Herman Cain's ideal presidential candidate

Some years ago Herman Cain told us who his ideal presidential candidate would be. It's worthwhile dredging up Cain's op-ed from 2006 because his background is so little known and this is a window into his thinking that most Americans can easily relate to.

And what does it tell us? That Herman Cain lacks any judgment. Cain argues that the Republican Party should cultivate Tiger Woods to run for president as soon as possible. Cain described Woods as his ideal candidate; the golfer's character and self-discipline would inevitably make him successful in solving all the problems that no actual politicians could fix. In retrospect it is of course ridiculous. But even in 2006 Cain's adulation of Woods would have seemed nauseating as well as dangerously simplistic.

Tiger will be 40 years old in 2016. The Republican Party should begin grooming him now for a run at the White House. His personal attributes and accomplishments on the golf course point to a candidate who will be a problem solver, not a politician.

Tiger's success on the golf course, which will translate to success in the White House, is a product of his character, discipline and leadership by example.

[snip]

If the Democrats maintain control of Congress and the presidency through 2016, the big issues of restructuring Social Security, replacing the tax code and instilling free market forces in the health care system will still not be fixed. If the Republican Party regains the majority in Congress and retains the presidency, there is no guarantee that they will have the courage to make bold changes. Only an outsider will possess the leadership and the conviction to tackle the big issues without regard for the polls, media spin or inane promises of bipartisanship.

Tiger Woods could be an inspiring figure for the country, the likes of which we have not seen since Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ronald Reagan.

It doesn't seem to have occurred to Cain to consider what if any relevant views, knowledge, or experience the rich athlete possessed. This is just the perennial portrait of (rich) non-politician [X] as political savior, which is so beloved of the silly and naive.

In this case, at least, subsequent events have invalidated Cain's assessment of Tiger Woods to such a degree that it's fair to say they demonstrate conclusively how little judgment Cain possesses.

h/t Jim Galloway

Update: Turns out that his op-ed was yet another thing Cain was simply 'joking' about.

"That was a joke, okay? Tiger - I - that was a joke," the presidential hopeful said. "Americans got to learn how to have a sense of humor, okay?"

crossposted at Flapola

Ten Years

The most poignant thing about this anniversary is that ten years ago we Americans shared the common conviction that things could not get any worse.

S&P: Cut Medicare, Social Security

Nearly lost in all the media hubbub over S&P’s unprecedented decision to downgrade the US credit rating is the blatant fact that it is meddling in US politics. Robert Reich makes the obvious point that S&P’s responsibility is simply to assess whether the US is likely to pay its debts, and that it has no right to insert itself into the question of how much debt the US should decide to maintain. But even Reich does not go far enough.

What S&P is doing is to use its rating leverage to take sides in the ongoing deficit negotiations in Washington. In its justification of the downrating, S&P says (a) it wants more deficit cuts, and (b) that the problem is partisan brinksmanship in those negotiations makes it unlikely that the federal government will accept the necessary package of revenue increases, especially tax hikes, and entitlement cuts needed to attain (a).

We lowered our long-term rating on the U.S. because we believe that the prolonged controversy over raising the statutory debt ceiling and the related fiscal policy debate indicate that further near-term progress containing the growth in public spending, especially on entitlements, or on reaching an agreement on raising revenues is less likely than we previously assumed and will remain a contentious and fitful process.

In other words, the downgrade is about the further negotiations regarding deficit reduction that will resume when Congress reconvenes after the August break, specifically the debate over the balance between tax hikes and entitlement cuts.

Republicans and Democrats have only been able to agree to relatively modest savings on discretionary spending while delegating to the Select Committee decisions on more comprehensive measures. It appears that for now, new revenues have dropped down on the menu of policy options. In addition, the plan envisions only minor policy changes on Medicare and little change in other entitlements, the containment of which we and most other independent observers regard as key to long-term fiscal sustainability.

S&P says that it takes no position on how the two parties work out that balance, as long as they do cut the deficit further.

Standard & Poor's takes no position on the mix of spending and revenue measures that Congress and the Administration might conclude is appropriate for putting the U.S.'s finances on a sustainable footing.

But that is disingenuous. Everybody in Washington (save perhaps the delusional would-be bipartisans in the White House) knows that the current GOP will never allow any tax increases. Hence what S&P is really saying is it demands to see cuts to Medicare and Social Security. It is threatening to lower the nation’s credit rating even further unless the deficit is cut even further, so the message is clear: Cut entitlements.

All of us saw that Obama and the Democrats allowed themselves to be taken hostage in recent months in order to save the Treasury’s creditworthiness. Now S&P is trying its hand at the same thing.

crossposted at unbossed.com

Another unacknowledged edit by Jeffrey Goldberg

The more evidence turns up about Jeffrey Goldberg’s revisions of his controversial post “Mumbai Comes to Norway,” the worse his journalistic lapses look and the less satisfactory his explanation appears.

