I will say this for Ed Whelan. His apology was nowhere near as weasely as this crap from Jeff Rosen:
“It was a short Web piece,” Rosen says now, sounding a little shellshocked. “I basically thought of it as a blog entry.”
[….]Above all, Rosen says he’s drawn a lesson from how his initial essay was treated by people of both ideological stripes. He won’t be blogging any more. He wants to spend more time with the material before hitting “send.”
But, all in all, Whelan’s apology and Rosen’s non-apology are cut from the same cloth. They’re both assholes who weren’t able to get away with their usual bullshit and were forced to make some kind of amends. It’s naive and simplistic to wonder about their consciences and ethics and what not. The criticism got loud enough, and they acted accordingly.
Mostly, there’s good news here. After seeing Whelan and Rosen brought to their knees, others will think twice about outing bloggers and smearing Supreme Court nominees.
kid bitzer
“He won’t be blogging any more. ”
translation: “i won’t be doing that irresponsible, thoughtless, unresearched shooting my mouth off that, you know, *bloggers* do. i’ll only do thoughtful, responsible, well-researched *journamalism*.”
yeah, fuck you too, rosen. lots of bloggers do more research than you ever do when you call it “journalism”.
HumboldtBlue
Yeah, uh-huh, and then ponies will fly outta my ass while rainbows cover the skies and Palin becomes the next Pulitzer winner in physics.
Two clowns get called out, while the biggest mouths of all get a free pass, or are we to believe Sotomayor is truly a racialist?
DougJ
What’s interesting is that I do think what nearly all bloggers do is certainly not journalism the way Woodward and Bernstein were, or Dana Priest is, or the countless thousands of correspondents who risk their lives in places like North Korea are. But neither is most of what TNR does.
GeoX
Awesome David Bowie reference there. And that is all I have to say.
dmsilev
Every bit as convincing as a politician under fire retiring to “spend more time with his family”.
-dms
calipygian
It’s actually refreshing to see those shitheel republicans back down for once and not double down – Rosen, Douchebag Whelen, O’Reilly a couple of times this week, even Newtie Newt had to back track off Sotomayor a little.
The only one who hasn’t yet is Rush, who came “this close” to calling Obama a half-breed today. I wonder just how outrageous he has to get before he backs down.
Mr. Furious
Yeah. If only.
Rosen’s hit piece did its job—it supplied the Right Wing Noise Machine™ with ammunition. Doesn’t matter about the p. A32 retractions. Once it’s out there, it’s a source to those fuckers.
As for outing bloggers, that type of (over)reaction is being bred into the current crop of righties—shoot first, expect cover, only clean up when required.
demkat620
Um, Ron Christie just reaffirmed on the Ed Show that Sotomayor is a racist. Or did you mean that satirically?
‘Cause then, yeah.
cvcobb01
Was thinking along the same lines as dms. Thought it hilarious that Rosen quit blogging to spend more time with his material.
DougJ
In fairness, that stuff doesn’t come from Rosen.
DougJ
Great observation from both of you. Wish I’d thought of it for the post.
dmsilev
@calipygian:
Part of me thinks there’s no limit, but I think highly explicit profanity, including racial slurs at the level of n*gg*r, would cause his advertisers to head for the hills, which would cause him to back down. It’d set a new record for “most grudging apology”, but I think Rush likes his bank account and mammoth contract too much to risk them.
I’ll pick “just after the 2010 elections” in the pool for when it will happen.
-dms
Laura W
@demkat620: Campbell Brown is about to tell us why Obama just may be more popular than effective.
Never in my life would I think that I would be so damn grateful that an ice hockey game is coming on in two minutes.
Doug, please don’t let John forget about a hockey thread, as swept up as he is in new dog smell tonight.
demkat620
@DougJ: No, it doesn’t but its a smear nonetheless.
Rosen’s piece was bad. And it became the main talking point for the GOP. I can’t believe he didn’t have enough self awareness to realize that would happen.
dmsilev
@DougJ:
Feel free to steal it. We’re all just a bunch of lazy good-for-nothing ethics-free bathrobe-wearing bloggers after all.
-dms
JL
Whelan’s apology was in his best interest since he’s on an ethics committee. It was meaningless
demkat620
@JL: No, I’ll give Whelan credit for a decent apology, maybe he realized it was a shitty move.
The Grand Panjandrum
OT: Cool Lily ad on the left hand side of the blog! AND it links to the original Lily post. Nice.
BombIranForChrist
Honestly, this is the A Number One reason I value blogs: fact-checking and bullshit calling. I am sometimes skeptical by the analysis of blogs of all political stripes, because I think there is a lot of (unconscious) group think and not enough original thinking, but if all blogs do is push back against sloppy writers and / or guilty assholes, it’s worth all the other stuff.
geg6
Rosen is has outed himself as tje world’s biggest WATB EVER. When a batshit insane wingnut like Whelen at least superficially looks classier than you, you are officially Wendy Whiner forever more. His reaction is simply that he’s taking his ball and going home. Like anybody gives a shit about his now worthless ball.
