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Archive for the 'Blog Fights' Category

The Agony and the Apostasy

Published by William Beutler on October 19, 2006 in Blog Fights, Defections, Elections, George W. Bush, Internecine Battles, Leftosphere vs. Rightosphere, Primary fights, Terrorism and White House '08. 4 Comments

Back in 2004, one of the founding members of the political blogosphere managed to blog his way out of the good graces of many he had inspired to take up Blogger accounts in the first place. That was Andrew Sullivan, and while he undoubtedly remains an A-lister, he’s probably already proved a kind of blogosphere peak traffic theory.

Another popular veteran blogger has been steering wider and wider away from his peers in the rightosphere, and unlike Sullivan, it’s one who has called himself a Republican. This is John Cole, the West Virginian Army vet and Pajamas Media signatory who writes Balloon Juice. His site is a rarity in the sense that the chief blogger identifies as right of center, but the readership (as demonstrated by its loyal commenters) leans decidedly to the left. For some time now, Cole has featured a co-blogger, Tim F., who is even more critical of the contemporary right than himself.

Andrew Sullivan, John Cole, conservative blogger discontentBoth Cole and Sullivan have voiced greater concerns about the direction of the Iraq war and the war on terrorism, and about the Republican Party’s priorities regarding social issues than most mainstream conservative bloggers (and more than avowed non-conservative Glenn Reynolds, at least until the “pre-mortem” post). Unlike many of their peers, they’ve lost all respect for the Bush presidency and reclaimed/redefined conservatism enough to justify staying on the same side of the fence.

The very fact of their disagreement isn’t so much the issue — they could have drifted apart and largely ignored each other. Instead, the animosity really has to do with Sullivan and Cole coming around to openly fight with their erstwhile allies. These arguments look like personality conflicts, and they certainly are, but are also so contentious because an ideological fight underlies them.

The fights they pick are not without merit, though it’s sometimes hard to decide which side is thinking about it more clearly, if anyone — and so I’ll punt and just say “follow the links”: a non-definitive summary would note that Sullivan has clashed with Glenn Reynolds and with James Taranto and become an inside joke among numerous other bloggers. Cole is currently in the middle of a blog fight with Dan Riehl, just concluded one with Red State, and before long will probably go another round with Michelle Malkin.

As far as I can tell, it seems Cole usually aims to stand up for decency, Sullivan for his principles. This also seems to mean Sullivan-engaged arguments often revolve around himself — and hey, that’s just what Time is probably hoping for. To use a phrase more commonly associated with the leftosphere, they’re like concern trolls* in the wider conservative blogosphere.

Such blog fights can be either great fun or excruciatingly dull, depending on how much you have invested in the squabbling parties. And considering the war’s prominence in these splits, there will probably be more. Assuming Iraq gets worse before it gets better — that being one thing supporters and opponents of U.S. Iraq policy might agree on — we’ll see more bloggers reach a breaking point, lambasting their spherical allies for failing to understand what they do now, while the stalwarts kick them to the curb and renounce them as apostates.

It’s hard to say what this means for the 2008 White House scrum, currently still in training camp (pre-season begins with the first post-election early primary state straw poll). Both the left and right blogospheres will fracture, sometimes with acrimony and sometimes amicably, as they all back different candidates for president.

Since its post-2002 midterm formation, the leftosphere has been an anti-Bush monolith, and his eventual departure from Washington (and our eventual withdrawal from Iraq) will create new tensions for Democrats and the bloggers who favor them, along with the expected opportunities. If Democrats win the White House in ‘08, we could see the blogospheric equivalent of a geomagnetic reversal — on both sides, existing bloggers would realign, some veterans might lose readership, and newcomers could pick up big traffic.

It seems plausible that Sullivan and Cole could support a Republican for president alongside their erstwhile compatriots, but probably not until after the primary is decided. But I have to wonder, when Cole has been putting his “Republican Stupidity” category tag to much greater use lately compared with his “Democratic Stupidity” one, even though the latter category was once created 10 places before the former.

Of course, if a Republican takes the oath of office in January 2009, things certainly won’t remain static. 9/11 created the right-blogosphere and the Iraq war defined it, but as domestic (social and economic) policy has been inevitably regaining significance compared to foreign policy (which again, they don’t always agree on) things have gotten — and will continue to get — more interesting.

So, let’s settle for a hypothesis: The longer an individual participates in the blogosphere, the likelihood of a political shift dividing said blogger from his or her allies along new lines approaches one.

Note: Additional text and argumentation provided by OXR.

On Different Internets

Published by William Beutler on October 19, 2006 in Blog Fights, Campaigns, Instapundit, John McCain, Leftosphere vs. Rightosphere, PorkBusters and Republicans. 31 Comments

It appears that until about this time in the afternoon Wednesday, Rush Limbaugh had never heard of a weblog* called Instapundit (even his transcriber thinks the name of the site is “Insta-Pundit”). This was news to me, but it wasn’t necessarily a surprise.

To start, here a rambling Rush reproves Glenn Reynolds:

Now, I got a couple of e-mails I was checking here during the break from people who say, “Oh, no, Rush! Don’t get in a war with conservative bloggers. If the media rips you guys apart, it’s all over.” I am not at war with conservative bloggers. I quote countless posts from many blogs on this program. I use them as resources. I’m referring to one blog post, and I don’t even know who it is. This all got started when I cringed when I saw the use of the term “premortem” on a blog site called Insta-Pundit. … Whoever Insta-Pundit is, is letting somebody else reply to whatever it was I’m saying on the program, and it’s a little one-page post that I responded to this morning in the first hour.

