Sunday, December 11, 2005
I Think This Just About Confirms It
Ever since the word came out that David Corn was signed on to be the token liberal at and lender of fake respectability to Pajamas Open Source Pajamas Media, a number of people have been wringing their hands and wondering "How COULD he DO this?"
Answer: He's been doing "this" -- that is, not being as smart (or as liberal) as you'd been led to believe -- for years now. He's one fat Pajamas paycheck away from turning into a full-blown Christopher Hitchens/Marty Peretz "I didn't leave the left, they left me" neocon. And even if Pajamas doesn't deliver (which it won't, as should be abundantly clear by now), we find from John Amato at Crooks and Liars that he's always got his good friends who led the bogus and unconscionable ten-plus-year assault on the Clintons and their associates to help him get that house in the Hamptons:
Just the other day, I learned through anonymous sources that David and Michael Isikoff are collaborating on a new book. I find this fascinating. I’m sure it will be a good read too, however as I looked to see if there was a formal announcement of the new project-I found that David wrote a similar piece defending Isikoff of criticism from Media Matters. David candidly says: "Admittedly I have a bias in favor of a friend." No matter how many good stories Michael writes his credibility is shot over the Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky affairs. We need David in the good fight to make sure this administration and any other one is held accountable to the positions they take. If journalists come out in defense of each other after they use questionable judgement, it makes them look like a special interest group that protects its own. How can the American people trust what is written then? You can still choose to defend your buddies, that’s a choice to make, but you open yourself up to heightened scrutiny and the accusation of veiled motives when you do.Now, I no longer hold that much of a brief for Bill and Hillary, and not just because they helped and (in Hillary's case) are still helping to prop up Bush and his misbegotten war effort. For one thing, they failed to recognize early on the extent to which the very Republicans to whom they were sucking up would go to destroy them. But the attacks on them were not about the Clintons, so much as they were destroying the Democratic party, and in fact anyone that would threaten the GOP/Corporate Media Axis' decades-long de facto hegemony. Anybody who was seriously paying attention to the events of the time knows this as they know how to breathe. So, those of us who remember Corn's odd refusal to assist in the debunking of various anti-Clinton smears -- and his eagerness to start or at least promote smears of his own (see one smear here and its debunking here) -- are not in the least surprised that he would be longtime friends and business partners with one of the key components of what Jame Carville called the "puke funnel" designed to put into media play all sorts of lies, half-truths, and smears against the Clintons. We'd always suspected Corn was a sellout; this pretty much confirms it.
Corn says that he has a number of sources at the CIA. This is not bad. It is good for any investigative journalist writing about intelligence stories. But his writing makes me wonder how well he maintains his objectivity. It's not a far step from using people as sources for information to being used by them as an outlet for disinformation.
Isikoff is a strange case. Palast is buddies with him as well.
And sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Maybe Izzy is just a bucket of laughs when he gets a beer into him.
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