They're still at it, including the ones who insist they are really trying to help Ron Paul (apparently by embarrassing him into taking their side in the Cato proxy war against Rockwell). Here's the roundup for today:
David Boaz, Cato
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2008/...hing-you-read/
His article, entitled "Don't believe everything you read," is an attempted response of what he calls "attacks on the Cato Institute and several of our staff members" from the blogosphere "fringe" "all because of our attempt to separate the grand old cause of classical liberalism from racism and bigotry." Strangely, this lengthy rant doesn't refute any of the specific charges made against Cato. It doesn't explain Cato's role in the story's background, or when/where/how Cato first learned of the "bombshell" that Kirchick was about to drop. It doesn't explain Cato's stand-offish reception of the Ron Paul campaign before the New Republic. It does not dispute the now-documented fact that Boaz and Jamie Kirchick have been friends with each other since long before the story broke.
He urges his readers not to believe what has been said about Cato yet offers no proof why this should be so, and in fact he refuses to do so on the grounds that it would be like "wrestling with pigs" to respond to his accusers in any substantive, meaningful way. Boaz's entire 6 paragraph rant can actually be reduced to this: "I deny all the charges against Cato and myself, but I'm not going to offer any proof because anybody who attacks us is a closet racist and not a real libertarian."
Tom Palmer, Cato
http://www.tomgpalmer.com/archives/042388.php
His latest response is a simple link to Boaz stating "nuff said," implying his endorsement of the shoddy logic outlined above.
In case anyone's missed it, there's a beautiful irony in the Palmer/Boaz line of response. These guys are both demanding that the Paul campaign "out" the author of the newsletters. Like shrill harpies, their whines echo through the tunnels of the Orange Line. They constantly impugn the Paul campaign with innuendos of deceit, ineptitude, and collusion with people they deem "racists," and they constantly tell us that the Paul campaign's response is "insufficient" unless he outs and publicly flogs Lew Rockwell. Yet when evidence emerges showing that the Cato/Reason crowd colluded with Jamie Kirchick on this story, they refuse to talk. Note to Tom and David: I've seen your responses to the allegation of collusion with TNR, and it's insufficient!
Julian Sanchez, Reason
http://juliansanchez.com/notes/archi..._last_word.php
Sanchez makes the official attempt to respond to Justin Raimondo's excellent analysis of the TNR story (http://www.takimag.com/site/article/...mear_ron_paul/)
Sanchez's argument is wanting on several counts.
1. First, he repeats the meme from his appearance late last week on this forum: "we're just reporters investigating a story and sharing notes with Kirchick out of professional courtesy." Let's break that one down point by point. Well, Mr. Sanchez, let's get one thing straight: you are not a "reporter" and Jamie Kirchick is not a "reporter." You are both nothing more than glorified bloggers at ideologically charged niche magazines with minuscule circulations who hold jobs there for no other reason than your own ideological concurrence with that magazine's niche. The various odds and ends you call a "job" may be enough, as Karen DeCoster has suggested, to pay the rent in a one-bedroom flat on the outskirts of DuPont Circle, but the simple fact is that neither of you will be up for a Pulitzer nomination at any point in your current careers. On the totem pole that is called professional journalism, you sit only marginally above the guy who sells major dailies from a crate at the highway overpass. You don't hold a candle to a typical beat writer in any major daily paper (which, despite being AWFUL for plenty of other reasons, are actually real full time careers with at least some semblance of journalistic professionalism and standards behind them). You aren't a newscaster (not even a bad one like Bill O'Reilly). You aren't a news commentator (not even a bad one like Hannity). Hell, you aren't even the weather girl at the Jackson, Mississippi CBS affiliate. You aren't a Michelle Malkin, painfully attempting to straddle the world between writing newspaper op-eds and blogging, because you do entirely the latter wherein a small portion of the latter is misidentified as the former by virtue of appearing in your own blog-in-print called Reason Magazine. So stop calling yourself a "reporter," stop insisting that shameless hack bloggers like Kirchick are your "professional peers," stop pushing this ridiculous line that you are simply "following the story wherever it leads," and, quite frankly, get a real job and GROW UP.
2. Sanchez does attempt to tackle Raimondo's actual article, but poorly at that. The main thrust of Raimondo's piece was a point-by-point dissection of Kirchick's shoddy journalism, abusive misquotations of the newsletters, and obvious political axe. Yet the bulk of Sanchez's response is caught up in the trivial quips of Raimondo's well-known acerbic writing style. It's easy to see how this happened because Cato and Reason were the direct targets of a sharp tongue in this case. But Sanchez spends so much time concentrating on the insults (many of which are very funny and are meant to be read that way) that he completely misses the main body of the article itself.
3. When moving to the main body of Raimondo's response, Sanchez decides to punt and admits doing so: "I, for my part, don't feel much need to talk about the bulk of Raimondo's piece." All he has to say about his friend Kirchick is this:
Then he drops the issue. Yes, he admits, Kirchick did a hatchet job. "But that's neither here nor there, really." So the content of Kirchick's allegations is neither here nor there, Julian? I submit that that content is the story itself, both in its claims and in its abusive misportrayal of the quotes. Keep the following in mind: the story is as bad as it is precisely BECAUSE Kirchick gave the worst possible spin to the quotes and precisely BECAUSE, until Raimondo, nobody even questioned that spin. And I can easily prove this to be the case by pointing out that Paul had easily weathered older newsletter stories before where the "offensive" content was exactly the same, but the spin was scrutinized and the response was different.I don't think it's my job to defend Kirchick's article: It was a hit piece, it did sometimes stretch to put things in their worst light, and it did make a fuss about some passages that weren't really offensive at all.