JK
@Laura W:
Campbell Brown is a clueless, useless tool like Jeffrey Rosen. She’s also married to former Bush appointee Dan Senor.
CNN should have fired her when she was on maternity leave.
Brown’s slogan No Bias, No Bull is as phony and dishonest as We Report, You Decide.
Laura W
@JK:
The network that still has Larry King and Lou Dobbs in prime time?
It’s nice to have a dream…
OH, and this. CNN hearts twitter! I just watched this a bit ago and meant to write his line down, it was so funny.
http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/06/09/john-stewart-takes-on-twitter-and-cnn/
jrg
What is it about HTML that makes people write crap? If he could only stick to using crayons and paper, the quality of his research would be much, much better. Yep, that’s the source of the problem.
Laura W
@Laura W:
CNN, We’re All Like, I Know!
Joe Lisboa
O/T: Seconding Laura W on the need for a hockey thread. I’ll try not to start this one +4 like the last game.
DougJ
I agree.
Laura W
@Joe Lisboa:
Oopsie Doodle!
So Joe…last game both Tim and John threw up a thread within 5 min. of each other and you had to choose whose thread you were gonna play in. Tonight many of us have begged both John and DougJ for a thread for the whole first quarter (half? third?) and no thread. I smell a conspiracy. Or a new dog.
kth
Rosen seems, from that quote, to be as disturbed by the wingnuts citing his article as the source for their “Sotomayor’s a pushy dumbshit” chorus, as by the DFHs mad at him for enabling those wingnuts. So give him credit for that, though if he didn’t foresee what the right would make of his reporting, that doesn’t say a lot for his intelligence.
Rosali
She has her moments but the part of her show where she tries to get the debaters to agree on something is stupid. It seems like she’s looking for agreement just for sake of agreement and not because she’s really trying to promote greater understanding.
Jason
@jrg:
Precisely, as if Rosen thinks it’s some accident of the genre that made Rosen write poorly. And that’s the funny thing: I doubt Rosen is writing anything that constitutes “blog” – his apology simply passes the buck to the activity (and tarring a lot of his critics with the same brush). It wasn’t like “I could’ve done the research but I had a thorny Rails issue to work out first – it’s so hard to blog, what with all the technical stuff”
TenguPhule
Fuck Rosen and his double insult to journalists and blogs.
Woody
Sonia Sotomayor violated the prime directive: Never shalt thou acknowledge, much less discuss, “White, Male Privilege.”
She will be required to PROFUSELY apologise, and to supplicate herself an a ritual of flagellant self-abasement for her sin., and to promise NEVER to treat any non-White person with the deference due their white male counterpart. Just to prove her ‘even-handedness,’ you understand…
kid bitzer
12, 26–
“I think there is a lot of (unconscious) group think and not enough original thinking”
exactly. that’s just what i think, too.
jcricket
Just like anti-abortion nut-jobs are going to stop after the outpouring of criticism for their murder of Dr. Tiller, right?
At the very least this should be a lesson for progressives.
Waiting around and writing the occasional sternly worded letter is fracking stupid.
Fight back. Keep it up.
When we’re right, we will win (even if the person on the other side doesn’t back down).
brian griffin
I don’t know Rosen, but he’s a friend of a close friend of mine, and I understand he was genuinely blown away, and mortified, by the reaction to his article. apparently he was trying to make the point that sotomayor was not rigorously liberal enough, and so he never expected the response he got.
Hearing about his reaction really made me wonder– do most dc pundits & insider journalists just not see the news sources the way avid consumers of the news (like the folks here) do?
when I pick up the new republic, I expect to find several articles that play conservatives and liberals against each other in a self-serving way. so I saw this that way. if it were in something more reliably liberal, maybe it would’ve been read differently. do reporters not know this?
This whole Rosen flap has really made me think the tunnel vision in the village is much much worse than I thought.
Brachiator
Did you stifle a chuckle when you wrote this?
Whelan made an apology. I think it is more effective if it came about because he reconsidered his position, than if he is bowing to the collective will of the mob.
And the GOP has not yet begun to smear. This is what they live for.
MBunge
Can we please stop with the silly and, frankly, insulting use of the word “outing” in reference to bloggers? Whatever your views on pseudonymity, forcing someone to put their name to their publicly expressed opinions is in no meaningful way equivalent to revealing someone’s sexual orientation.
Mike
Dan
Best post title ever.
brantl
. Actually, yes it can be. If you haven’t followed publius’ explanation of the problems it can cause him AND his family, you’re undereducated, on this.