Yglesias’ IRS defense goes something like this: Legal constraints didn’t allow him to criticize Sarah Palin publicly, so he had no choice but to seek out journalists who were as horrified as he was by the ascension of a savvy, successful pro-life woman on the political horizon, and conspire with them to neutralize her.
And the rest, as we all know, is history. They spawned a strategy that General Patton would envy. Curiously, though, I don’t remember seeing all the “source documentation” laid out as each of those carefully coordinated propaganda bombs exploded on Palin and her family throughout fall of 2008.
It makes me wonder, how even Yglesias could blame the Daily Caller or the IRS for being party to Spencer Ackerman’s over-the-top suggestion to divert voters’ attention from Reverend Wright: “Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”
I do not endorse a Popular Front, nor do I think you need to. It’s not necessary to jump to Wright-qua-Wright’s defense. What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically.
Everyone knows that under certain guidelines journalists are allowed to state their opinions. But this goes way beyond that. As Jonah Goldberg wrote yesterday, “Even liberal opinion writers aren’t supposed to ‘coordinate’ their messages with the mother ship.”
Even Andrew Sullivan weighed in: “Look: you know how appalled I was by the Palin pick, but on this issue, I have to side with the JournoList critics. If this was not an organized media campaign in the service of a political candidate, what would be?”
Tucker Carlson, editor of the Daily Caller, explained:
We’re not contesting the right of anyone, journalist or not, to have political opinions. (I, for one, have made a pretty good living expressing mine.) What we object to is partisanship, which is by its nature dishonest, a species of intellectual corruption. Again and again, we discovered members of JournoList working to coordinate talking points on behalf of Democratic politicians, principally Barack Obama. That is not journalism, and those who engage in it are not journalists. They should stop pretending to be. The news organizations they work for should stop pretending, too.
So what about Yglesias’ future as trusted gatekeeper of information to the people? No worries there. The preservation of reputations in our culture lies firmly in the domain of the left. Yglesias and his ilk will continue in their present capacities, and the JournoList will go the way of Acorn. Ain’t that wonderful?