I’m going to tell you the blog postings that I regularly read in my RSS reader. I’ve communicated with many of the people who run them. They’re fabulous people, starting with National Review Online, then Hugh Hewitt and his Townhall blog, Captain Ed, Ed Morrissey at Captain’s Quarters. The three lawyers at Power Line. These are resources that I have added to everything else that I use for show prep which makes show prep an ongoing, never ending thing. Red State is another site.(I hope I don’t forget anybody.) Little Green Footballs. I don’t want to leave any out. A.J. Strata, Strata-Sphere. I don’t want to leave anybody out here. The American Spectator. You here me talking about these. I’m referring to two days’ worth of posts on this one site.

So Rush is on speaking terms with RSS and knows what blogs he likes — mostly well-established members of the right-blogosphere — and yet he has no apparent knowledge of just who this “Insta-Pundit” fellow is supposed to be? A little unusual, no? But the fact of the matter is, though their Democratic and left-leaning critics might be slow to realize it, Reynolds and Limbaugh are actually, in the parlance of our times, on different Internets.

I’m willing to bet dollars to puppy shakes that Limbaugh doesn’t know who he is because Reynolds really isn’t kidding when he says he’s not a Republican. I’d wager Pajamas Media’s endowment that Reynolds has never sent so much as an e-mail to the EIB Network, whereas Strata, Morrissey and the NROniks all have him saved in their Outlook.

Limbaugh’s favorite bloggers are always on message, always hitting the day’s big news or arguing with the left. In contrast, consider the podcast Reynolds hosts with his wife — sure, they’ve hosted Bill Frist more than once, but then Frist is clearly enamored with blogging; Reynolds just happens to be a friendly, a big dog, and Frist’s constituent to boot. Yet the Insta-Pundit and the (arguably more conservative) Insta-Wife have also turned over considerable airtime to Democrat Harold Ford and John McCain — who is no friend of Limbaugh’s, to say the least.

Is Reynolds anti-left? No doubt he’s wingnut enough for the moonbats to write him off. (The project of exposing him as a stealth reactionary certainly has its adherents, but that’s old news.) Yet he’s also not pro-right enough for serious GOP activists in the blogosphere to rely on him to push their agenda (nor their candidates). To the extent that Reynolds is a political activist at all, he seems to prefer policy and procedural reforms to party-building (c.f. PorkBusters).

Reynolds’ preferred reforms tend to be government-limiting and market-oriented, and the Limbaugh-sphere is certainly amenable to that. But whereas their online efforts are intended to elect Republicans, Reynolds spends less time bashing Democrats and more time evaluating digital cameras.

  • According to a commenter, not quite. But it’s still clear he didn’t know a “heh” from an “indeed.”

A Tree Falls in the Forest

Published by William Beutler on October 18, 2006 in Asymmetrical Media, Blog Fights and Leftosphere vs. Rightosphere. 1 Comment

[Note: Updated below]

If an allegedly closeted senator is “outed” and Matt Drudge doesn’t link to it, did it actually happen?

Drudge hasn't mentioned it yet

To be sure, the blogosphere has been hammering away at this story since last night — and at each other as well, over what it all supposedly means:

Bloggers do cover the alleged outing

A question bears asking: Has anybody actually been “outed” here? Or is someone just spreading rumors and calling it an outing?

Obviously, it’s still too early to tell where this story with Larry Craig and Mike Rogers (there, I’m using their names too) is going, if anywhere. That said, if Drudge isn’t biting (he rarely links to bloggers) then certainly nor will the Beltway press (distinct from the Beltway media). And as long as this story remains the idle speculation of bloggers, the blogosphere is where it will stay. (There is another possible avenue into the national press, one almost quaint: through the local press.)

Despite the finger-pointer’s recent accuracy in such matters, that isn’t enough to go on here. In those cases he presented physical or circumstantial evidence that led others to act. This time he’s quoting anonymous sources only he has access to (and appears to hope this will make him the next Judy Miller).

Blog P.I. is never one to avoid controversy, but until something resembling evidence materializes, we’ll refrain from calling this anything more than rumormongering.

P.S. Of course, some not-insignificant bloggers are fanning the flames without even stopping to ask whether it’s true. Probably the worst single headline belongs to Patrick Frey:

Lefty Blogger Outs Senator As Gay

As if it was Q.E.D. But he’s far from alone. At the moment I count, from the left and right, in a list that is by no means comprehensive: Inactivist, Culture Kitchen, Pam’s House Blend, Corrente Wire, Glenn Greenwald, Confederate Yankee, Law Hawk, The Moderate Voice, Ann Althouse (who quotes Frey’s headline as her headline) and Andrew Sullivan all speculating about what this means for the senator, for the election, for acceptance of gays, about almost anything but whether the allegation has any merit. Does it? Who knows?

Credit where it’s due: A few have entertained the thought that the claim’s merit has yet to be substantiated. Captain Ed, Blue Crab Boulevard, Hot Air, Dan Riehl and La Shawn Barber are in that crowd. The currently 404 New West Network deserves special mention for having reported the senator’s denials.

Update: I don’t have much more to add here, except that what I’ve said above pretty much goes for Jerry Weller, too.

Updated, August 2007: I’ll never doubt Mike Rogers again. Wait… yes, I will.

Maf54, Where Are You?

Published by Olly Ruff on October 8, 2006 in Blog Fights, Instant Messaging and Republicans. 2 Comments

After several days of Foleymania, the blogosphere has spoken: It is resolved that absolutely virtually everyone agrees that middle-aged congressmen should not be exchanging sexually explicit IMs with teenagers of either gender, especially if they’re under 18 (but even if they’re not), especially if it also constitutes workplace harassment.