4. Sanchez's next line is a logical contortion of epic proportions. He just admitted that Kirchick did a hatchet job, but rather than ask how Kirchick's spin affected the way the story played out he dismisses it as an irrelevant attempt at "parsing out the exact percentage of some New Republic article one agrees with." The worst of the worst, he tells us, is simply beyond defending so anything questioning Kirchick's spin is useless - "preposterously strained is the attempt to minimize their awfulness." The problem with this argument is what Raimondo pointed out and others have pointed out all along: yes, there is some truly awful stuff in the newsletters but this "worst of the worst" is isolated to a few short lines The rest is all padding by Kirchick - quotes intentionally taken out of context and contorted into the worst possible light imaginable.
Yet to Sanchez none of that matters. He flippantly dismisses it all as irrelevant. Let's follow his logic: Kirchick's reporting is for the most part shoddy and deceptive, but he did get it right on a couple of really bad examples, so therefore we must unquestioningly accept Kirchick's conclusions as a whole and, in fact, it is not our place to question parts of those conclusions? Am I missing something, or does this simply not add up?
5. Divide and conquer. This is Sanchez's final argument, and it's logical flow is about on par with the earlier ones. Sanchez points out that the Paul campaign repudiated the newsletters. It follows that Raimondo's rebuttals (which we were just told don't matter anyway, no matter how truthful they are) are at odds with the Paul campaign's repudiation of them. The implication then is that Raimondo and Paul are at odds with each other, and therefore Raimondo's argument must be misguided. Think this one through though, all the while keeping in mind that only moments earlier Sanchez dismissed Raimondo's argument as irrelevant but now considers it material for its apparent contradiction of Paul.
Here's what's really going on, and it involves two divergent but equally necessary tactics from a political angle: Paul's campaign, by necessity of the way the media works, HAS to dismiss the newsletters and has to do so in a short, sweet, and simple condemnation. If they get caught up in the details at any level beyond that it becomes too difficult to explain in 15 second soundbytes on Wolf Blitzer or Tim Russert. This sad byproduct of the 24 hour news cycle leaves some people (including his supporters) wanting a more substantive response, but it is politically necessary because a more substantive response is also by necessity more complex...which means it's harder to explain in 15 seconds and only makes the story worse in the public mind.
In contrast, Raimondo is conducting an equally important analytical dissection of Kirchick's article. He is providing the answer to those of us who want more substance on Kirchick, and he is also throwing a large wrench into the gears of the Cato/Reason crowd, which up until this point has taken Kirchick's abusive spin as truth without question (possibly in part because many of them are personally friends with Kirchick himself). In other words, Raimondo His purpose is doing what we'd like the Paul campaign to do but what they cannot do because of political constraints imposed by the media spin cycle.
This is Campaign School 101 stuff, and it is mind-boggling that a self-styled political "reporter" like Sanchez could be so completely lacking in political sense that he doesn't recognize it. To react as he does is to pretend that the Paul campaign exists in a vacuum, impervious to the political realities of the news cycle and therefore making its pronouncements that are clearly tailored to that news cycle an artificial point of rebuttal to Raimondo, who is not bound by that constraint. If anyone wondered why these Cato/Reason types take the career of glorified blogger instead of real reporters or real political movers and shakers here's your answer in its full glory: they don't understand the politics of the same media circles they pretend to inhabit, and that makes them and their chosen candidates inherently unelectable.
David Weigel, Reason
http://www.reason.com/blog/show/124523.html
Weigel's latest is an attempt to keep the newsletter story going by chaining it to today's MLK day themed money bomb. As Weigel puts it, "Anecdotally, from personal contacts and contacts across the web, I know some casual Paul fans have given up supporting the campaign since this scandal. Many will still vote for him, but they're uncomfortable posting signs or giving him cash." His "evidence" in the numbers is that after 9 hours, the money bomb produced only $400,000.
Keep in mind that these first 9 hours fell between midnight and 9 AM this morning - i.e. the time that most normal people are asleep. I guess that excludes the typical Reason/Cato cosmotarian crowd, which spends the wee hours of the day hopping around the trendy nightclubs of Adams Morgan (or blogging at 4:37 AM after spending the morning doing god knows what else...http://www.tomgpalmer.com/archives/042385.php). But most normal Americans actually sleep at night. Predictably, today's moneybomb trends have accelerated rapidly after about 8 AM EST when the non-cosmotarian world began to wake up (http://www.ronpaulgraphs.com/last_48...donations.html). And as of right now we're at a solid $1 million for the day. Weigel's next point is to predict that this moneybomb will fall short of the last ones. Clearly, Weigel is setting the stage for a self-fulfilling prophecy where a "disappointing" moneybomb can be blamed on the newsletter "scandal," and ends up vindicating everything that Reason and Cato have been doing for the last two weeks.
The only problem is that a $1 million haul or more for the day is NOT a failure! Sure, it falls short of the $6 million Tea Party haul but that comparison is about like saying a 4 minute mile is a failure because it didn't break the world record. Bottom line: if today's moneybomb stays at its current pace things are looking very good for a solid and commendable 1-day haul, the Cato/Reason Smear machine not withstanding.
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Originally Posted by colin1
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