Right wing flights of fancy. (Yo journalists, this is a thing)
by digby
Ok, so we have two excellent examples in the last few days of right wing operatives using the same rationale for mudslinging without proof: "I'm just asking questions, I'm not an investigator. The ball is in the media's court." And like the good little lapdogs they are too many members of the press go haring off chasing the ball.
First example is, of course, "Clinton Cash" author Peter Shweizer:
SCHWEIZER: No, we don’t have direct evidence. But it warrants further investigation because, again, George, this is part of the broader pattern. You either have to come to the conclusion that these are all coincidences or something else is afoot.
STEPHANOPOULOS: And that — that is that — the Clintons do say it’s a coincidence. As they say, you have produced no evidence. And I still haven’t heard any direct evidence and you just said you had no evidence that she intervened here.
Here's Paul Hinderaker on the ridiculous bogus story of Harry Reid being beaten up by Mafia thugs:
TPM: You write that you checked Pfeifer out "to the extent reasonably possible.” How did you vet him?
Hinderaker: Basically online. As I said in my post, I spent a lot of time with the guy on the telephone. And you know, he was consistent and seemingly sincere. I checked him out online, he didn't come up in any negative way under either of those names — obviously, having two names is odd.
But as I wrote in the post, just Googling Easton Elliot and Lawrence Pfeifer turned up information that tended to confirm how he described himself.
The point I kept making over and over again, is that to really investigate this, you've gotta be on the ground and you've gotta be an investigator.
And you've called for an investigation of Reid's injury, right?
Exactly, right.
And what kind of investigation? What would that look like? An actual police investigation? Could you describe that?
Well [laughs]. I can describe aspects of it, I suppose. I'm not an investigator. I don't know all the techniques that could be available to investigative reporters, even. But, I mean, there are obvious omissions in we know in this incident.
See, they're just asking questions. There's no character assassination or innuendo involved at all.
Finally, one can't help but go back to one of the more famous of these flights of fancy which I posted the other day. It was Peggy Noonan wondering why Bill Clinton would return a little six year old boy to his father:
The great unanswered question of course is: What was driving Mr. Clinton? What made him do such a thing? What accounts for his commitment in this case? Concern for the father? But such concern is wholly out of character for this president; he showed no such concern for parents at Waco or when he freed the Puerto Rican terrorists. Concern for his vision of the rule of law? But Mr. Clinton views the law as a thing to suit his purposes or a thing to get around.
Why did he do this thing? He will no doubt never say, a pliant press will never push him on it, and in any case if they did who would expect him to speak with candor and honesty? Absent the knowledge of what happened in this great public policy question, the mind inevitably wonders.
Was it fear of Fidel Castro -- fear that the dictator will unleash another flood of refugees, like the Mariel boatlift of 1980? Mr. Clinton would take that seriously, because he lost his gubernatorial election that year after he agreed to house some of the Cubans. In Bill Clinton's universe anything that ever hurt Bill Clinton is bad, and must not be repeated. But such a threat, if it was made, is not a child custody matter but a national security matter, and should be dealt with in national security terms.
Was it another threat from Havana? Was it normalization with Cuba -- Mr. Clinton's lust for a legacy, and Mr. Castro's insistence that the gift come at a price? If the price was a child, well, that's a price Mr. Clinton would likely pay. What is a mere child compared with this president's need to be considered important by history?
Was Mr. Clinton being blackmailed? The Starr report tells us of what the president said to Monica Lewinsky about their telephone sex: that there was reason to believe that they were monitored by a foreign intelligence service. Naturally the service would have taped the calls, to use in the blackmail of the president. Maybe it was Mr. Castro's intelligence service, or that of a Castro friend.
Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to. A great and searing tragedy has occurred, and none of us knows what drove it, or why the president did what he did. Maybe Congress will investigate. Maybe a few years from now we'll find out what really happened.
This irrational bullshit "speculation" is the right's modus operandi. It's really not their fault if they keep doing it. The mainstream media keep jumping on the bandwagon.
.