Friday, February 10, 2006

Anne Applebaum, Take 3

Captain Ed gets a broadside from Anne Applebaum and dutifully prints it on his blog today. Applebaum is quite defensive, and again, persistently mis-understands the beef of right-wing bloggers (at least most of them) against the Newsweek "story" (later proved false) about U.S. soldiers flushing pages of the Koran down the crapper at Guantanamo. Newsweek's source was unreliable. But in their rush to publish something that would somehow reflect badly on Bush, they neglected to corroborate the story—Journalism 101—and later had to take it back. Meanwhile, the usual imam suspects stirred up the usual thugs and goon squads to riot, burn, and kill on this pretext. (No doubt the same ones trashing Danish and Norwegian embassies right now on the pretext of offensive cartoons published several months ago.)

The Newsweek gaffe was precisely the same problem exhibited in the Rathergate mess. The media is so far left that they fall all over themselves to publish anything that might hurt Bush, whether they've corroborated the story or not. Since it's anti-Bush, it must therefore be true, right? Anything positive about Bush would probably go through a 5-year vetting process, guaranteeing that it wouldn't see print until he was out of office, if ever.

Applebaum absolutely refuses to acknowledge that the righties are right on this issue. The left, even a pretty reasonable writer like Applebaum, simply cannot ever concede that anyone on the right ever has a valid point. It is absolutely astonishing.

Our original post on l'affaire Applebaum is here.

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