Bloggers Do Debbie
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| Bloggers do Debbie, and it feels oh, so good. |
Cache Valley, Utah: if ya can't stand the heat…
Publish partisan lies and not expect a backlash? Get real pal!!!
Fire that f***ing b**** forthwith and all's well that ends well, no? Otherwise,
batten down the hatches, pal, 'cause there's a storm a brewin' and it's gonna
be nasty.
Respectfully yours.
Jim Brady: Afternoon, thanks for all your questions (well, maybe not this
one). But I wanted to start with it to make a point that this was the kind
of stuff we spent all week cleaning out of our message boards (except there
were no asterisks). And when the amount of time it took to ferret these kind
of posts out exceeded the bandwidth we could devote to it, we decided to close
commenting on post.blog down. Now, on to some intelligent questions, of which
there were many.
_______________________
Washington, D.C.: Mr. Brady,I can understand why you would want to temporarily
shut down reader comments (re: the Howell matter) if your staff could not
handle filtering out a large quantity of profanity and hate speech. However,
that doesn't explain why you deleted all of the reader comments that had been
posted and therefore had presumably passed your staff's scrutiny. Many comments
were well-reasoned and supported by facts — why not leave them up?
Jim Brady: Good question. The reason was that shutting them all off together
was just that it was the quickest way to remove the problematic ones that
were starting to overwhelm our ability to get rid of them. But, you're right,
there were lots of good posts, and over the next few days, we'll go back through
them and restore the ones that did not violate our rules, though we're still
going to leave comments off on that blog for the time being.
Got your attention now?
The Washginton Post blew it big time and now The
New York Times and the AP
have picked up the story, which began when liberal bloggers started biting back.
This morning, Jim Brady took questions in an online forum. I particularly
loved this one, with Brady's answer illustrating the problem.
Los Angeles, Calif.: Mr. Brady,
Does The Post believe that Ms. Howell's reporting on
the Abramoff scandal as involving Democrats is fair and accurate? If so, based
on what facts?Jim Brady: Just to be clear on the issue of
the column itself, that's not my domain. I am the executive editor of the
web site, not the newspaper, so that's a question that you'd need to take
up with them. What I'm looking to do here is to answer your questions on the
decision made to shut off comments on post.blog, and make sure the people
reading this discussion can see some of your takes on the decision.
In other words, Brady went online to save face, after Howell shut
down the comment section on her brand new blog, but the original complaint,
that she lied in a column about Democrats receiving as much money as Republicans
from Abramoff, well, he can't talk about that because it's beyond his pay grade.
The Washington Post still hasn't addressed the main issue, which
is that they are simply reporting the information in a very sloppy manner. First,
there is a big difference between taking lobbyist money and taking a bribe to
do what Bob Ney did, what Duke Cunningham did, to do what Ralph Reed, Abramoff
and Scanlon did between the Texas and Louisiana gaming scandal, etc. All of
Congress takes lobbying money and if you're in Nevada, like Harry Reid, just
try getting elected without it. But Reid took down the mob a long time ago,
so he's not going to get tangled up with crooks like Abramoff. Taking lobbying
money is different from taking pay to play pay offs.
So, either the Washington Post is too lazy or ignorant, or just maybe they feel safe saying everybody in Congress does it. Well, they don't, especially when you're the party out of power and the Republicans have put in place a system that forbids Democrats sharing the power.
Republicans want to keep the story confused because they
don't want it to hit the top of the carnival bell, the Bush-Cheney re-election
team of 2004. The Washington Post is helping them do it. Because since we know Abramoff sent tribal chief clients inside
the White House to meet with George W. Bush, as well as attend staff meetings,
you can bet that wasn't about getting House members elected. If Grover Norquist
is in this, so is Karl Rove and ultimately Bush-Cheney re-elect. It's as old
as the master himself, Richard M. Nixon.
Follow the money, baby, follow the money.
But seriously, you'd think the Post would have learned something
from Bobby Golddigger's full scale reputation pummeling. For those of you just
tuning in, I'm talking about Bob “I ain't gonna get no stinkin' subpoena”
Woodward.
If you don't know the whole story by now, suffice it to say that
the big bad liberal bloggers took down little Debbie. Check out firedoglake,
Americablog,
moderatevoice
and many more. (If you have a link regarding Bloggers do Debbie, send it to
me!)
As in my previous post on Roy Blunt, as well as Chris Matthews,
which was everywhere yesterday, the establishment is getting to know what it
means to take incoming. It began with Judith Miller, continued with Bob Woodward,
then into the Post's alarming reaction to one of their own bloggers, which eventually
resulted in liberal bloggers doing Debbie good.
The people have awakened the Plantation massa, and we're
not going to stop until they open up the doors.
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