Saturday, July 18, 2009

NYT Opinionator Roundup: CIA Hit Squads

For some reason I can't put my finger on, I found this worth reading.

Most humorous part: report from the fever swamps, in particular, Jennifer Rubin at the now-just-slightly-less-comical-than-the-NRO Commentary, about how Holder is "marching forward, preparing prosecution with no legal basis," and how it's Obama who's "demoralizing our intelligence community." Not, say, Bush/Cheney, of course, who used them as political pawns, encouraged them to break the law and torture people, and encouraged them to lie to Congress. Nope. It's Obama for...um...saying that we shouldn't investigate Bush and Cheney for that? Hmm...that's quite possibly true...but not what Rubin means... (Let me say again: we really do need a loyal, rational opposition in the press.)

Most interesting part: Robert Baer [Jeremy Scahill], who says, in essence: this is undoubtedly small potatoes compared to the other laws Bush and Cheney were almost certainly breaking.

3 Comments:

Blogger Tom Van Dyke said...

I can't find Robert Baer saying what you say he said. Sorry, WS, I really tried. In fact, I think he thinks just the opposite of what you said he said. I do want to be wrong about this.

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1910670,00.html

6:28 PM  
Blogger The Mystic said...

You lied to me. YOU LIED TO US ALL. GOD.

Why can't you be more like Tom who PLEADS to be wrong in the face of the horrors of this world? Why, WS? Why do you insist on hurting us?

11:51 AM  
Blogger Tom Van Dyke said...

I wasn't going to mention it unless I got called on it, but Hilzoy just pulled the same [stuff], delegitimizing a bunch of righty bloggers for getting something wrong.

http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2009/07/good-to-know.html

As you may know, she's retiring from blogging, and based on our crossing swords around here once, I wrote elsewhere favorably of her civility and honesty.

But this

"This matters. One of the real mistakes many conservatives made, I think, was to dismiss people who disagreed with them. It's an easy thing to do: by definition, people who disagree with you say things that you think are false, and it's a short step from 'false' to 'obviously mendacious', 'intellectually irresponsible', 'flat-out insane', or something else that means that you just don't have to take the person in question seriously any more. If you want to keep yourself honest, you should listen to the people who disagree with you. But since life is short, it's nice to find an actual, objective test for things like intellectual irresponsibility, one that lets you just see that some people are, really and truly, intellectually irresponsible, and thus that you can dismiss them forever, and read them only for laughs, while saving your precious free time for others who deserve it more."

Well, Brother Mystic, you just wrote [intimated] how little you think of such thinking. I think little of it either.

So, we should stop reading The Corner, stop reading Philosoraptor, in fact stop reading Obsidian Wings because Hilzoy herself erred in the facts of her delegitimization of Patterico? And of course stop reading the New York Frigging Times, which prints corrections by the bushel. [And which are just the tip of the iceberg.]

No! We seem to agree that we shouldn't rub WS' nose in it, stop reading his blog because of it, or God forbid, report him to Hilzoy.

Cool.

10:36 PM  

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