Greenwald on Pollack and O'Hanlon
Here.
[HT: Anonymous]
Oof! Bif! Zwap! Sok!
Ouch.
As I said a day or so ago: it's not like I trust Ken Pollack...
And it's not like his abysmal record proves that he's wrong this time...but it does show that we'd be stupid to listen to him.
As I've said many times before, if these pro-war conservatives were really serious about this, they'd quit lying about it. By habitually lying and cherry-picking, they rob themselves of all credibility. So even if they ever do get it right, only the pathetically gullible will believe them...
Here.
[HT: Anonymous]
Oof! Bif! Zwap! Sok!
Ouch.
As I said a day or so ago: it's not like I trust Ken Pollack...
And it's not like his abysmal record proves that he's wrong this time...but it does show that we'd be stupid to listen to him.
As I've said many times before, if these pro-war conservatives were really serious about this, they'd quit lying about it. By habitually lying and cherry-picking, they rob themselves of all credibility. So even if they ever do get it right, only the pathetically gullible will believe them...
posted by Winston Smith at
3:14 PM
24 Comments:
Nice - O'Hanlon was part of the PNAC.
These people are really quite scary. They're everywhere - just when you think you realize what they've infested (like the presidency and all of Bush's administration..), you find out there's another infestation (as in this instance, in the media).
Everywhere they go, they're forced into the same routine: lies and deception. You'd think that, just by chance, they wouldn't have to lie because facts supported their beliefs at least ONCE. It's as if they intentionally choose to believe that which is contrary to logic and fact and that's why they lie and deceive at every turn.
I was truly shocked when I read the paper by the PNAC, stating their goals explicitly to establish American dominance over the world, militarily, the main goals being the preparation to fight and win "multiple theatre large-scale wars", I believe was the wording, in order to ensure that we could suppress the riotous outcry against our extended military arms.
They all think that America, being the best country ever (EVARR!) is obligated to forcefully ensure that its influence is kept strong around the world with military intervention if necessary.
Do not allow opposing views, crush all those who do not want to change, destroy that which is not as we think it should be.
Anyone who hasn't read that stuff needs to. It's so crazy, it's like a document you'd expect to uncover as a secret evil plan in a movie.
WS wrote:
"[I]f these pro-war conservatives were really serious about this, they'd quit lying about it. By habitually lying and cherry-picking, they rob themselves of all credibility. So even if they ever do get it right, only the pathetically gullible will believe them..."
Exactly.
For academics (like WS and myself and, perhaps, many other readers of this blog), it is hard for us to keep their mendacity in the front of our minds when reading the op-ed page, etc., as we are conditioned to presume that debaters are honest.
However, with this crowd, it is vital that, even while we read their work and hear their words, we remind ourselves that their MO is to lie and cherry-pick and mislead and deceive.
And, if we do succeed in holding on to the requisite skepticism while reading or hearing the words of these "habitual liars", we may be told that we may be "... becoming as dogmatic as conservatives regarding the war"
With this crowd it is now reasonable to start by presuming that they are lying. If they are not lying then either:
(A) It is a minor matter, or
(B) If the matter is major, we will almost certainly soon learn of it from a trustworthy source.
There are two major benefits to presuming that they are lying:
(1)Since they are not "serious", we don't waste our time chasing after their will-o-the-wisps,
(2)If a critical mass of us will treat these habitual liars as untrustworthy, it can deny them of their undeserved credibility and access to major media outlets -- both of which they can recover (in time) by becoming truthful.
Obviously, it is (2) that prompts some of my comments here.
(2)If a critical mass of us will treat these habitual liars as untrustworthy, it can deny them of their undeserved credibility and access to major media outlets
Ooooo. Declare them liars and suppress what they have to say. Sweet.
There are several historical precedents to this mentality, all of them pejorative.
But actually, what you describe is pretty much the case already, Jim. Hardly a word from the administration passes unfiltered through the media, much good news is left out or underreported, and there are many who willfully insulate themselves from any views uncongenial to their own.
I don't think you have anything to worry about.
A little friendly advice, Jim. You're probably going to go find ironclad proof of the administration's extreme mendacity and present it to Tom, who will proceed to offer some kind of post-modern dismissal or justification for their deceptiveness, probably with a half a teaspoon of Clinton did it and a pinch of FDR was a lying bastard.
So my advice Jim, should you choose to accept it, is save yourself the trouble.
To Annonymous (9:02 PM):
Thanks for the advice -- your description of Tom's MO is dead on. Sometimes, however, I can't help myself!
To all:
Tom wrote --
"Ooooo. Declare them liars ..."
Well, WS declared them liars in his post. In fact, I use the term "habitual liars" because that is how WS descibes them. WS posted the link to Mr. Greenwald to support his contention.
