Hullabaloo

Friday, June 22, 2007

 
Primitive Elites

by digby

I don't know how these right wingers manage to avoid nervous breakdowns what with the monumental cognitive dissonance roiling inside their heads. Today's exercise in 180 comes from Dorothy Rabinowitz (courtesy of Christy Hardin Smith at FDL) who evokes the name of disbarred prosecutor Mike Nifong to tar Patrick Fitzgerald.

Any similarities between Nifong and Fitzgerald are straight out of Bizarroworld. Fitzgerald didn't accuse anyone of a crime they didn't actually commit, he didn't withhold exculpatory evidence and he made no claims to the press he could not prove in court. (Of course, for Republicans, a prosecutor who isn't spilling grand jury dirt to every friendly reporter he can find to smear Democrats is just not doing his job. Perhaps she got confused on that count.) The best she can do is rather amusingly claim that he unethically manipulated poor frightened little Richard Armitage by asking him not to talk about the case. (Have you seen Richard Armitage? He's not exactly a shrinking violet.)

But as much as the parallels between Nifong and Fitzgerald make no sense at all, the parallels between Nifong and Rabinowitz herself are absolutely uncanny.

Here, let Eric Alterman explain it:

The story ultimately broke on February 19, when the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal joined its erstwhile political and journalistic comrade Drudge. Deploying tear-jerking prose, right-wing ideologue Dorothy Rabinowitz accepted Broaddrick's claims at face value. She wrote, "To encounter this woman, to hear the details of her story and the statements of the corroborating witnesses, was to understand that this was in fact an event that took place." The trusting editorial writer--"I am not a hard news reporter," she has explained--asked Broaddrick no uncomfortable questions and turned up no contemporaneous evidence. Nor did she raise the issue of a voluntary polygraph. Woman-to-woman, Rabinowitz simply decided that Broaddrick's twenty-one-year-old claims were true, and the massive news-disseminating resources of the Dow Jones Company were marshaled behind a story that its news division wouldn't touch. Following this act of journalistic recklessness, the paper's editors chided NBC for its commitment to ethical standards and even compared their own work to George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia.

(I'm afraid they compared it to the wrong book.)

Introducing the world to the Broaderick smear is the single most important and memorable thing Dorothy Rabinowitz ever done and I can only marvel at her confidence that she would write about false rape accusations without realizing that people would connect these dots: the woman who tried to bring down a president with a 20 year old rape charge based on no evidence but the highly questionable word of an alleged victim who had denied it for years, now shamelessly uses the reputation of another false rape accuser to assassinate the character of a straight arrow prosecutor. False rape accusation for political gain has become her specialty.

You have to admire her chutzpah, even as you recoil at the bottomless void where her ethical and moral center should be. Shamelessness, hypocrisy and lack of conscience doesn't even begin to account for such behavior. The woman is simply a primitive political animal, without even the slightest capacity to act out of anything but sheer predatory opportunism. To have wingnuts like her commenting on legal ethics is like asking a wolf pack what they think of sheep herding. Let's just say their perspective on such things is more than a little bit self-serving.

And by the way, get ready. That sound you hear is the rightwing smear machine cranking up. Scooter is their trial run.


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digby 6/22/2007 05:18:00 PM |