Now, the fun part — that of figuring out how much this is going to hurt the Republicans and whether there’s any conceivable way of blaming it on the Democrats or ABC instead — is only just getting started, and a small sub-fight — that of deciding which side of the blogosphere is proving itself to be the most hypocritical/opportunistic/crazy — is also bubbling away nicely. As with every other news story of the last five years, the Foley scandal exemplifies the culture of corruption imposed upon Washington by a power-mad Bush administration, while simultaneously revealing the tragic consequences of the heathen licentiousness promoted by Democrats across this great land. Also, there has to be something here that can be blamed on Glenn Reynolds:

There are other sites, large and small, that have linked to Wild Bill as well — that’s also wrong. We won’t be providing links to any of these posts.
concludes the above-linked Think Progress post, primly. Not wanting to link to “Wild Bill” — the blogger who printed the former page’s name along with a bunch of pictures — is understandable, but not linking to a guy you’re claiming did link to it is problematic when he actually didn’t. (James Joyner analyzes this error here.) The trouble with this supposedly-principled omission of links is that people using Think Progress as a clearinghouse don’t necessarily check these things.

The link is the currency of the blogosphere, and any post that omits links is always the more suspect for it. “Read the whole thing” may be one of the most banal things a blogger can say to their audience, but that doesn’t make it bad advice.

Speaking of bad advice, attempts to quibble over the age question don’t seem likely either to make the story go away any faster or to make Foley suddenly appear sympathetic. Also, it’s hard to see the percentage in fretting over the fact that Democrats are getting as much electoral mileage as they can out of the erstwhile Maf54’s astonishing lack of discretion or propriety. Why shouldn’t they? Politics is full of lemons, but on those rare occasions when you’re handed a glass of lemonade, the thing is to enjoy drinking it.

Some kind of medal, though, must be reserved for the peerless Ben Shapiro, who follows up a predictable non sequitur claim that “studies show that homosexuals are disproportionately prone to pedophilia” with this gem:

On what moral basis do Democrats condemn Foley? They have no basis for moral outrage, since they have championed the destruction of traditional morality for decades.
With this kind of adept spin management, we can expect to still be hearing about Mark Foley well into the 2008 primary season*.

  • In fairness, the scrum begins November 8, 2006.

House of Flying Daggers

Published by William Beutler on October 3, 2006 in Blog Fights, Internecine Battles, Midterms '06, National Politics and Republicans. 1 Comment

Edwin Edwards, former Louisiana governor and connoisseur of corruption (now spending his golden years in the slammer), was once quoted saying the only way he could lose re-election was if “caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy.” Which is pretty much what’s happening to the House Republicans right now.

The rightosphere has always been less partisan than the leftosphere, or at any rate, more anti-Dem than pro-GOP. The liberal netroots count maybe a few Republicans that they like, while the conservative blogs include right-trending Democrats such as Ann Althouse, Roger L. Simon and more libertarians than you can point a :CueCat at. You don’t even have to call yourself a conservative to be in the club.

Because this coalition is built largely around foreign policy issues, they’re not very quick to defend the GOP on domestic issues or when the party is in trouble. And this very moment, you can see the right half of the blogosphere splitting into two camps over the question of Denny Hastert’s future as House Speaker (the matter of course being brought into sharp relief by today’s Washington Times editorial page).

For lack of better phraseology, let’s call these camps the parsers and the partisans. The former camp is concerned most with being on the right side of this particular issue, the latter is quicker to forgive leadership for errors and even not recognize errors as such (and yes, I realize that this description telegraphs my own view of the matter). Here’s the breakdown…

First, there is the side saying Hastert Must Go:

  • Ed Morrissey is one of several to scoff at Times editorialist Tony Blankley’s suggestion of Rep. Hyde to temporarily fill Hastert’s shoes, but he agrees it should be someone:
    Incredibly, no one apparently ever asked any of Foley’s former or current pages if they had noticed any inappropriate behavior from the Congressman. What kind of an investigation doesn’t address the reality of patterns in allegedly predatory behavior? Foley’s uncommon interest in young teenage boys had become parlor talk among the pages, but either Hastert didn’t want to find that out or deliberately avoided it. Hastert apparently made the decision not to follow procedures and refer the matter to the Page Board, the bipartisan committee that oversees pages, and that looks very clearly like a cover-up.
  • Rick Moran doesn’t quite call for Hastert’s dismissal, but is clearly sympathetic:
    What is needed is a reckoning — a settling of accounts by the voters for all the broken promises, the wasteful spending, the arrogant mismanagement, and the irresponsible lawmaking which have combined to bring the Republican party to its sorriest state I’ve seen in my 30 years of membership.
  • Gregory Djerejian, never much of a party guy to begin with, finds some validation in this turn of events:
    Gross negligence and deliberately looking the other way? Say it ain’t so! Why, this might well sum up a large amount of our contemporary history these past five years.
  • For Dr. Steven Taylor, Hastert’s ouster would be long overdue:
    In general, there ought to be built-in changes in leadership probably every six years or so–and not just musical chairs at the top (i.e., Majority Leader to Speaker, Whip to Majority Leader, etc.). Anyone who has ever worked in the same organization for any length of time knows that new blood is vital, and that frequently those who become entrenched in positions tend to become overly comfortable and problematic over time.
  • La Shawn Barber hears excuses, and would prefer not to:
    Whether or not the leadership saw “lurid” IMs is not quite the point. Members knew about Foley’s “overly friendly” e-mails to 16-year-old boys. From that they could have deduced he was up to no good, in my opinion. They should have investigated Foley’s conduct more thoroughly. That they didn’t know the extent of Foley’s “issues” is BS. I’m sorry, but this CYA stuff is not going to cut it.
  • That’s about how The Sundries Shack sees it:
    Hastert knew about at least some of the communications between Mark Foley and an underaged boy. Even if he didn’t know about the sexually explicit communications, it seems obvious that Hastert did little to rectify the situation.
  • James Joyner draws an appropriate — and blog-related! — parallel:
    When the Trent Lott-Strom Thurmond scandal broke a few years back, my instinct was that Lott was merely buttering up an old man upon his retirement rather than saying that segregation was a good thing. Regardless, I thought he should resign simply because he displayed such poor judgment as to be demonstrably unfit to hold such an important office. Ditto Mr. Hastert.