I came across a site that mirrors his Atlantic blog, perhaps using his RSS feed. It preserves two versions of his “Mumbai” post – one with “UPDATED” in its title (from late in the evening of July 22), and the other without (evidently captured earlier that afternoon at 3:22 PM ET). Here is the text of the earlier version:

I'm following news of the Norway attacks like the rest of you, and am curious to see, among other things, Norway's response. I hope it is not to pull troops out of Afghanistan; this would only breed more attacks. So, why Norway? It doesn't seem likely, on the surface. There are many countries with more troops in Afghanistan than Norway; and there are several countries whose newspapers have printed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. My first reaction is two-fold: 1) Jihadists did this in Norway because they could. Norway is pretty well-known among homeland-security types for being among the softer, less-defended countries of the West, and 2) Norway is making moves to expel a jihadist called Mullah Krekar, who is one of the founders of Ansar al-Islam, the al Qaeda-affiliated group that operated in Iraqi Kurdistan with some help from Saddam's intelligence services. This could be a message about his coming deportation.

Of course, asking the question, "Why did jihadists attack (x)?" could lead people to believe that these sorts of attacks are responses to particular events. They are not. At the deepest level, they are responses to Western existence. I know that this sort of statement sounds too Bushian for some people, but I tend to think that many hardcore jihadists -- i.e. ones who are willing to murder innocent people -- develop a deep desire to murder infidels, and only then go looking for specific places to do this murder, and only then gin-up weak rationalizations for the murder. In other words, the list of ostensible grievances is endless.

This version differs from the original piece, posted half an hour earlier. The second paragraph is longer; everything after “Western existence” was added after the original post went up. Notice that this addition is not labeled an ‘update’.

This calls into further doubt Goldberg’s explanation of events. When he learned that I’d turned up evidence of an unacknowledged update to “Mumbai” in which he added material down through its third paragraph (with its alternative theory for the Norway attacks), you may recall, Goldberg quickly added an update to “Mumbai” stating:

(a) that he appended the ‘caveat’ in the third paragraph right after he originally posted “Mumbai” (“I wrote it almost right after I posted originally”)

(b) that he did initially label this addition as an ‘update’

(c) that a subsequent revision of “Mumbai”, because of obscure technical difficulties, accidentally deleted the update label in (b)

This new evidence is hard to square with that story. (i) It shows that there were at least two updates before the third paragraph was added, not one nearly immediate update as Goldberg implied. (ii) The first of these revisions (some 10 to 30 minutes after the original post) was not in fact labeled as an ‘update’, nor was the title of the post. (iii) A further revision (appending the third paragraph) came more than half an hour after the original post, not quickly as Goldberg said. So Goldberg’s account of his revisions of “Mumbai” is in tatters. We also have clear evidence that Goldberg did append some material to his original post without acknowledging the revision.

It’s also worth underlining that Goldberg’s first inclination after he wrote “Mumbai” was to go back to expand and emphasize the unequivocal blame he was heaping on jihadists. So the third paragraph, whenever it finally was added, was an even greater reversal than it had originally seemed (when we didn’t know of this first unacknowledged update).

Notice too that the clause Goldberg inserted surreptitiously in the first paragraph (“if this is jihadist in origin”) is not present yet in this first revision of “Mumbai”. That means very likely it was inserted at the same time as the third paragraph was added. In other words, it’s even clearer now that the inserted clause was meant to work together with the third paragraph in helping to deflect criticism that he had rushed to judgment.

As always, it will be interesting to see whether Jeffrey Goldberg attempts to explain the ever-widening confusion about the history of his revisions of this extraordinary post.

crossposted from Flapola

Jeffrey Goldberg busted

For the last ten days Atlantic writer Jeffrey Goldberg has struggled to explain how an inflammatory post he published on July 22 was radically altered subsequently to make it seem less imbalanced – without however alerting readers that it had been changed. Goldberg initially blamed the Norway attacks unequivocally on Muslim terrorists. But then as events that Friday were demonstrating how foolish his rush to judgment had been he appended seven new sentences to the original post, raising the possibility of right-wing terrorism and suggesting that all along he was just exploring various theories about who was responsible. Three days later, when Goldberg learned that I’d turned up evidence to show that he’d revised his post without acknowledgment, he went back to the post and added a nearly incomprehensible and dubious update explaning how that transpired. When this ‘gibberish update’ was greeted derisively by various journalists, he quietly slipped yet another explanation into the post briefly restating his version of events and accusing his critics of trying to undermine him for ideological reasons (I call this one his ‘Checkers update’).

Goldberg has maintained throughout – in vague terms – that misleading readers was entirely unintentional and the product of a single technical glitch. Goldberg claims that he originally did set the additional seven sentences apart, preceded by the label “UPDATE”, but later in the day when he appended a further ‘update’ the original label was accidentally omitted.

