This one [Dowd Award] goes to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer for deliberately mangling a quote from Congressman George Nethercutt. He’d just returned from a tour of Iraq and, like so many others, reported a much more optimistic scenario than many in the media have been reporting. He gave a talk in which he said,“So the story is better than we might be led to believe - I’m - just - indicting the news people - but it’s a bigger and better and more important story than losing a couple of soldiers every day which, which, heaven forbid, is awful.”
The Seattle P-I chopped off the quote so that it said in its subhead: “It’s a better … story than losing a couple of soldiers every day.” They added in their own words: “He added that he did not want any more soldiers to be killed.” But that is not an accurate rendition of the full quote. It’s a device to protect themselves in what is clearly a hit-job. Nethercutt complained
“I requested that the Post-Intelligencer correct the record. They refused. And they even refused to at least run my full quote. But the P-I didn’t stop there. They then wrote an editorial condemning me, repeated the quote they had deliberately distorted, and put my ‘quote’ next to the name of one of our fallen soldiers. To do so was completely heartless.”
But not unexpected. Here’s how the Seattle P-I responded:
“It’s a better and more important story than losing a couple of soldiers every day,” the would-be senator gaffed at a gathering Monday. The family of Pfc. Kerry Scott of Concrete, who buried their young hero Tuesday, likely would not share Nethercutt’s news judgment.
Charming, huh? What they implied with their first story is now explicit in their editorial: that Nethercutt doesn’t give a damn about the military casualties that have taken place. And once the quote is in the database, you can’t escape it. Guess what? Maureen Dowd ran with it! Dowd’s insinuation is particularly unfair. She wrote:
On Monday, Representative George Nethercutt Jr., a Republican from Washington State who visited Iraq, chimed in to help the White House: ‘The story of what we’ve done in the postwar period is remarkable. It is a better and more important story than losing a couple of soldiers every day.’ The congressman puts the casual back in casualty.
Well, he would have put the casual back in casualty if he hadn’t added, “which, which, heaven forbid, is awful.” Doesn’t that elision completely undermine Dowd’s cheap shot? Dowd is not personally guilty of deliberately distorting the quote; the Seattle P-I is. But it behooves Dowd and the NYT to run a correction exonerating Nethercutt from the charge of insensitivity to the troops.
It does seem to indicate a bit of desperation when Big Media feels the need to simply misquote in order to make its political point.
UPDATE: [ source] More Seattle-PI flesh-rending commentary over at the Shark Blog. In particular, the newspaper now admits that they did, in fact, alter the quote. The paper calls it a “paraphrase”, but paraphrase are not generally put inside quote marks.
[source]
Meanwhile, there’s another nail in the coffin of the scientific “consensus” surrounding greenhouse alarmism. Much of the case for panic has been based on the suggestion that the recent rise in surface temperature is unprecendented in the last 1000 years. That conclusion is based on Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” graph that was included in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Third Assessment Report. Many paleoclimatologists have been suspicious of this graph as it contradicted long established theories of a medieval warm period and a little ice age during that time.
Well, now it seems that the proxy data on which the graph was based contains several glaring errors, especially in the earlier part of the period. Once those are corrected, the 1400s — after the end of the medieval warm period according to all earlier research — is as hot or hotter than today, with equally dramatic rises in temperature (and dramatic falls too). The corrected graphs are available here.
They missed the Little Ice Age? How could any alledged “climatologist” miss that? I’d call them “amateurs” but that would be insulting to the amateurs who seem to be the ones doing the real science and investigation.
[source]
At the San Francisco protest on Saturday, I may have got a glimpse of the future of far-left activism in America, at least through November 2004 […]
I can’t find confirmation for this on the Internet or elsewhere, but as Muhammad was finishing up a tirade against the twin evils of the Republicans and the Democrats, he said something like (paraphrasing) ‘and that’s why the Peace and Freedom Party is running Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abu-Jamal on its 2004 presidential ticket.’ If it’s true, it’s a brilliant move. Leonard Peltier murdered two FBI agents, Ronald Williams and Jack Coler, while Mumia Abu-Jamal murdered a Philadelphia police officer, Daniel Faulkner. Thanks to their notoriety, the ticket will generate a huge amount of media publicity. Since the far-left simply assumes the two of them were framed by the U.S. government, they won’t have any trouble voting for them, and will use the presidential election to promote their innocence. In turn, Peltier and Abu-Jamal, through their writings and representatives, will promote a radical, revolutionary brand of politics that’ll make the Green Party look like Rush Limbaugh.
[…]
If this scenario plays itself out (again, I’ve got no confirmation), it’ll be a disaster - not for conservatives, but for the Green Party. I doubt the Green Party is so far left that they could endorse a Peltier-Abu-Jamal ticket without provoking a split in their ranks; after all, even people as left as Michael Moore know Mumia Abu-Jamal’s a murderer. But if the Green Party runs its own ticket, it’s going to see its vote split across the country thanks to young college kids who just can’t resist the temptation to vote for Mumia.
Bwahahahahahaha! Please, oh please - it’ll be better than the California recall.
So, remember before the war, when the Human Shields were going over to Iraq? And whenever someone even hinted that they were supporters of Saddam they would denounce that, and say that no, they abhorred Saddam and his policies but were for the Iraqi people?
Ok, so I’ve been reading the news accounts of the latest round of bombings in Iraq. I figured that if anything was deserving of such protection as having a ring of human shields to prevent bombing, it might be a Red Cross facility dedicated to succoring the Iraqi people. But no mention of any human shields. But then I thought: Of course, they left Iraq after the fighting (some left during the war). But of course now they should be planning on returning to Iraq, right? Out of the same interest for the well-being of the Iraqi people. I mean, sure, they don’t like Bush’s policies, but they claimed they didn’t like Saddam, either. So I scanned the papers and news wires for stories of their plans to return to Iraq. I haven’t found any such stories about any of the former human shields who went to Iraq to protect it from American bombs planning on returning to Iraq to place their bodies between bombs and Red Cross facilities now. But surely they must be doing just that, if they were sincere when they said they did not support Saddam, only the Iraqi people. I just haven’t found the stories. Do you happen to know where the human shields are?
Labour leaders backed Diane Abbott, the Left-wing MP, yesterday over her decision to educate her son privately, days after condemning a Tory MP for saying he would do the same.
Labour MPs were taken by surprise by the news that she had chosen the £10,000-a-year City of London Boys School for her son, by-passing four comprehensives in Hackney and Stoke Newington, the constituency she represents.
Many of the commentors at Samizdata seem to have missed the point of why this is flaming hypocrisy — it’s not just that Abbott is preventing other parents from helping their kids as she is but that she had just flamed another MP for doing the same thing.
UPDATE: Abbot discusses her actions noted above [source]:
On BBC2’s This Week, Miss Abbott, a member of the Socialist Campaign Group of MPs, said: “I’ve said very little about this because anything you say just sounds self-serving and hypocritical. You can’t defend the indefensible.”
That’s actually a lot more honest than you’d expect out of a politician.