Second, there are those who say Don’t Scapegoat Hastert:

  • GOPBloggers contributor Mark Noonan is not yet ready to judge Hastert:
    My wife saw a friend leaving work the other day with a man who wasn’t her husband. Is this a red flag? What should we do with such information? … I’m never going to agree to punish people for things they didn’t do. Neither Speaker Hastert nor any other member of Congress is responsible for Foley’s reprehensible behaviour unless they were 100% informed of all that Foley had done and then they did nothing about it.
  • Considering Hugh Hewitt’s support for onetime SCOTUS nominee Harriet Miers, it should come as no surprise that he doesn’t want Hastert to resign, either:
    To do so would be to capitulate to Democratic-activist-induced and MSM-abetted hysteria. Not only should Hastert not resign, he should use every opportunity to swing back hard at a MSM deeply compromised by its ideological extremism and a Democratic Party committed to retreat and defeat in Iraq and fecklessness in the war generally.
  • Like Hewitt, Flopping Aces would like to turn this back on the Democrats:
    Stop the hysteria. Because ONE Republican turned out to be gay and had a thing for teenage men does not mean you can throw a blanket over the whole party. If that was the case then the blanket could have been thrown over the Democrats many times over since Studds and all the way up to Jefferson.
  • One Republican is getting some inadvertant bad publicity out of all this. At TownHall, Mary Katharine Ham writes:
    You know what this feels like to me? This is a classic McCain Move on the part of the Times. Get a jump on the moral high ground, condemn someone in the severest terms before the evidence necessarily justifies it. Result? You end up looking like an unassailable saint and you get a whole lotta press out of the deal. Sweet.
  • John Hawkins sounds the same note about McCain, adding:
    Although I’m not a big fan of Hastert either, falsely accusing him of covering up for a sexual predator so he can be kicked under the bus and replaced is a little too vulgar, even for the brass knuckled world of Washington Politics.
  • Perhaps most combative is Macsmind, hitting back at weak-kneed Republicans. And this is before he saw the Times editorial:
    Quite frankly for some of the conservatives crapping in their pants this isn’t about Foley, it’s about Harriet Miers, Dubai, and Fences. Get the hell over it already! The Bible says that he who makes a judgement without knowing all the facts is a fool, and we are seeing a lot of fools come out, especially on the Right. Thank God not all have the backbone of a rubberband. … Remember, vitue can be a vice in war, and ladies and gents we are at war.
  • A few are drawing not-unfounded equivalencies between the House GOP and the news outlets that had the e-mails. The Strata-Sphere is one:
    The excuses proffered by these media organizations about why they did not pursue the matter are identical to those offered up by Hastert. So if these news organizations (who had only the marginal emails - we have some suspicions about Ross and ABC who do not make that claim) then it is good enough for Hastert and company
  • Don Surber is another, cleverly if tenuously:
    The Times just lost its human resources manager because he tried to seduce a 13-year-old girl online. Using the logic of the Times, there is only one thing to do: Wesley Pruden, editor in chief, must resign.
  • Almost but not quite splitting the difference, Erick Erickson at Red State calls on Republicans to walk first and then chew gum:
    Let’s be clear — now is not the time to have a leadership struggle. We’re five weeks from an election that isn’t looking very good. But, should the GOP somehow be able to keep the House in Republican hands (and Lord I hope they can!), the Speaker must go when the House returns.

Hastert is in deep trouble now, and despite what he says today, is probably beyond rescue. I suspect the Hastert defenders will slowly start changing their minds. Sometimes the manager gets sacked, even if it’s not exactly his fault.

It really doesn’t matter whether he lied about knowing of the Foley e-mails late last week. If he did, that’s worse, but even if he didn’t, the House GOP should have still interviewed former pages, not to mention informed the Democrat on the page system committee, not to mention other Republicans on that committee.

Those were errors of moral judgment, and as often happens, they’re being followed by errors of political judgment. Starting with NRCC chair Tom Reynolds’ refusal to be “thrown under a bus,” as he put it, message discipline in the caucus has broken down, and it’s only a matter of time before the coup comes. The only real question is whether it’s before the Republicans lose the election or after.

Blog P.I. Presents: Your 2006 Campaign Blog Scandal Guide

Published by William Beutler on September 25, 2006 in Blog Consultants, Blog Fights, Blogs vs. MSM, Campaigns, Democrats, Netroots, Republicans and Sock puppets. 7 Comments

Two Republicans, two Democrats. Two firings, two stonewallings. Two weeks.

