May 25 2006

Fly By 05/25/05

6 responses so far

6 Responses to “Fly By 05/25/05”

1. dgf says:

   May 25, 2006 at 9:55 am

   “There seems to be a lot of rehashing of old news by the media to try and portray some breaking scandal “

   All due respect AJ, if you read the cited article carefully, you will discover that what was reported concerned just-released grand jury testimony of Libby’s, which (reportedly) “provided the first detailed look at what Libby told investigators about his interactions with Cheney on th[e] [issue of Libby’s preoccupation [with rebutting Wilson’s July 2003 column] stemm[ing] from Cheney’s intense focus on Wilson’s assertions.”Whether or not this is the “first [such] detailed look”, I know not, but as a general matter the import of such evidence is rendered fairly clear in the article.

   [W]ho says the media is not obsessively liberal”

   Me, for one. 🙂 Also, even if the WaPo article actually was “try[ing] to portray some breaking scandal” (an unfair characterization of the piece, I think) isn’t it hard to tar “the media” (atsa lotta meatballs, as I’m sure you’ll agree) by one piece?
   Finally, you write
   

   Of course the VP was angry. Wilson claimed that the VP knew about forged documents regarding Niger and used them as proof to go to war! I mean, duh! Journalists have the memory of gnat.
   The Wilson piece (July 6, 2003) does not make the claim that Cheney knew that the documents were forgeries at a time when he/the Administration was using them as justification for war on Iraq/Saddam; it does, perhaps, suggest that (at that “pre-war sales-pitch” time) Cheney ought to have known that the documents were forgeries, and that indeed seems a very fair point to make. This is so is all the more the case, in light of the wealth of other data available at the time, putting into doubt a real Iraq-Niger uranium connection. (see, e.g., Wikipedia’s Plamegate and Yellowcake Forgery articles) I mean, duh! 🙂
   Having just re-read what I wrote and what you wrote, perhaps I mis-read your comments. If you meant “of course Cheney was scorched because Wilson’s piece made Cheney (and/or the Administration) out to be unprincipled deceivers (as he/it was in fact)”, then I pretty much agree with you. You’re a tad ambiguous on the point, but having read a fair number of posts on this blog, I suspect my first read was right.

2. carol johnson says:

   May 25, 2006 at 12:26 pm

   “(see, e.g., Wikipedia’s Plamegate and Yellowcake Forgery articles)”

   Geez, another one who believes that Wikipedia is not total BS!! Don’t you know by now that Wikipedia can be and regularly “is” altered by all sorts of people with all kinds of political axes to grind on both sides?

   Here is EXACTLY how to do it:

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:How_to_edit_a_page

   Not only should you take anything in Wikipedia with a huge grain of salt…you should probably totally disregard it as a source for ANYTHING.

   I have.

   Carol

3. pull says:

   May 25, 2006 at 1:19 pm

   The denials of the OBL sighting are from Pakistan. Of course Pakistan would deny this. They are biased… on one hand, you have their fundamentalists in service that do not want him caught, on the other hand, you have their more liberal guys that do not want themselves as being seen as the country that hid Bin Laden.

   I don’t know. I want the guy caught or dead. Even if he appears live confessing to 9/11, though, the Left and Islamists won’t believe him. They will then just argue that he was a CIA plant all along.

   But, catching Guzman, the leader of the Shining Path in Peru did a lot for killing that movement. It is extremely important to catch the guy and prosecute him for the crimes he has commited.

   I hope elements in the Pakistani government are not actively helping to hide him.

4. dgf says:

   May 25, 2006 at 3:36 pm

   Hiya Carol. You write –
   

   “Geez, another one who believes that Wikipedia is not total BS!! * * * Not only should you take anything in Wikipedia with a huge grain of salt…you should probably totally disregard it as a source for ANYTHING.”

   I agree wholeheartedly that Wikipedia, and pretty much everything else, should be approached critically. Some might uncritically accept anything written there (or in the NYT or the Weekly Standard etc.) and some might uncritically reject anything written there (etc.). However, Wikipedia, when it is functioning as it should (which is probably the vast majority of the time), is a useful source of information and at least a potentially good starting point. When it is functioning as it should (even with respect to controversial matters), it seeks to (and does) refer readers to “(more) primary” sources (newspaper reports, books, government reports, learned treatises, etc, etc, etc) Sometimes it fails and sometimes there are “edit wars”, but it really seems unfair and unjustified (and unsupported) to hold that it cannot profitably be used as a source “for ANYTHING”. The key, of course, is to employ Wikipedia critically (keeping in mind its several inherent limitations), just as one’s goal generally should be to educate oneself with the degree of rigor and critical analysis consummate with one’s abilities, one’s interests, and the time one has (or chooses to have) to undertake the educational experience in question.

5. carol johnson says:

   May 26, 2006 at 9:46 am

   Sorry DGF,

   Thanks for the reply. I see your point.

   You are obviously a critical thinker and I think that’s great. I wish, however that there were more people who took the time to read beyond the surface and such. There are alot of people who don’t. It’s a real struggle sometimes to nail down the facts of anything (and I am speaking for myself here). When I jump to conclusions about something, it’s usually because I don’t have all the facts or I have allowed someone else, that I trust, to sway me. Which is different than to convince I think. Again thanks for the thoughtful reply.

   Carol

6. dgf says:

   May 27, 2006 at 10:56 am

   Thanks, Carol.