Joe Scarborough has a warning for conservatives: going after Jeb Bush will make him more likely to run for president.
According to Scarborough, speaking on today's Morning Joe, Jeb is "his mother's son," "kind of "cranky" and "rough around the edges." If conservatives think they will drive Jeb out of the race by attacking him, "they've got him played exactly backwards." To the contrary, conservative attacks will make Jeb more likely to run "to prove them wrong."
On CNN's Reliable Sources on Sunday, University of Virginia student Alex Pinkleton revealed how Rolling Stone's Sabrina Rubin Erdely, who wrote the disputed Rolling Stone story on alleged rape at the college, acted more like an "advocate" than a reporter as she interviewed people for the article. Pinkleton, a friend of the woman who made the rape accusation, asserted that Erdely "did have an agenda, and part of that agenda was showing how monstrous fraternities themselves as an institution are, and blaming the administration for a lot of the sexual assaults."
One of the more amusing aspects of observing today's left-biased establishment media environment is seeing agenda-driven journalists directly or indirectly convey a clearly inflated sense of their outlets' self-importance.
A recent example of this came Friday from Jacob Silverman at Politico Magazine. In his writeup on conservative firebrand Charles Johnson, Silverman employed the comparative version of a word - "fringy" - rarely used in the political realm. Silverman described Breitbart and The Blaze as "even fringier" than ... well, let's try to figure that one out.
Two recent items in the Washington Post support my contention that the establishment press is currently doing more than anyone besides Lena Dunham and "Jackie," both of whom have been irrefutably exposed as rape story fabulists, to cause victims of sexual assault to be reluctant to come forward (Note: That's not to say that the two women haven't been victims of sexual assault, "only" that the stories they are currently promulgating cannot possibly be true).
As Tim Graham at NewsBusters noted this morning, the Post provided feminist character witnesses supporting Dunham (including one who still "completely believe(s) her") and made pathetic excuses for the "Girls" star, including that she has a "demanding job." Meanwhile — and to be clear, this is appropriate work which Rolling Stone should have done in the first place — the Post has been thoroughly vetting the story of alleged University of Virginia fraternity gang-rape victim "Jackie."
Yesterday at 4:11 p.m. ET, Eugene Volokh at the Washington Post's Volokh Conspiracy blog sharply criticized Time.com's Eliza Berman for not being "quite fair" — i.e., being quite unfair, given the author's penchant for understatement — to Breitbart.com's John Nolte, the reporter who investigated the veracity of Lena Dunham's detailed claims about and descriptions of her alleged Oberlin College rapist.
Volokh's critique was based on language in Berman's original writeup which Time pulled at some point after Volokh's post without any notice that it had done so. Berman, as Volokh noted, "casually dismiss(ed) an investigation ... that actually succeeded in getting a publisher to correct a statement," and in the process betrayed fundamental tenets of journalism as it's supposed to be practiced.
In the Rolling Stone-University of Virginia fraternity gang-rape saga, National Review's Jonah Goldberg's journalistic instincts expressed in his December 1 Los Angeles Times column ("Rolling Stone rape story sends shock waves -- and stretches credulity") obviously ran circles around Los Angeles Times op-ed columnist Diana Crandall's.
On December 3, shortly before the story imploded, Crandall went after Goldberg with a vengeance for supposedly "being out of touch with college realities" and for writing the kind of column which "prevents rape victims from coming forward" (bolds and numbereed tags are mine):
The headline at Saturday's Assocated Press story at Yahoo News dealing with the implosion of Rolling Stone's November 19 story about an alleged — and, for all appearances, completely fictional — fraternity gang rape at the University of Virginia focuses, as so many other establishment press stories have, on the supposedly "chilling effect" ... (it) could have on sexual-assault victims reporting the crimes." Gosh, whatever happened to "the truth will set you free"?
A central issue here is the magazine's detail-free apology "to anyone who was affected by the story." While quoting several people who are outraged by the magazine's approach, AP reporters Alan Suderman and Frederic J. Frommer withheld a key detail from their readers — one which make it to anyone that Rolling Stone's story was seriously flawed.
The straw man argument is a fundamentally dishonest fallback tactic employed by someone whose side is losing a debate: Make up a position the other side has never taken, and then shoot it down.
The leftist fever swamp known as Vox, perhaps reacting to the utter implosion of Rolling Stone's University of Virginia fraternity gang-rape story and the potential impact it might have on keeping universities from imposing due process-denying regimes on campus, has produced a graphic employing that tactic against the apparent hordes of Americans who think that rape "isn't a real issue in America" (HT Twitchy):
When the now-retracted article by the Rolling Stone magazine was published on November 19 about a brutal gang rape of a first-year student at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house at the University of Virginia, the major broadcast networks rushed to the story and devoted multiple segments to both the article and reaction on the school’s campus. In doing so, they failed (unlike other outlets) to point out its flaws that brought an apology from the liberal magazine on Friday afternoon after it came to realize that many of the key facts in the story were in serious doubt.
Rolling Stone managing editor Will Dana issued a statement on Friday about their much-publicized "A Rape on Campus" story, which zeroed in on an allegation of gang rape at the University of Virginia by a woman named "Jackie." Dana acknowledged that "there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie's account," and continued that "we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced....We are taking this seriously and apologize to anyone who was affected by the story."
Andrew Lohse is entitled to hacking out an embarrassingly poorly-argued, simplistic screed. But it is curious that editors at Time magazine chose to publish it. When you boil it down, Lohse essentially argues that fraternities are beyond the pale and must be abolished because of their genesis in the antebellum South.
On Monday, ABC’s Good Morning America provided First Lady Michelle Obama’s school lunch program, entitled the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, with some free publicity. Co-host George Stephanopoulos touted how “new federal guidelines pushed by the First Lady have cafeterias serving up healthier foods and a new study finds those lunches may be better than the ones parents pack for their kids.”