Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog

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Tuesday, September 21, 2004

11:23 - Once in a lifetime

(top)

Politics is by its nature a very subjective game. A lot of the time, it seems, you can use the same set of facts to "prove" completely opposing points of view. Touchy-feely, human interest anecdotes�whether the sob story of some oppressed worker, or a soul-stirring tale of capitalism and entrepreneurship making a dream come true�carry a lot of weight with people and do more, perhaps, to sway a person to one side of the aisle or the other than a table of statistics ever could. It's a rare occasion indeed when one side turns out to be 100%, unequivocally right about something.

Which is why the CBS/Memogate scandal is such a "big deal". No matter what one might think of the bloggers who ran it to ground and relentlessly pushed it until CBS could no longer breathe, they turned out to be right, and nobody can take that away from them by calling them "partisan hacks" or muttering darkly about imagined political ties. They were right, and they proved themselves to be both more technically competent and more scrupulous than one of our largest and most trusted journalistic banner-bearers, and cast doubt by extension upon the honor of the entire mainstream media. By whatever objective scoring system you use, these guys�Powerline, LGF, INDC Journal, and others�ought to revel in the well-earned spotlight that's now turned on them (though, hey, by the look of that one dude's desk, it might be more of a desk lamp...).

And this is why it's so pathetic to see some people still trying to complain that the bloggers who unmasked CBS for what it is�little more than a bought-and-paid-for partisan propaganda machine�are somehow lessened by being politically motivated. As though there's something political about the truth! This is, again, one of those rarest of things: an event in political history where there's an incontrovertible truth, and a set of people who recognize it as such and another set who were lying. There's no "interpretation" here, no question of "credibility" or "uncertainty". Those damn memos were forged, and you either saw them as such or you tried to contribute to the lie. There's really no middle ground. And it doesn't matter in the slightest what the political motivations were of the people who staked out their claim on that piece of coveted land called Truthsville; they could have been neo-Nazis, or they could have been Communists, or they could have been invading space mutants�it doesn't matter, they were right, and those who opposed them were wrong. You can't throw out a proof because you don't like the look of the guy proving it. And if the bloggers who did the leg-work here all happen to share a political goal (it should be noted that not all of them even identify as Republicans), well, so what? Rather than stamping your foot and wailing like a kid who doesn't understand why his mother won't buy him candy, maybe it would be worthwhile to think about what else these guys might possibly be right about.

I've been waiting for a volta in this turbulent discourse for some time now: the turning point, the event at which the media realizes that its own bias might make a bigger, more saleable story than stumping for John Kerry. So far nothing's been sufficient. But Memogate might just be it. The Washington Post has turned on CBS and produced nice flashy glossy timelines comparing the fake memos to real ones from the same time period. Time has the above-linked blog-pumping cover story, and Newsweek might follow suit. The pressure to cover this story of internal pathology within the mainstream media has been growing, though to do so would be to turn away from the Kerry cheerleading that's at the center of the debate, and so it's not happened yet; but now this story is so big, so hard to keep out of public discourse, that to ignore it is to abdicate any pretense of "keeping the public informed". This might, in other words, be that volta we've been waiting for.

It seems that Kerry is trying desperately to shift the discussion to Iraq, and much good may it do him�but with Memogate now as deep into the public consciousness as it is, and with it having reached the critical mass necessary to sustain a journalistic chain reaction that keeps it alive in the headlines for more than a couple of days, Kerry's entire campaign is now poisoned. Who can say they trust him now? Who can say they trust his campaign? How can Kerry advertise in such a way that paints him as a trustworthy good guy and makes it stick? I think it's really too late for him in this election; he's as good as gone, by all the electoral polls, and his party really ought to concentrate now on figuring out how to rebuild itself into a body with some credibility and some reasoning power, rather than ad-hominem attacks, petulant whining, and hypocritical screeching about an imagined "evil" that the rest of the country now sees only in that party's own tactics.

UPDATE: Yes, I know "truth" and "fact" are not the same thing... or so some smart bearded people in universities say. That's sort of my point.

Anyway, Matt H. e-mails the following thoughts:

The lefties and the Dems seem to treat opinions as facts and facts as
opinions. I've noticed that the MSM, if it wants to "report" on inconvenient
truths, simply encapsulates them in quotes from Republicans. "Republicans
say the memos are forgeries." "Republicans say the sky is blue."
"Republicans say the sun will rise in the east tomorrow." The idiots
comprising the 15% that Jonathan Alter talked about will read this as "The
documents are not forgeries." "The sky is not blue." "The sun will rise in
the West tomorrow."

And the opinions that are facts : "Bush did not fulfill his National Guard
duty." "Halliburton has done something nefarious and Cheney has benefited."
"Iraq is a quagmire." "Less than 1000 combat deaths is a military
catastrophe."

Due to the way the MSM's and the Dems are acting, truth is
_starting_ to become political. It's becoming necessary to vote against
these guys, because of their lack of respect for truth! It's getting so
absurd that who else _except_ Republicans would be worried about the truth?

What's that word again? Oh yeah: indeed.

UPDATE: Geez, there are examples of this all over.