Since Labor Day alone, the 2006 campaign season has witnessed a flurry of mini-scandals wherein a federal campaign has gotten in over its head with some online activity or another involving political blogs, usually with the intent of doing a little friendly harm to their opponents’ image — but invariably the whole thing blows up in their face.

As we’ve seen here previously, the Internet has tempted campaigns (and journalists) to do things that might initially seem in their best interest, but really aren’t. Beltway-based brick and mortar campaign operatives often disdain the blogosphere, where they think think “anything goes.” and so when the time comes they decide they want to leverage the blogopshere, they think anything goes. They’re wrong, of course. It would behoove political operatives to respect the medium and try to understand it before they try to engage it (let alone try to exploit it).

Until they do, here’s a handy chart comparing the various players, circumstances and issues surrounding the latest campaign blog scandals:

OFFENDING CAMPAIGN Rep. Charlie Bass (R-NH) Rep. Ben Cardin (D-MD) State Sen. Tom Kean Jr. (R-NJ) Atty Amy Klobuchar (DFL-MN)
AGGRIEVED PARTIES NH blogs Blue Granite, NH-02 Progressive, The Yankee Doodler, Paul Hodes (D) campaign LG Michael Steele (R) campaign, Kweise Mfume, arguably Cardin, Jews Blue Jersey, Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) Rep. Mark Kennedy (R) campaign, GOP consultant Scott Howell
ACCUSATION Bass House office secretly concern-trolled NH liberal blogs Staffer wrote too-revealing secret campaign diary as blog Kean campaign secretly concern-trolled BlueJersey Klobuchar employees viewed illegally-obtained forthcoming Kennedy TV spot
THE ACCUSED Unknown Hill staffer(s) Now-former Cardin employee Ursula Gruber Kean flack Jill Hazelbaker, unknown staffer(s) MN blogger Noah Kunin, Klobuchar ex-flack Tara McGuinness
INTERNET SLEUTH(S) NH bloggers MissLaura, Keener, Republic Not Empire Wizbang’s Kevin Aylward Blue Jersey’s Juan Melli N/A
TROUBLESOME BLOG N/A Persuasionatrix N/A Blanked-Out
SOCK PUPPETS IndyNH, IndieNH @ 143.231.249.141 N/A usedtobeblue, cleanupnj, AmadeusNJ @ 70.90.20.85 N/A
MSM COVERAGE N/A Roll Call Sun, Post, BET, AP Times, Record, Ledger, AP Pioneer Press, AP
BLOG COVERAGE Daily Kos, ThinkProgress, Mia Culpa Mary Katharine Ham, Insider Politics, Washington Prowler, Red State, Rhymes With Right, Atlas Shrugs, Alabama Liberation Front, Soccer Dad, Jessica Cutler Daily Kos, Skippy, Steve Gilliard, Blanton’s And Ashton’s, MyDD, Pam’s House Blend, Kid Oakland, Beltway Blogroll, Blogometer Power Line, Kennedy vs. the Machine, MN Publius, Minnesota Democrats Exposed, Wizbang, Beltway Blogroll
OUTCOME N/A Unknown staffer “appropriately disciplined,” whatever that means Gruber fired Denials to NYT, AP, etc McGuinness fired, Kunin apologized, FBI may investigate
REMAINING QUESTIONS Will the Bass campaign be pressed to admit or deny? Will there be any fallout? Was Gruber a senior staffer or junior staffer? Will someone fess up? Maybe Hazelbaker? Why did Klobuchar camp wait to report it? Was it actually illegal?
ONGOING? Maybe Maybe Yes Yes

And after the jump, some additional thoughts:

Continue reading ‘Blog P.I. Presents: Your 2006 Campaign Blog Scandal Guide’

The Blogosphere is What You Make of It

Published by William Beutler on September 19, 2006 in Blog Fights and Sock puppets. 2 Comments

Promoting what sounds like an insufferable new book in the New York Times Magazine this weekend, ex-blogger Lee Siegel submitted to Deborah Solomon’s insufferable questions:

Did you feel that you were doing something ethically questionable when you posted, for instance, a comment by Sprezzatura that carried the headline ‘Siegel Is My Hero’? Every man is a hero to his alias. No, it never occurred to me at the time that I was doing something wrong. There are other people who appear anonymously on Web sites; they do battle with their detractors. Anonymity is a universal convention of the blogosphere, and the wicked expedience is that you can speak without consequences. What was wrong about it is that I did it under the aegis of The New Republic, as a senior editor of the magazine.

As I have written before, what he did wrong was blending multiple online personalities — one identifiably Siegel and one claimedly not-Siegel, and had the latter defend the former as if they were distinct individuals. This would have been equally wrong had he done so under the aegis of a free Blogspot account.

Moreover, it’s not just the ethics of the ’sphere that confounds Mr. Siegel, but the wisdom one needs in order to make sense of it. Consider:

[Siegel:] Obscurity is the new poverty. People don’t seem able to bear being unknown. But obscurity and struggle are the artists’ Harvard and Yale. Anonymous bloggers are also saddled with obscurity, which I doubt you would similarly glorify. That’s right. In their case, anonymity is obscurity’s rash. At least for those who practice incessant character assassination, which represents a good portion of the blogosphere, they vent out of the pain of being unacknowledged.

Leaving aside the fact that it’s probably more correct to say obscurity is anonymity’s rash — if it even it makes sense to say such a thing — let’s ask whether or not “incessant character assassination” constitutes a “good portion of the blogosphere.” But what’s a good portion? Is it bigger than a breadbox?

