too dumb to be spun

[waider]

The past weekend's Orange Alert has almost immediately garnered a wash of undermining press, suggesting that the data is up to four years old, as opposed to discovered as part of the capture of an AQ agent last week¹. You'd imagine that if it were a proper spin, this information wouldn't have been revealed by the Executive's own intelligence people. This is just the latest in a series of incidents which suggests one of several conclusions:

• It's not spin, it's all real, and America is constantly under vague, undefined threats whose veracity the Administration is attempting to bolster for credibility's sake lest the populace get lulled into a false sense of security by Tom Ridge's constant shades of Yellow, Orange and Red;
• It's incompetent spin, where noone's thinking more than one day - if even that - ahead of the Official Line, and Karl Rove is constantly having to fight fires;
• It's a clever attempt to present something of the latter as the former;
• It's lazy spin, because the administration figures that the populace and the fourth estate will eat whatever bullshit they're fed and go out and reelect Bush come November regardless.

I've pointed out to someone elsewhere that assuming the worst when it comes to judging the morals and motives of the Bush Administration is my own personal blinkered view, no less open to mockery and argument than anyone who's rigidly in the Bush-in-2004 camp. So obviously you can guess which option - or maybe options - I'm picking.

1. The capture itself had its own problems. Predicted by several left-winger publications/web logs via a Pakistani source; Happening on the weekend, but not making it to the news until right before Kerry's acceptance speech; The actual status of the captured AQ agent in terms of what he's actually done, who he is, etc. Which further adds to whatever point it is I'm trying to make.

update: Hmm. I appear to have confused one capture with another. The points about the dubious status of the captured AQ agent are correct, but don't relate to the other guy whose capture allegedly led to the Orange Alert.

Comments

[wisn.livejournal.com]

The July Surprise papers were first reported not in a left-winger blog but a well-respected Washington insider publication - The New Republic is too rightwing or too leftwing depending on your political stance but that should be considered only in context of the reliability and verifiability of its factual information, which remains good, albeit selective. (It was previewed in a blog, but it was in reference to The New Republic's story then being written.)

The (self-avowedly and accused, both) liberal/progressive blogs I read, for example, have avoided the story accusing Bush of drug use, which elevates my respect for them to the extent they're unwilling to run unsubstantiable character-bashing. Which is not to say they're immune to propagating unverified stories, but I trust them at least not to report news that would plausibly fail a fact-check. Which is why I read them, and not certain other, more interesting blogs.

For all I know, Bush can't get out of bed in the morning without taking three kinds of horse tranquilizer, but his actions, and the consequences of his actions, which have been unilaterally disastrous for the general welfare here, for Americans abroad and for many people in other parts of the world are at issue, not the unsubstantiated reasons for those actions, and one should not believe he will achieve sudden clarity of thought and action if he got off the drugs he's hypothetically on. If there's character-bashing, it can be as a consequence of the innumerable bad decisions he's made, and those made on his behalf, and cooking up unverifiable rationales serves no good purpose.

Which is why I refuse to be defensive about my opinions, and why I refuse to cover them with excuses other opinions are valid, and so on: I don't have a blinkered view, I have opinions that are reinforced by history and timely information, by well-reasoned analyses by others, by discussion and argument.

The false notion of balanced fairness that derives from, for example, pitting the lack of WMDs in Iraq against the Administration's hyperbolic claims of Saddam's might/could/would is a mechanism which graces unmitigated bullshit with institutional respectability, and taints future debate.

[waider.livejournal.com]

Two clarifications:

• yes, I was referring to TNR as one of the publications, so mea culpa on that. I'm pretty certain someone else more left-wing either picked it up or ran it more or less the same time. And possibly saying left-wing in the first place was silly of me, since it's not exactly relevant to the point I was trying to make.
• I don't think my own opinions are particularly invalid, nor do I feel defensive about them. I do, however, have a fairly dogmatic opposition to the incumbents which can lead me to overlook the occasional occurrence of, if not goodness, then lesser badness. That's what I was referring to above, not some sense that, say, some right-wing nut who feels that Iran should be invaded post-haste is in some sense on a par with me because of my anti-Bush bias.