Fact-Checking Is For Squares, Man

Last year, I noted that nothing in the world turns a bunch of “hard-boiled”, skeptical journalists into uncritical fanboys and giggly fangirls faster than a bit of attention from one of the superstars of their own field.

And so a crowd of the Twin Cities’ finest “journalists” suspended all judgment and skepticism last year when Seymour Hersh claimed that Dick Cheney was running a covert hypersecret assassination squad, “Joint Special Operations Command”; none of them could apparently be bothered to check that JSOC had existed for thirty years, and has founded by  Jimmy Carter, whose vice president Walter Mondale was sitting in the room with them, lapping up Hersh’s very presence.

It’d be easy to jump from that to “the media just doesn’t fact-check liberals”.

And unlike a lot of easy jumps, Mark Hemingway notes it’s pretty much correct.

Hemingway remembers the Hersh bit, too…:

In March of last year, New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh dropped a bombshell that a “covert executive assassination ring” had been run out of Vice President Cheney’s office.

Of course, Hersh has long had a “loose relationship with literal truth,” according to a 2005 article by Chris Suellentrop in New York Magazine. Columbia Journalism Review once offered this pointed critique of one of his books: “Hersh’s attributions generally fall short of normal journalistic yardsticks. More important, many of his conclusions are weakly substantiated by his research and highly questionable.”

Despite Hersh’s unreliability, his suggestion Cheney was assassinating people at will was dutifully parroted by the activist Left and receptive members of the media.

(Note to Mr. Hersh, his people, and his legions of media fanboys; where is that book?)

This week President Obama publicly ordered the assassination of a U.S. citizen, Muslim Cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. Unlike Hersh’s scurrilous charge, this presidential directive is a matter of record — not a wild rumor.

Make no mistake: al-Awlaki is a bad guy. He’s been definitively linked to the 9/11 hijackers, and more recently the recent Fort Hood massacre, not to mention the failed underwear bombing plot this past Christmas.

But he’s also a U.S. citizen, and thus entitled to basic constitutional protections. So where are the denunciations of Obama’s extraordinary decision from those who spent eight years decrying Bush and Cheney’s wartime expansion of executive power?

Denunciations?

The “journalists” are all busy on their blackberries trying to get tickets to the Helen Thomas swimsuit shoot.

28 thoughts on “Fact-Checking Is For Squares, Man

  1. Let check the usual suspects:

    Gleen Greenwald:
    “Instead, in Barack Obama’s America, the way guilt is determined for American citizens — and a death penalty imposed — is that the President, like the King he thinks he is, secretly decrees someone’s guilt as a Terrorist. He then dispatches his aides to run to America’s newspapers — cowardly hiding behind the shield of anonymity which they’re granted — to proclaim that the Guilty One shall be killed on sight because the Leader has decreed him to be a Terrorist.”

    Spencer Ackermann
    “Karen Greenberg, director of New York University’s Center on Law and Security and the person who convinced me the government can’t just revoke al-Awlaki’s citizenship, views a potential assassination of the Yemen-based cleric as a looming national security blunder.”

    Marcy Wheeler at Firedoglake:
    “Does it strike you as odd that we’re targeting US citizens with no judicial process? Does it strike you as odd that we’ve got two entirely separate sets of list on which Americans can be targeted to be killed? Does it strike you as odd that we’ve now got an apparent turf battle over who gets to kill al-Awlaki?”

    Maddow and Olbermann have done segments on the issue.

    I could go on. Unlike you we continue to act on our principals even when our guys are in the wrong.

  2. Well, kudos to the bloggers involved. And a rare yay for Maddow and Olbermann – presuming that their segments were actually critical.

    Not exactly a groundswell.

    And you’ll note that , bloggers notwithstanding, it’s the administration that doesn’t seem to be living by its “principles”.

    And while your comment wasn’t exactly a rebuke of the administration, I suppose it’s a start that at least you didn’t come up with an obtuse justification.

  3. Too bad Republican Senators blocked the appointment of Dawn Johnson

    Once again RatioRinkyDink proves he hates America and wants to embrace his overlords. Kumbaya won’t defend you from people bent on America’s destruction. Go bow to a despot and alienate all your friends.

    PS. Your Wikipedia link broke down? It’s JohnsEn.

  4. The dominant media culture – excepting ‘Sockpuppet’ Glenn Greenwald, the Blackface Artists at FDG and two low rated presenters at the news network for the nutfudge fringe (ie. the center of the Democratic Party) – has ignored this development due to Tina Fey’s tour-de-force portrayal of stupid Sarah Palin on SNL. I mean what’s a little no trial, no conviction execution order when the actress “Who Brought Down the Sarahcuda” has got a movie to hype?

  5. RickCP, if blocking a single, fairly minor, appointment changes the entire tenor of Dear Leader’s administration, exactly what are we to say about Dear Leader’s “leadership”?

    Nothing printable, I’m sure.

  6. Seflores:
    “The dominant media culture – excepting ‘Sockpuppet’ Glenn Greenwald, the Blackface Artists at FDG and two low rated presenters at the news network for the nutfudge fringe (ie. the center of the Democratic Party) – has ignored this development”
    Because the dominant media culture is dominated by conservatives.

  7. Bubbasan: If you think the head of the White House Office of Legal Counsul in “minor” is relation to the issue of Executive power, you really ought to walk away from this conversation.

    Nor did I say it changed the “entire tenor” of anything. That is just your inability to read.

