Blogger Chris Mooney credits journalists for sticking it to Scott McClellan in the wake of the publication of “internal White House documents that show that a White House official that was formerly a lobbyist for the oil industry has doctored and edited administration scientific reports in ways that consistently emphasize supposed uncertainties about global warming — uncertainties that the vast consensus of science doesn’t think are that severe,” as one reporter put it to McClellan.
Mooney, who specializes in science reporting, just wishes he had a way to feed the gaggle the right questions, since they weren’t familiar enough with the issues to pin down the evasive McClellan. This morning, Mooney printed the transcript of the exchange, inserting his comments along the way.
Here’s a typical one, after McClellan said to reporters, “I encourage you to go look at the reports, because one of the reports that you highlighted was widely praised by the scientific community, including the National Academies of Science”:
God, I wish these reporters knew the issue better so they could nail McClellan on this distortion about the National Academies having “widely praised” the 10 year plan. The NAS also seriously faulted it for failing to build on previous government climate research, especially with respect to the impacts of climate change on the United States (i.e., the U.S. National Assessment).
Any way we can get that blogger into the gaggle?
John Podhoretz, meanwhile, gets the award for most amusing line and link in the ‘sphere today. Podhoretz and other conservative bloggers are upset with Democrat Charles Rangel, who made “a truly disgusting and despicable analogy between the war in Iraq and the Holocaust,” as Podhoretz put it. Rangel said, “It’s the biggest fraud ever committed on the people of this country. This is just as bad as six million Jews being killed. The whole world knew it and they were quiet about it, because it wasn’t their ox that was being gored.”
Podhoretz closes his post about the burgeoning controversy with this: “You can read about it here,” he writes. “You can throw up here.”
Onward: the confirmation of Janice Rogers Brown brings this snarky comment from Steve M. of No More Mister Nice Blog: “Now that it can no longer affect the outcome of her confirmation battle, The New York Times feels free to recount some outrageous things Janice Rogers Brown has said.” Here’s the offending Times passage:
In the heyday of liberal democracy, all roads lead to slavery,” she has warned in speeches. Society and the courts have turned away from the founders’ emphasis on personal responsibility, she has argued, toward a culture of government regulation and dependency that threatens fundamental freedoms.
“We no longer find slavery abhorrent,” she told the conservative Federalist Society a few years ago. “We embrace it.”
And Steve M.’s response:
You say you support Social Security? Unemployment insurance? Federally backed student loans? You may as well be saying you support the bullwhipping of slaves.
The problem for Howard Dean is that decades of conservative rhetoric have conditioned Americans to believe that Democrats and liberals are dangerously far from the mainstream, while Republican right-wingers are solidly in the American grain — so it’s inevitable that he’s going to be attacked when he seems to cross a line. But when a right-winger crosses the line in a way that’s self-evidently outrageous, the mainstream press simply has learned to suppress that fact. Ann Coulter is portrayed as a mere jokester and satirist rather than a hatemonger; Janice Rogers Brown’s vilest group slanders are kept out of the press until she’s safely on her way to the federal bench.
Finally, rickheller at Centerfield notes that “[a]t the same time that the Justice Department is successfully seeking to override state laws to prevent the use of medical marijuana, Justice Department lawyers appear to be sabotaging their own case against the tobacco industry by lowballing a request for penalties.”
“What is one to make of this?,” he wonders. “Is that the lobbyists for tobacco are richer, more powerful, and more respectable than marijuana proponents?”
Ya think?
Brian Montopoli is a writer at CJR Daily.