If you spend your time wading through the comment section vitriol at Eschaton or LGF, you don’t really have the right to complain about it afterward — that’s what they’re like. But if you choose your bloggers wisely — the folks at Volokh Conspiracy, Obsidian Wings, The Corner and Tapped are just a few of many who fight fairly — the chances are much better you’ll decide the blogosphere has something to offer. Evidently, Siegel prefers denunciation to conversation.

Even if we grant him this assessment, it must be said, the blogosphere is what you make of it.

The Oprah Winfrey-9/11 Ticket Agent Suicide Myth?

Published by William Beutler on September 15, 2006 in 9/11 Attacks, Blog Fights and Urban Legends. 20 Comments

Update, Jan. 2007: Resolved. See: “Myth Busted: Oprah Winfrey and the 9/11 Ticket Agent ‘Suicide.’”

Note: The question mark in the above headline may be removed, depending on how this all plays out. I may also be grievously wrong — but I don’t think so.

Note 2: All updates have been moved to the end of this post. As of early Friday afternoon, the issue remains a mystery. All I can say for certain is that there is no actual proof that an American Airlines ticket agent committed suicide after a brush with 9/11 terrorists.

Earlier this week the political blogosphere witnessed an interesting and fairly infrequent occurrence — a minor blogfight pitting an academic left blogger against an activist left blogger: At the Prospect’s newest blog, Horse’s Mouth, former Spinsanity co-writer Brendan Nyhan slammed Eschaton for taking a callous shot at President Bush. Nyhan initially mistook guest poster Avedon Carol for Atrios himself, and chaos ensued. That’s interesting and all, but I’m distracted from whatever I was going to say about it because… the incident giving rise to the debate — the alleged suicide of a ticket agent who had checked in Mohamed Atta and Abdulaziz al-Omari on the way to crash Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center — appears to be an urban legend, hoax or mistake.

You take your pick. Here’s why I think this…

Early on Wednesday morning, Nyhan wrote:

TWO LIBERAL BLOGGERS POLITICIZE A SUICIDE. In a guest post on Eschaton, the blog of Duncan Black (aka Atrios), the blogger Avedon Carol quotes approvingly from a Suburban Guerilla post that uses the tragic suicide of an American Airlines ticket agent to take a swipe at President Bush … Is nothing sacred? And do they want Bush to commit suicide out of remorse, as the post suggests? This is just vile.

As cited by both Carol and Nyhan, Susie Madrak at Suburban Guerilla had written on the morning prior:

The American Airlines ticket agent who checked in Mohammed Atta on 9/11 later committed suicide - unlike the man in charge who, being briefed on the potential threat, told his briefer, “Okay, you’ve covered your ass.”

Madrak’s source was a September 11, 2006 diary at Daily Kos by one teresahill, apparently a “Novelist, former newspaper reporter, soon to be massage therapist in Greenville, South Carolina.” She had written:

AA employee, checked in Atta on 911, later commits suicide, [sic] by teresahill One of Oprah’s guests today was Michael Tuohey, an employee of US AIR who checked in Mohammed Atta and one of the other hijackers on the morning of Sept. 11. A 37-year employee of US Air, Touhey said he’s recently started to see Atta’s face staring at him from cabs that pass by on the street or even at his local mall, that even though he knows it’s not him, Atta looks as real to him today as it did on Sept. 11. Two ticket agents checked in Atta that day, Touhey and a woman with American Airlines in Boston. Touhey said the woman has already committed suicide, and he didn’t seem far from it on the show. (No warning by Atta’s name at all, BTW, you idiots at ABC. Nothing. ID checked out. Ticket checked out. Nothing to tell this broken man he shouldn’t send Atta on his way.)

That diary made the Recommended list and picked up 262 comments. I haven’t seen the show (an Oprah.com preview is of no help) and I can’t get my hands on a transcript [Update: See updates], but the the dKos diarist apparently saw it herself. The show’s official write-up, available on the site, offers the first and only independent report about the alleged suicide:

Plagued by sleepless nights and visions of Atta, Tuohey felt another layer of guilt when he learned the ticket agent in Boston who checked in Atta and Alomari for the last leg of their flight committed suicide. Tuohey: I’m saying, my God, if I had just done the job the way I was supposed to she never would have seen these people. Oprah: But this is the thing … If you’re going to beat yourself up and be guilty about it and say, “What I could have done,” what could you have done? Tuohey: Basically nothing. Oprah: Well then… Tuohey: Yeah, I know. I know that. … But try to convince your mind.

But where’s the proof? I’ve searched Google up and down for any combination of “ticket agent” suicide, and the same terms plus atta and 9/11 and boston, to no avail. Nor is there anything at Google News. In short, there is no mention of it on the known Internets predating Oprah’s interview of Tuohey. I don’t have Nexis anymore, but if anybody out there can run the Nexis search on these terms, please let me know. [I now have a pretty good set of Nexis search results -- hundreds of articles and transcripts. More on this soon.]

I’ve been thumbing through my copy of the 9/11 Commission Report, but it’s no help in identifying who the Boston ticket agent was:

Between 6:45 and 7:40, Atta and Omari, along with Satam al Suqami, Wail al Shehri, and Waleed al Shehri, checked in and boarded American Airlines Flight 11, bound for Los Angeles. The flight was scheduled to depart at 7:45.4

Following that footnote, it seems the answer may lie in the “AAL response to the Commission’s supplemental document requests,” but that doesn’t seem to be on the web.

Also inconclusive but pointing toward “myth” — or urban legend — is the skepticism of commenters on the message boards at Snopes. However, by late morning on the 13th the thread had died without resolution.