Tom is more than welcome to show why he believes WS's and Greenwald's charcterizations are incorrect. I happen to believe them.
Tom continues --
"... and suppress what they have to say. Sweet."
Pollack and O'Hanlon are free to try to persuade major media outlets to carry their words. I am free to try to persuade those outlets that Pollack and O'Hanlon are not acting in good faith and, therefore, should not be published.
I am also free to try to persuade others to join me in demonstrating to media outlets that Pollack and O'Hanlon are not acting in good faith in their opinion pieces and therefore should not be published.
Tom is free to try to discredit me in your eyes (as he has attempted in his post) just as I am free to try to discredit Pollack and O'Hanlon in you eyes (as I did in mine).
This is freedom of speech at work. There are no threats, no coercion, no suppression. Just words written in good faith. Evidently, Tom doesn't care for freedom of speech for all. I do.
Extraordinarily well-said, Jim.
Calling a liar a liar and ignoring him hereafter is hardly suppressing what he says.
As if that were going to be a real problem with Pollack.
That having been said...you ignore Anonymous's advice at your peril...
Just to get an idea of the extent of the shitting of the bed, and the extent of the fantasy that the recent *surge* could actually even begin to undo the damage:
http://whoisioz.blogspot.com/2007/07/whos-on-first.html
He even leaves out the part about how we helped create the insurgency and increase its lethality by disbanding the Iraqi army, purging all former Baathists, and leaving munitions dumps unguarded.
But at least they didn't threaten to pursue the murderers of 3000 Americans into Pakistan or anythhing, right?
I am also free to try to persuade others to join me in demonstrating to media outlets that Pollack and O'Hanlon are not acting in good faith in their opinion pieces and therefore should not be published...
This is freedom of speech at work.
I'm just not feeling you on this one, Jim.
It is of course the common wisdom that we should have left the brutal Sunni Ba'athists in charge of the Iraqi army. Perhaps it's true. Realpolitik over idealism is certainly making
its comeback, and from the most unlikely of quarters.
Ooooo. Declare them liars and suppress what they have to say. Sweet.
TVD, you think freedom of speech obligates us to listen to bullshit (oops, that mean, offensive word again)? I see how that would suit your purposes, but I get to choose what I listen to even in the marketplace of ideas, and networks eventually react to their viewers' expressions of disdain for "analysts" who are perennially wrong and who refuse to learn from it. Well, except for the Bushists' Pravda - they'll never reform, no matter how obvious it is that O'Reilly is a pompous, bullying, biased gasbag, to take just one example.
And to move this fun time along a little: Any Administration with any accountability whatsoever would have fired Rummy solely on grounds of his failure to secure the Iraqi munitions dumps.
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."---Aristotle
Um, it's a great Aristotle quote, but it's apropos of absolutely nothing in this conversation, Tom.
C'mon, man. Get serious.
"There. Whoever you are, all your troubles are over. I'll-I'll put you down safe on this comfortable clover."
-Horton
(Horton Hears a Who)
OH, I just read Winston's post - sorry, I thought we were saying our favorite random quotes.
B-b-but LL, Fox News is just offering a counterbalance to the wildly liberal other networks, you know, the ones that occasionally come close to conveying reality.
I mean, after all, we need an outlet like Fox News to do the following:
"Josh Rushing: When I would go out and give reasons why we were going to invade Iraq, having been given the messages from a Republican operative that was my boss, he would give me the theme of the day. Sometimes it would be "WMD," others it would be "regime change" and others it would be "ties to terrorism." I would go out to a Fox reporter and they would say "Are there any messages you want to get across before we get to the live interview?" And we would script the interview around the government messaging, and they would thank me for my service at the end of it. And out of fairness, that wasn't just Fox. There were a number of American networks who did it. The reporters were in a position where there was no way their editorial leadership or their audience for that matter, wanted to see them be critical of a young troop in uniform.
But the devious part of that, is that the administration knew that and understood that and used young troops in uniform to sell the war in a way it knew couldn't be questioned or criticized. If you look at MSNBC, they packaged their coverage with a banner that said "Our Hearts Are With You." So when that banner is under my face and I'm giving the reasons why we need to go to war, is anyone going to ask me a critical question? Of course not...
There are other examples, with Fox in particular. Fox likes personalities, and Geraldo Rivera covered the war on my TV and was giving away future troop movements by drawing a map in the sand.
