Last Straw

Onegoodmove has a clip of (ahem) Hardball’s Chris Matthews interviewing Norm Coleman (the schmuck Senator who thought it might be a good idea to slander Gorgeous George), who then has Galloway respond. As Norman Jenson of onegoodmove puts it, “once again Galloway hands him his ass.” Or as one of Norman’s American readers writes, “Why can’t the Democrats talk like this?”

John Nichols, a well known American writer, offers his analysis:

The problem for Coleman is that Galloway is not a standard-issue American politician — the kind who has nothing to say and says it poorly. He is a veteran of the rough-and-tumble politics of Glasgow and the equally rough-and-tumble politics of the British Parliament. In other words, Galloway comes from places where voters and politicians do not suffer fools. And anyone who has ever followed British politics knows that George Galloway has beaten every political challenge he has faced — even those posed by British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

I agree with his analysis of Galloway, but when, according to the Nuremberg Tribunal, your Prime Minister commits the “supreme war crime,” and you re-elect him, I’d say there’re a few voters in Britain willing to suffer fools.

To initiate a war of aggression is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.
—Nuremberg Trial Proceedings, 30th September 1946

And back to weasle world, Greg Palast, recently awarded the George Orwell Prize for Courage-in-Journalism, hands out his own Cowardice in Journalism Award to Newsweek and a Goebbels Award to Condolleezza Rice for their efforts in castrating Newsweek after one of Newsweek’s journalists did something highly inconvenient, and reported news critical of the U.S. government! Well, it’s hardly news, allegations of Quran abuse have repeatedly been made by former Guantanamo prisoners (Washington Post, 3/26/03; London Guardian, 12/3/03; Daily Mirror, 3/12/04; Center for Constitutional Rights, 8/4/04; La Gazette du Maroc, 4/12/05; New York Times, 5/1/05; BBC, 5/2/05; cites compiled by Antiwar.com, 5/16/05). It appears, however, that this story broke the camel’s back, culminating in deadly anti-American riots in Afghanistan, now called the “The Newsweek Riots” by spineless American media outlets. Palast concludes:

Newsweek has now publicly committed to having its reports vetted by Rumsfeld’s Defense Department before publication. Why not just print Rumsfeld’s press releases and eliminate the middleman?

FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting) offers this angle:

Newsweek’s retraction of the Quran story, contrasted with the lack of any correction of its “green mushroom” claim and other similarly erroneous WMD coverage, is quite illustrative of the actual rules—quite different from the ostensible rules that are taught in journalism school—that govern contemporary journalism:

Anonymous sources are fine, as long as they are promoting rather than challenging official government policy.

It’s all right for your reporting to be completely wrong, as long as your errors are in the service of power.

The human cost of bad reporting need only be counted when people who matter are doing the counting.