For what it’s worth, Michael Tuohey’s story has been well-documented — he’s been the subject of myriad web columns, blog posts and a few CNN appearances, and until this September 12 appearance 9/11/05 appearance on Oprah, had said nothing at all about a ticket agent committing suicide. If it happened, it was not reporteed in the press at all.

A minor mystery here, at least for the moment, is when the show first aired. Oprah’s season premiere is Sept. 19 — that’s the McGreevey interview. All it would mean is that the myth had been broadcast to millions, unchecked, at least months earlier, and nobody seems to have investigated the claim. [Update: Nexis seems to indicate the show was first broadcast on 9/11/05.]

So: In the absence of independent confirmation of this story, I am left to conclude that there probably was no suicide. And of course, this raises another question: Who was the ticket agent at Boston’s Logan airport who did check Atta and al-Omari through?

P.S. So far as I can tell, only one person — anonyblogger T.S. from Martini Pundit, apparently a “a corporate whore living in Brooklyn” and former “newspaper columnist” — questioned the veracity of the story:

Chilling, yes, but also utter nonsense. If it were not, something would’ve turned up on Nexis and/or Google, I think.

And I may just be picking on the numerous bloggers who passed the story along, but hey, let’s have a look, shall we?

For example, Andrew Sullivan made it a Begala Award Nominee:

“The American Airlines ticket agent who checked in Mohammed Atta on 9/11 later committed suicide - unlike the man in charge who, being briefed on the potential threat, told his briefer, ‘Okay, you’ve covered your ass,’” - blogger Susie “Suburban Guerrilla” Madrak, linked approvingly on Eschaton. (Hat tip: Brendan.)

He might also have given it to Avedon, who followed up in a comment at Horse’s Mouth:

It breaks my heart to know that poor kid committed suicide for something that was Bush’s responsibility. You really are a jerk if you don’t get that, Brendan.

Or Steve Gilliard:

Brendan, it’s really simple: George Bush has spent five years avoiding accountability for his actions. He wants Congress to make the illegal wiretapping and torture go away. He doesn’t even want these people to sue for their maltreatment in US custody. Yet, the burden of guilt on this person was so great, they couldn’t live with it. Have you ever seen a suicide? I’ve seen three. It is an amazing thing. I don’t think most people would trivialize it.

It also duped Oprah’s fans at Television Without Pity:

That is one of those untold stories from 9/11 and it was just fascinating. I felt so bad for the guy and especially the fact that he blamed himself for the other ticket agent in Boston committing suicide.

Aside from TS, Echidne of the Snakes also asked:

My question is: Is the woman portrayed in the [ABC "Path to 9/11"] docudrama as having just waved Atta on the same one who killed herself in reality? And had her memory smeared posthumously?

Unlike most of the others, she did ask questions. Just not the right ones. [Update: As the current update situation makes clear, I can't say this for sure without further inquiry.]

Early morning update: I said I might be wrong, and indeed I might be. I’ve been forwarded a magazine article indicating that Oprah’s producer had received a message from the woman’s husband:

Oprah Winfrey, with Tuohey as her studio guest, told 20 million viewers that a woman who’d worked at American Airlines in Boston had later killed herself. Earlier, Oprah’s producer had told Tuohey she had a message from the woman’s husband: “It’s not your fault.” “When she said that,” Tuohey says, “it felt like a stone was lifted from my heart.”

But I can’t call it definitive, beause the source is still Tuohey, and there’s no indication that the producer was contacted for the magazine article. I’m certainly not going to accuse him of fabrication without knowing more, so stay tuned.

Late morning update: Alex Pareene at Wonkette has the Nexis access that I don’t, and the first report about this he finds is the UK Sunday Mirror on 9/11/05. Who’s the source? Michael Tuohey. Which settles nothing, but sure makes things more interesting.

Early afternoon update: I’ve just got my hands on the transcript of The Oprah Winfrey Show from 9/11/05. Here’s the relevant section, omitted from the Oprah.com summary:

WINFREY: Recently you learned that the woman who did the same job as you in Boston, who checked Mohamed Atta and Abdulaziz Alomari in at the ticket counter committed suicide a few months ago. Mr. TOUHEY: Yeah. That was another part of the guilt, and that’s another part of the problem. I didn’t realize that until a good friend of mine–he’s been working with American Airlines for 38 years. And he says, `That girl that checked in Atta committed suicide.’ I said `What?’ He said, `Yeah, she killed herself.’ I says, `You sure?’ He says, `Of course. They’re talking about it in the airport.’ Man, that just added another layer of guilt. I’m saying to myself, `My God, if I had just done the job the way I was supposed to, she never would have seen these people and maybe, you know, been around today, you know.’ It’s just…

So he heard it from a friend. That isn’t very solid sourcing, to say the least, and there’s no indication he followed up on it. On the other hand, it does not settle the issue of whether Oprah’s producer talked to the (supposed) ticket agent’s husband. There’s more to this story yet.

The Blog Post Is Half-Full

Published by Olly Ruff on September 7, 2006 in Blog Fights, Democrats, Lamont v. Lieberman and Relaunches. 2 Comments

As impatiently anticipated in this space on Tuesday, the Lieberman ‘06 blog has been loosed upon the world. Despite the admonishments of Atrios, as backed up by DavidNYC and other luminaries, the comments are filling up briskly with anti-Joe sentiment. (Albeit nowhere near as fast as Atrios’ own threads.)

