Okay, okay, I'm back from a break that was longer than anticipated. I was in Detroit last weekend covering the North American Auto Show for my day job. Then my laptop died, and I buried it in the bowels of the Reniasssance Center. Then I came down with the flu, and stayed in bed for a couple of days. Now then, time to return to skewering some some sacred critters.
Courtesy of David Brock, Eric Boehlert at Media Matters examines the Moose Whisperer's latest claims of victimization by media, pronounces them patently full of shit, but then devotes a great deal of bandwidth chastising those of us in the blogosphere who smelled something rotten in"I strongly believe [Andrew] Sullivan should have laid off this. I could have linked to it yesterday, but didn't, since at that point it was only fodder for a pseudonymous diarist at the Daily Kos," wrote Dan Kennedy at his site, Media Nation, just hours after Sullivan posted."This is the sort of hurtful story that reputable news organizations should check out thoroughly before injecting into the debate. I mean, come on. Does anyone think Josh Marshall hasn't been following this? Or dozens of other liberal political blogs and Web sites, including Media Nation? None of us went there, and Sullivan shouldn't have, either. This is the definition of a story that shouldn't be hashed out publicly."
Perhaps not. But was it surprising that some observers in the blogosphere reacted the way they did? Let's recount: Sarah Palin concealed her fourth pregnancy from everyone in Juneau for over seven months---even from her own chief of staff---until she was no longer physically able to do so. For someone who claims to unabashedly celebrate the Culture of Life®, this seems an odd choice to make. The question: Why the secrecy? When Palin's water broke and she needed to hustle herself off immediately to the nearest maternity ward, she instead embarked on a 2,000-mile transcontinental airflight that virtually every OB-GYN who was interviewed for this story characterized as dangerous, life-threatening, and reckless in the extreme. Again, this makes no sense from someone who values the Culture of Life®. Why the recklessness? No official record of Trig's birth is apparent at the hospital in Wasilla where he was born, and the Palin family refused---and still refuses, to this day---to release as much as a photocopy of the baby's birth certificate. Why the enduring mystery? It seems to me that those are the kinds of questions that people like Eric Boehlert need to be asking, not flagellating a few of us in the blogosphere who chased a cat up the wrong tree for a few days before getting a grip. (For the record, I never subscribed to the "Bristol maternity" meme either, and didn't blog about it here. But take a look all at all the minutiae in this story from a big-picture perspective: Here you had a young and relatively unknown political player suddenly bursting upon the national scene: All we really knew for sure was that she was a governor, aspired to the White House, and had already shown a penchant for secrecy, recklessness and concealment. Sound familiar? Is it any wonder why a few red flags shot up across the blogosphere over this?)
Now, asking for some clarification from the Palins over little Trig is not, repeat not, like asking the Clintons to prove that they didn't kill Vince Foster--disproving the negative, as it's said, is impossible. This is about simply clarifying the particulars surrounding an event that demonstrably did happen under some rather extraordinary circumstances, and which Palin and her handlers have done their best to obfuscate by erecting all manner of smokescreens. So the speculation about whether Sarah Palin was Trigg's mother was erroneous. So what? Not every tip that Woodward and Bernstein ran down in their Watergate research panned out either. And the one indisputable fact in this matter, then and now, is that the Palins could have easily shot down, disarmed and otherwise disabled the rumor mill that spun wildly over Trig's parentage by simply providing some plain and honest explanations of the candidate's behavior during the late stages of her latest pregnancy. That, and a copy of Trig's birth certificate. The fact that they still refuse to produce one still makes this, in my opinion, a perfectly valid story to to run with.
Simply put: these people have been trying to conceal something all along: An honest journalist would ask, what is it?
Then again, when an otherwise harmless spinner of fanciful yarns such as Jayson Blair can be blacklisted from the profession while a fawning courtesan of high power such as Tim Russert can be eulogized as a titan of modern-day journalism, where unabashed apologists for lawbreaking such as Bill Kristol and active collaborators in government misinformation campaigns such as Judith Miller can be rewarded with book deals and think-tank appointments, I suppose it's perfectly normal that we save our most outraged opprobrium for the likes of Andrew Sullivan. Beltway journalism isn't really about exposing inconvenient truths anymore---it's all just an elaborately stylized public relations game. The only genuinely important thing lies in knowing your client, and trimming your message to push the client's product. And that's the biggest difference between the folks at the Times or the Post or even the New Republic---their clients are different than Andy Sullivan's, or mine.
Now I need to lie down in the barnyard for awhile. The swine flu is a rough one to shake off.
Update: Another thing to consider when claims and counterclaims of groundless conspiracy theories are being bandied about is the source of all the outraged anguish. It ain't pretty, but it does reveal things, if one stops to think about it a bit.
---Vitelius
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