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Open thread April 2, 2019

Dan Crawford | April 2, 2019 8:24 am

Tags: open thread Comments (1) | Digg Facebook Twitter |
1 Comment
  • EMichael says:
    April 2, 2019 at 10:02 am

    Nice perspective here, but it leaves unanswered the motives of taibbi, greenwald, et al.

    Easy to understand why the limbaughs and other rwdws grabbed this total fabrication regarding the trump/russia investigation, but why in the world would those two, and others, and so many progressives follow right along behind them?

    Just speculating, but I really believe it just flows from the 2016 Dem primary.

    “If anyone wants a quick primer on how comical and irresponsible it is to keep identifying the Steele dossier as a springboard for everything that’s wrong with the Mueller probe, Fox News’s Chris Wallace offers a recent tutorial here in which he takes Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing talk show host, to task for the same court jestering.

    Taibbi is more sophisticated than Davis but he cherry-picks his examples and largely ignores Mueller’s damning indictment of Russian hackers and the great reporting that preceded that. People who should know better have avidly linked to Taibbi’s essay as if it were the Rosetta Stone rather than an entertaining screed laced with mistakes, thematic fault-lines and curious cop-outs.

    In a follow-up essay responding to critics of his WMD analogy, Taibbi emphasized that “the WMD fiasco had a far greater real-world impact” than reporting on the Mueller investigation did. Well, yes. Phantom WMDs were an excuse to launch a devastating war that killed hundreds of thousands and disrupted a region. The Mueller investigation encouraged reporters and pundits to ask tougher questions of Trump and his associates than they had during the presidential campaign, while focusing public attention on national security. Reporters and pundits, to their discredit, sometimes got out over their skis with speculation. But hundreds of thousands of people aren’t dead because of that. Making the comparison, even while acknowledging the distinctions, is a handy, clickbait-y bit of hyperventilating that Taibbi would have poo-pooed in the Mueller reporting.

    Some of Taibbi’s other core concerns are spot on. He takes the media to task for failing to take Trump seriously as someone who could win in 2016 (conceding he made the same mistake himself). He sees Russiagate reporting displacing more relevant social and political explanations for why Trump beat Clinton, and he believes that Democrats’ failure to connect with working-class Americans is a greater threat to the country than Putin’s trolls.

    I don’t see it as an either-or problem, though. Yes, the media can continue sharpening its understanding of the dynamics in the election and better understand how they might resurface in 2020. But that doesn’t have to come at the expense of solid Trump-Russia analysis.”

    https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-04-01/no-russiagate-isn-t-this-generation-s-wmd

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