I’ve found no evidence to back up his story and have provided several grounds for doubting his explanation of events. Furthermore, although Goldberg promised in the ‘gibberish update’ to look into the electronic trail of his various updates to the post and thus clarify what actually transpired, he hasn’t said a word since then about it. I've pointed out repeatedly that he could simply use The Atlantic’s logs to show how his post changed over time. Goldberg has never responded to that suggestion or brought forward any actual evidence beyond his own assertions. His integrity and that of The Atlantic have been called into question, and he has declined to rebut the allegation in detail. Indeed, Goldberg has said that it is his critics who need to prove his story is false.

Well, a serious hole in his story just showed up. It was raised by commenter ‘Robinisms’ at my original post on the Goldberg scandal, who noted another telling (but until then overlooked) change Goldberg made to his original post: Goldberg inserted a new clause into the middle of his first paragraph. This insertion clearly was designed to make his original post seem more circumspect; it adds an element of caution to a paragraph that originally lacked it entirely. It is a change that Goldberg’s explanation plainly does not justify.

I quote the entire post as originally published:

I'm following news of the Norway attacks like the rest of you, and am curious to see, among other things, Norway's response. I hope it is not to pull troops out of Afghanistan; this would only breed more attacks. So, why Norway? It doesn't seem likely, on the surface. There are many countries with more troops in Afghanistan than Norway; and there are several countries whose newspapers have printed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. My first reaction is two-fold: 1) Jihadists did this in Norway because they could. Norway is pretty well-known among homeland-security types for being among the softer, less-defended countries of the West, and 2) Norway is making moves to expel a jihadist called Mullah Krekar, who is one of the founders of Ansar al-Islam, the al Qaeda-affiliated group that operated in Iraqi Kurdistan with some help from Saddam's intelligence services. This could be a message about his coming deportation.

Of course, asking the question, "Why did jihadists attack (x)?" could lead people to believe that these sorts of attacks are responses to particular events. They are not. At the deepest level, they are responses to Western existence.

When Goldberg appended the seven new sentences later that day, these original sentences remained the same with a single exception. He slipped a new clause into the fourth sentence of the first paragraph, which he did not mark in any way as a revision:

It doesn't seem likely, on the surface, if this is jihadist in origin.

The new clause turned the first two paragraphs of the post into a hypothetical exercise, which they had not been in the original. So even if Goldberg did add “UPDATE” before the long section he appended, as he claims, he had doctored the original post sufficiently with the surreptitious insertion of this clause that he might have hoped to deflect criticisms that he had rushed to judgment.

I see no way that Goldberg can explain away this clause under his current story, except by making it even more baroque than it already is.

The very surreptitiousness of this insertion tends to strengthen my original impression that Goldberg's unacknowledged revision was meant to mislead readers.

crossposted from Flapola

Jeffrey Goldberg’s Checkers Update

It turns out that on Thursday Jeffrey Goldberg slipped yet another update into his “Mumbai Comes to Norway”. It was a response to the public reception of my criticism of his journalistic lapses here and here. Remarkably, Goldberg did nothing to publicize this defense of his integrity, either at The Atlantic or on Twitter (at both of which he was posting very frequently).

So far it is the only sustained attempt he’s made publicly to rebut the charge that he doctored ‘Mumbai’ on July 22 with an unacknowledged revision, since his notorious ‘gibberish’ update last Monday. Here is the latest update in full:

UPDATE ON THE UPDATE ON THE UPDATE (Thursday the 28th): Jay Rosen has pointed out that the previous paragraphs read like gibberish. He's mostly right. Here's a shorter version: I posted, updated,, erased the post by mistake, tried to restore the post, left things out of the post, then fixed the post. There are people out there -- people who are opposed to me on ideological grounds -- who are accusing me of intentionally doctoring the post. They offer no proof, however. All I can say is that the screw-ups were inadvertent.

The last three sentences here are priceless. Goldberg insinuates that his critics are out to get him “on ideological grounds”. He offers no proof for such an explosive charge.

I’m the critic who first accused him of doctoring his post, and I’d like to know why he claims to understand my ideology. And how is that ideology, whatever it may be, at war with his own? Observant readers will notice that the accusation was in fact first published at the newish website Flapola, which “exists to chronicle the absurdities of public discourse”. It’s unclear whether “the people out there” who Goldberg feels are his ideological enemies would also include journalism professor Jay Rosen of NYU. If so, that seems absurd as well. Goldberg’s update reminds one a little too much of Richard Nixon at his worst (“You've got to be a little evil to understand those people out there. You have to have known the dark side of life.”).

