Another Reason Not To Trust Journalists...

Sometimes you gotta feel sorry for some journalists. They go and try to do a good story, spin a tune, and get taken in for a ride by those who are not only smarter than they are, but better at telling stories and spinning tunes than the journalist will ever be.

Seymour Hersh, for one.

If you look here, you can see how Hersh, thinking himself oh-so-clever, has swallowed the party line with hook and sinker. Whose party line? Why, that of Syria and Hezbollah: after all, I am sure that Hersh is thinking, the enemy of my enemy is my friend...

But it doesn't stop there: this shows how it's not just one man's opinion that Hersh has been been seduced by the dark side of the Force.

And it doesn't stop there either. Hersh is not only completely off on Lebanon, but has blown it describing Egypt as well, as can be seen here.

The reason why someone like Hersh is fooled?

Simple: he's a journalist. For him, getting the "story" is everything. If he doesn't get the story, he keeps on trying to get it.

Those who work for middle Eastern despots don't have that luxury. If they don't get the spin right, their families might die. These regimes aren't interested in PR for the sake of better ratings or maybe a Pulitzer, they're interested in PR of the kind that Hersh gives them because it is existential for the continued ability of the despots to survive.

Those who work to survive do it with vastly more elan and commitment than those who do it for a living, regardless of how much you might like your job.

The Sandmonkey put it this way, underscoring the sophist nature of modern journalism:

This is a man who could distort shit so well that he could disprove gravity.

Nothing more need be said.

Except that this is as good (from Beirut to the Beltway, see above):

Baer, Hersh and their friends have one thing in common: they all have abandoned reality for fiction. And we all know that fiction sells better. In the words of Hersh's proclaimed nemesis, George W. Bush, "Seymour Hersh is a liar".

Abandoned reality for fiction: it sounds like Hersh and his friends have so identified with the enemy of their enemy that they have assimilated Middle Eastern thinking patterns, becoming one with their rhetoric and the truth be damned.

And Seymour Hersh is considered to be one the best of the best in the MSM.


There's an old epithet in British English, the wog. While it probably comes from the use of pollywog as a epithet, there are those who made it into an acronym for "wily oriental gentleman".

I'd like to formally propose that wog be redefined.

Wishful old geezer, used to describe Carter Democrats, limousine liberals and anyone who thinks that Barbara Streisand has something meaningful to say about world politics.

You read it here first.