There was another case where a Fox reporter was reporting live from in front of an Abrams tank that was on fire. The conventional wisdom was that Abrams tanks were impervious to the technology that the fedayeen had, small arms. But it turns out that if you did hit an Abrams tank in a certain spot with a rocket-propelled grenade, you could stop it and destroy it. So the Fox correspondent is reporting that, live on television: where the weak spot is and how this must have happened. Anyone watching that stuff, Iraqi intelligence officials, fedayeen soldiers -- and we know they were watching it -- would be like 'great, next time I see an Abrams, I'm gonna save my shot until I see the money shot and aim for the vulnerable spot I saw on TV. Thank you, Fox News.' Or anyone being watching the live report from Geraldo -- where he's drawing the map in the sand -- could say 'great, I know where coming and they're bringing Geraldo with them.' There's a danger in that.
And the thing is, Fox likes to see themselves as so pro-military and patriotic and they like to share their knowledge, like they're one of the guys. It's also interesting to note now how little Fox covers the war. MSNBC covered the war three times as much as Fox, I think in June. You've got to be kidding me. The number one cheerleader for this war is now just leaving it behind?"
From: http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2007/07/31/publiceye/entry3118705.shtml
And I gotta say, I'm really disappointed that Fox News hasn't been covering all the good news that's happening in Iraq these days the way MSNBC is.
Tom quotes me posting:
Jim: I am also free to try to persuade others to join me in demonstrating to media outlets that Pollack and O'Hanlon are not acting in good faith in their opinion pieces and therefore should not be published...
Jim: This is freedom of speech at work.
Tom responds:
Tom: I'm just not feeling you on this one, Jim.
I'm not certain what Tom means with is comment above, but I'll take it to mean that he doesn't understand the connection between the first quoted sentence and the second.
The first asserts that I am free to try to persuade others (such as the readers of Philosoraptor) to join me in persuading media outlets to follow a particular course of action (in this case, that they should not publish the work of Pollack and O'Hanlon).
The second asserts that, by trying to persuade you all in joining me in this effort I am exercising my right of free speech, and that I am not suppressing anyone else’s right to free speech.
Pollack and O'Hanlon have the Constitutional right to say and write what they will. They do not have the Constitutional right to have it appear in the Washington Post. Pollack and O'Hanlon are free to try to convince the Post to publish their work. I have the right to try to convince the Post to not publish their work. I also have the right to recruit others to join me in my effort.
None of this is "suppression": All of it is free speech.
Your means, but not your end. I guess you disagree with Aristotle, or perhaps you think The Great Unwashed can't handle what obviously to you is patent nonsense.
I don't see it that way, and I would not agitate to have anyone's voice stilled. Voltaire, and all that (altho he didn't actually say it). The more the merrier. Ward Churchill, David Duke, bring it on. They'll show their patent nonsense for what it is. It's the suppression that gives them currency, not the light of day.
In fact, one of my favorites is Alexander Cockburn, as far left as they come without plummeting over the edge. Cockburn has made me think far more than the near-left (and the near-right, BTW).
As for what O'Hanlon and Pollack are actually talking about, I imagine that's off the table. What is said pales beside who says it. So be it. There's an old saying about that.
These two men were early supporters of the war, altho O'Hanlon disagreed with the timing. (It's a waste to post the links, so I'll rely on memory, and my apologies in advance if I mess up a detail or two.) Both had written as early as 2004 that Bush was making a hash of it.
Now, it's good arguing to gather up defections from the other side, and these two got a lot more popular in the talking head-o-sphere when they went sour on the thing. Credible witnesses.
Now that they have assayed the new facts on the ground, in 2007 (and actually went to Iraq, unlike their critics), all of a sudden they're toejam again.
Such is the ebb and flow of public opinion, conventional wisdom, epistemological prejudice and what we sometimes call our reality base. Me, I'll give anyone a hearing, no matter how moronic. Like some of the folks on this very blog.
No, I'm not talking about you. You know, that other guy...
Your call, Jim.
Let's agree that any gotbucks like the Saudis or Scaife or Soros could overwhelm any publisher at any time. We should both fear that, in an freedom of speech sort of way.
I am happy to agree with Tom that:
... any gotbucks like the Saudis or Scaife or Soros could overwhelm any publisher at any time. We should both fear that, in an freedom of speech sort of way.
I am not familiar with the case cited in the Hot Air article, and can only see the two paragraphs that are free on the Chronicle's site.
I note that Cambridge Univ. Press acted "in response to a libel claim filed in England by Khalid bin Mahfouz, a Saudi banker."
It is my understanding that in the UK (unlike the US) the burden of proof in a libel is case is on the defendant.
Furthermore, if a defendant tries to demonstrate that their statements were true but does not convince the court, then the evidence the defense enters, and any media coverage of it, are considered to have aggravated the original libel. (Thank you, Wikipedia)
Under such a legal system I can see why CUP would do as they did.
---------
In the US this is not an issue, as the burden of proof is on the plaintiff instead.