  8. Actually, Rick, the reply I’m most interested in is the ones from all of the media bobbleheads who breathlessly repeated Hersh’s claims last year.

    And Walter Mondale, who was involved (presumably) in creating the “assassination squad” in 1979.

    Let me know when you’ve got something.

  9. Because the dominant media culture is dominated by conservatives
    If by “dominant” you mean media people actually believe then yes. If it’s a question of quantity vs. quality, not so much.

  10. Mitch
    “all of the media bobbleheads who breathlessly repeated Hersh’s claims last year”
    Like who?

  11. The “journalists” are all busy on their blackberries trying to get tickets to the Helen Thomas swimsuit shoot.

    Mitch, in the name of all that is good in this world, I hereby demand your surrender to answer for the above statement. Such horrifying mental imagery just can not be tossed around, without even the most basic of warnings to protect those without the intestinal fortitude to withstanding this criminal assault on our visual imagery.

    At the very least you owe me $5.60 as I just lost a perfectly good philly cheese steak sandwich.

  12. Rick, she wouldn’t have been on the cabinet, and if a non-Cabinet position changes big decisions like this–when, ahem, Dear Leader more or less campaigned against this sort of thing–then there are far bigger problems with this administration than the refusal to allow one of his appointees.

  13. RickDFL said:

    “Too bad Republican Senators blocked the appointment of Dawn Johnson to the Office of Legal Counsul. She would never have let this happen.”

    And, somehow, it’s all some Republicans fault. So. Very. Predictable. *snicker*

  14. Hey, RickDFL, there’s this thing called a “search engine”. Highly useful when looking for, say, journalists who repeated Hersh’s inane ramblings.
    Use it yourself next time instead of bothering your mental superiors, m-kay?

  15. Troy does not understand the meaning of “all”. So. Very. Predictable. *snicker*

  16. Terry:

    Tried Google and no particularly major media stories came up. If it was such a big deal you think it would be easy to find the stories. But then maybe I missed the Katie Couric special report on this.

  17. “Mitch
    “all of the media bobbleheads who breathlessly repeated Hersh’s claims last year”
    Like who?”

    So now you are talking about something you define as “major media stories” rather than “media bobbleheads who breathlessly repeated Hersh’s claims” as Mitch wrote and which you took exception to.
    Quit being a moron, if you can, RickDFL.

  18. Well, you have to admit, Terry, that Mitch set the bar low when he used the example of Eric Black. Black may not be chopped liver, but I wouldn’t elevate him to the corned beef level of Katie Couric (like our friend RickDFL). I did a Google search (I don’t have much of a life, obviously) on “Seymour Hersh claim Cheney assassanation squad”, here is what I came up with…
    1. Crooks & Liars – Keith Olbermann feature on the Hersch story. Keith Olbermann also criticized the Obama death squad(s) (I won’t denigrate our CIA operators by calling them “Short Bus” Biden Death Squads”). Score one for RickDFL. Whoa, wait a minute. a Google search on “Crooks and Liars Anwar al-Awlaki” points to 1. Fox News video, posted without comment, headline “Anwar Al-Awlaki The New Osama Bin Laden?” So does Fox News, er, sorry RickDFL, “Faux News” and by extention Crooks & Liars look at a US citizen as the equivalent of Osama Bin Laden who does have a “dead or alive” stamp on his hide? Further down the list, Crooks & Liars debates whether or not Anwar Al-Awlaki’s involvement brings him to the level of a full on hit squad. Not really a criticism – let’s call this a “draw”.
    1(a). Youtube posting of the Olberman story.
    2. The Eric Black MinnPost story. A search on “Eric Black Anwar Al-Awlaki turns up nothing related. (Mitch’s point that the Hersch story was printed without question, no subsequent story on Obama targeting a US citizen). A subsequent search on “MinnPost Anwar Al-Awlaki” brings a story by a Gordon Lubold that offers an uncritical look at the Obama ruling that Al-Awaki poses a an interesting dilemma. Score one for Mitch.
    Sorry I’ve run out of wasteable time. I’ll try to do more later tonight.

  19. So we have Eric Black, one time reporter for the Strib, now working for minnpost, repeating Hersh’s blood libel without doing the most cursory of fact-checks.
    The story is picked up and repeated by the bobble-heads at crooks & liars, Huffpo, rawstory, wonkette, truthout, alternet, thinkprogress, wonkette, Al Gore’s Current.com, and Scott Horton at Harpers.

    How can al-Awaki be sanctioned, Seflores? The Fort Hood attacks weren’t terrorism, they were the work of lone fanatics and had nothing to do with Islam.

  20. I guess we are “all” predictable in our very own ways, RickDFL.

    Some of us don’t “understand” the meaning of words (hehe), and some of us display no serious cognition “all” the way to the same end points, day after day.

  21. Terry:
    “now you are talking about something you define as “major media stories” rather than “media bobbleheads who breathlessly repeated Hersh’s claims” ”

    And the difference between them would be?

    “blood libel”
    As far as I can tell the Hersh story turned out to be true.

    The people who repeated the Hersh story have been the leaders in denouncing Obama’s policy. The exact opposite of what Mitch suggested.

    Troy:
    Are you some failed attempt to pass the Turing Test left to wander the voids of the internet expelling random gibberish?

  22. Just because _you_ don’t understand something doesn’t make it “gibberish”, RickDFL. It may not make sense to you, but then you go out of your way to misunderstand the simplest of concepts at times. *shrug*

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