Alas, the only real entertainment to be had is in speculating on the layers of identity within the commentariat. Which are paid stooges from the Lieberman campaign, posting deliberately incendiary remarks to make the Lamont campaign look bad? Which are volunteer stooges from the Lamont campaign, posting obviously amateurish incendiary remarks to make the Lieberman campaign look like they’re planting deliberately incendiary remarks? How many different people are posting as “Ann Coulter,” and are they all on the same side?

The site’s design is fairly dreary, and the sense that has characterized the 2006 Lieberman campaign — that of expectations cruelly dashed — is ably captured by the policy of having every post contain a “Read The Full Blog Post” link, even when (as is frequently the case) there is no more blog post to read. Meanwhile, the tireless exuberance of the comment posse is beginning to resemble that of an unruly high-school class, and within a few posts the blog itself had devolved into the very thing Atrios originally predicted: singling out random anonymous commenters as being representative of the Lamont campaign. (The approved neologism for this is nutpicking. I am more or less resigned to it, but am going to hold out for as long as possible in the hope that someone can come up with something equally clever but less overtly anatomical.)

By all rights this should be hilarious, but for some reason it makes me feel sad instead. Perhaps it’s a seasonal thing.

Foer The Record, Siegel Reinstated [Updated: Or Maybe Not]

Published by William Beutler on September 6, 2006 in Blog Fights, Blogs vs. MSM, Comment Sections and Sock puppets. 1 Comment

[Note: Post updated below. And updated, and updated.]

As covered extensively in the last post, last week TNR joined the Washington Post in the ranks of prominent political paper-based periodicals to get burned by its comment section; writer Lee Siegel’s blog was pulled after the editors discovered he had been posting as his own biggest fan, the artlessly arftful “Sprezzatura.”

Earlier this afternoon, TNR’s Foer went up with an editor’s note/meditation on the future of TNR’s comment section. Unable to arrive at a conclusion, Foer instead settles on drastically overthinking it:

A few months back, The New Republic actually considered requiring Talkback bylines. Our logic went like this: We would never publish an anonymous letter to the editor in the print magazine; in fact, we never publish a letter to the editor without checking the missive’s facts and authenticity. So why should we hold reader opinion on the web to a different standard?

Absent other perfectly good reasons not occurring to me just now, I’ll point out that the two are just not the same, and never have been. Comment sections are moderated, letters pages are edited. Magazines must be forgiven for being choosy, as they have very little space to work with; assuming a comment is on-topic, non-abusive and somewhere in the ballpark of substantive or amusing, it should be allowed. And it goes on like this:

The proposal wasn’t meant to demean TNR’s Talkback section, which has a far higher quality than almost any other example of the genre. Yet, scattered among Talkbalk’s thoughtful posts, you could still find examples of ad hominem attacks and argument that degenerated into taunting. (Some of which, it turned out, were produced by one of our own.)

Unlike the Post at the time of the Deborah Howell controversy, TNR already has comment registration — so that fix is out. But if one apple is bad, should the whole cart be overturned? Unfortunately, in this case the apple is from their own tree (all right, enough with that metaphor) and Foer sounds determined to let that fact ruin everything.

Later in the note, he acknowledges that many potential commenters will drop out before revealing their names. So Foer has just walked into a debate he already seems to have decided he can’t answer: Whether the honesty conferred by anonymity is productive or disruptive. Frankly, the blogosphere itself cannot really answer this question. Some have comments and some do not. Some are attacked for what their commenters say, others are attacked because they didn’t give anyone the chance to say it.

Also, curiously unmentioned in Foer’s meditation: Lee Siegel’s blog is back. All the posts have been returned, even the controversial ones about pedophilia, even the comments by Sprezzatura. I take this to mean that Siegel is not only not fired, he’s cleared to blog again. That’s fine, it’s their call to make. But shouldn’t Foer have included at least a sentence addressing this development?

Update: It’s worth noting that the return of Siegel’s blog seems to fly in the face of the New York Observer’s report, which quotes Foer as saying Siegel’s suspension is “indefinite.” Are some suspensions more indefinite than others? Or is it more likely he actually hasn’t been reinstated, and that the blog’s return is an accident; after all, the last post is dated 8/31, shortly before it was replaced by Foer’s apology. And that apology is pretty firm about Siegel’s blog no longer being published there. What we may have instead is the temporary (?) return of Siegel’s blog as an orphan page, not linked to by any other page on the site. But if you have the URL handy, “Lee Siegel on Culture” is yours for the reading.

Updated again: I am informed by Tyler Green of Arts Journal that Siegel’s blog is not actually back — just the archives. That’s actually what I’d asked for in the previous post; it sounds like they took so much heat for closing off the archives that they decided to open them back up. Good. And so I’ll conclude by going back to how I concluded this post in the first place — Foer’s note is more than annoying, more crucially, it lacks transparency. And in the end, it adds nothing.

Updated one more time: The first and last lines of that Observer piece, the first quoting Siegel, the last quoting TNR literary editor (and onetime Sopranos guest star) Leon Wieseltier, are expecially [Update: This should be a word] telling. Siegel first:

I made a dumb mistake, and I’m very sorry I did it. I took the blogosphere’s bait, and I stooped to the level of these people who were commenting on my pieces, and I shouldn’t have.

If you’re wondering how Mr. Siegel got off on such a bad foot with the blogosphere, look no further. One wonders why he stooped to the level of writing a blog in the first place. Now Wieseltier:

I don’t like the blogosphere for many reasons; one of them is its assumption that a person’s first thoughts are his best thoughts, which is quite obviously false.

I would say this very post is evidence of that. Lee Siegel had no business writing a blog in the first place, but Wieseltier sounds like he’d do just fine. Mr. Foer?