In the US, if a wealthy someone tries to silence a publication, the correct response (IMHO) is more speech -- vigorous, loud speech advocating boycotts and other lawful expressions of disgust and dismay.
Finally, my means are free speech. My end is a society that does not reward lying, deception, or mendacity in public political discussions. For that to happen, there must be a cost to lying.
One approach (mine) is to heap shame and scorn upon those who lie and deceive, and to ignore their words until they have clearly turned to truth telling. This approach presumes that the truth will win out in the marketplace of ideas.
The other approach is to set up an arbiter of right and wrong, and for that body to suppress those it deems wrong. This --- this, I don't care for.
Tom, your problem here is that you're conflating two issues inappropriately - suppression of speech and the removal of a contributor to a news medium from that medium, by that medium.
If someone writes a letter to the Washington Post going "Please stop publishing Mr. Smith's letters. He's a jackass" - that is not "suppressing his free speech". That's simply asking a medium to stop featuring his articles. Consumer feedback is how products improve, and a newspaper or some other news medium improves by improving the quality of its contributors. If people give good, logical feedback, then the news media can figure out more easily who should go and who should stay. It's that simple.
Making the case that someone is a waste of space in a newspaper is not suppression of free speech. It's just freeing up room for more worthy writers.
Doesn't that make sense? Free speech is not the right to be published in the newspaper. It's the right to be able to publicly express your views without fear of unfair retribution.
This entire problem revolves around the fact that Jim is proposing that we aren't violating free speech by removing morons from news media and Tom seems to think that free speech necessitates that we permit everyone, without reference to merit, to have the same access to media.
That's dumb. Free speech doesn't mean we shouldn't differentiate between good and bad reporting/reasoning/writing/whatever. It means we shouldn't force people to stop talking. If a company chooses not to let them use their megaphone, that's not forcing them to do anything. It's the company's megaphone - they can do what they want with it. If they want people to listen to it, they'll only let good, intelligent contributors speak through it.
Simple.
This argument = poo. Move on.
Um, this IS very simple. Tom illegitimately started talking about suppression of free speech, and the whole thread got confused and derailed.
Nobody here was ever talking about prohibiting people from speaking. NOBODY. It's a non-issue.
The question was: should we continue to treat people (like P&H) as credible after they've been wrong almost every time? Tom seemed to be asserting that if we didn't then we were infringing on their right to freedom of speech. This makes no sense, but we've been wasting our time on it ever since.
Here is the issue with the O'Hanlons and Pollacks of the world, boiled down pretty succinctly:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-yglesias2aug02,0,2911324.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail
The rub is that the ascendant ethos in the DC press corps is one of unadorned elitism; the great unwashed masses, especially some on the internets who commit the cardinal sin of using bad words, have a couple of pesky habits: 1) usually showing better judgment and common sense than those Washington elites and 2) having had the temerity to actually remind people of it.
If there is one universal appeal of the DC elite, it's not actually an appeal for *bipartisanship*, it's an Appeal to Authority, a fallacy most of us learned to avoid in Logic 101.
The question was: should we continue to treat people (like P&H) as credible after they've been wrong almost every time? Tom seemed to be asserting that if we didn't then we were infringing on their right to freedom of speech.
Did I say that?
No, what I said was I object to any attempt to drum them off the opinion pages. Perhaps it's a newspaper's job to print only what the majority of their readers find acceptable. That would be a shame, in my view.
I want 'em all out there, and in fact I wish Noam Chomsky were in every newspaper and TV show there is, every day.
But I have a feeling, they're hiding him, just as they trot out Pat Buchanan as some sort of representative of more than 1% of the population.
As for P & O'H, the reality-based community doesn't need ad hom grounds to ignore who and what they don't want to hear. That's a mere formality. I'm not making a freedom of speech argument at all, simply objecting to boycotts that masquerade as free speech themselves.
1. Freedom of speech has to do with government censorship, not with driving someone off the op-ed pages by presenting arguments to the effect that he isn't worth listening to.
THIS IS NOT A FREE SPEECH ISSUE.
2. Nobody here said anything that entailed or suggested that P&O should be dropped because anyone "doesn't like what they have to say." Rather, the argument is that they've been consistently partisan and consistently wrong.
There is an enormous difference between saying that one shouldn't listen to those who are partisan and unreliable and saying that one shouldn't listen to those who say things one doesn't like to hear.
I'm just not sure what the point of these distortions is.
No distortions. Please stop that, WS. The content of P & O'H's piece is certainly at issue here. If they turned around tomorrow and said Bush is toejam again, nobody would say boo, especially the elegant Mr. Greenwald.
But even when they were saying Bush was toejam when things soured in 2004, I wouldn't have called for them to be pulled from any newspaper.
That's the point, OK?
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