Goldberg demands proof that his contrived-sounding story is false. I have offered plenty of evidence, an electronic trail that calls his story into question. For example, I pointed out that the title and web address of ‘Mumbai’ only acquired the word “Updated” around 5 hours after it was originally posted. That’s hard to square with Goldberg’s statement that he added the label “update” to his first revision, which came “almost right after [he] posted originally”. Goldberg is the one with access to The Atlantic’s logs. As I’ve said several times, he could easily produce the “proof”, if those logs backed him up, to prove he’s telling the truth. He hasn’t even bothered.

“All I can say is that the screw-ups were inadvertent.” False, see my last paragraph. Goldberg can produce the evidence he claims would show that he marked the first revision of his post as an “update”. Simply repeating his undocumented assertions proves nothing.

This latest update is rather dismissive. Isn’t his journalistic reputation sufficiently worth defending that Goldberg would produce readily available evidence to back up his story?

crossposted from Flapola

The latest Jeffrey Goldberg scandal

On Monday Jeffrey Goldberg added a bizarre and nearly incomprehensible note to a highly controversial post at The Atlantic. The note sought to explain and justify an earlier, unacknowledged revision to the piece whose effect had been to make him appear less foolish. He maintains that he misled readers inadvertently by accidentally deleting the word “UPDATE” from that revision. His account was far from adequate and refers to obscure technical difficulties. Goldberg even said that he couldn’t really understand what had happened as he repeatedly revised the post the previous Friday. He promised to look into his electronic trail to figure the situation out.

Since then, however, Goldberg has added nothing to his garbled explanation. It should be a simple matter to extract from The Atlantic’s servers a record of his updates to that post, if in fact it would corroborate and clarify his flimsy account. As things are, Goldberg stands accused of deliberately doctoring a post to mask how outrageous his original post had been. Prominent journalists such as Jay Rosen have called him to task. And yet four days later Goldberg still has produced no evidence on his own behalf. His colleagues at The Atlantic remain silent as well.

There are detailed descriptions of this scandal here and here.

The facts as I understand them are as follows: Last Friday afternoon Goldberg posted a two-paragraph screed, “Mumbai Comes to Norway,” blaming the attacks unequivocally on Islamic terrorists. When events demonstrated how reckless he’d been, Goldberg added a third paragraph raising the possibility of right-wing terrorism. By not labeling this as an update, he left readers to conclude that he was just exploring multiple theories rather than using the massacre to make a bold pronouncement about the worldwide jihadist danger. Later that evening, beginning around 8 PM, Goldberg began adding 4 further paragraphs on stray thoughts, each of which he did carefully label as an “UPDATE”. At the same time he also added “(UPDATED)” to the title. So he was capable of noting updates when there was nothing to be gained from not doing so.

On Saturday, Goldberg posted a roundabout defense of his decision to rush to judgment, “On Suspecting al Qaeda in the Norway Attacks.” It is characteristically disingenuous, particularly about what he had written in “Mumbai”.

On Monday, when he learned (via James Fallows) that I had found cached evidence that he’d made those unacknowledged changes to “Mumbai”, Goldberg hurriedly added another update to the post. This was the aforementioned bizarre explanation for not having labeled the first revision as an ‘update’. It is so ridiculous it really needs to be seen to be believed.

The Atlantic needs to address this disgrace. The ‘Mumbai’ post was reprehensible to begin with. The doctoring of it is a further scandal. Goldberg’s ridiculous excuse-mongering makes matters worse. His refusal to apologize for any of it is worse still.

And as if that weren’t shameful enough, his colleagues at The Atlantic have some answering to do for ignoring or excusing all of this. On Saturday James Fallows called for the Washington Post to apologize for a Jennifer Rubin post that, like Goldberg’s, used the Norway attacks to propagandize about Islamic terrorism. His call was seconded by two other Atlantic writers. But none of them has so much as mentioned Goldberg’s reprehensible “Mumbai” post. In correspondence, Fallows bobbed and weaved when pressed about holding Goldberg to basic journalistic standards.

So will Goldberg and The Atlantic ever properly address this bundle of scandals?

Update Friday July 29: James Fallows finally responds here to the allegations of wrongdoing and hypocrisy. It’s pretty thin stuff. He states that Goldberg was having connectivity problems “that morning” and would have to be crazy to lie about the circumstances of his unlabeled update to ‘Mumbai’ (from later in the day).

Also, our system logs changes, and any of us would be additionally crazy, knowing that, to pretend that something happened if it didn't.

Setting aside the fact that Goldberg has said some pretty crazy things – for example, rushing to blame the Norway attacks on Muslim terrorists – apparently neither Fallows nor Goldberg has made any effort to dig out those logs to prove that Goldberg misled his readers accidentally as he claims. As I’ve noted repeatedly, it should be a simple thing to produce that evidence if it actually backs up Goldberg’s story. Further, Goldberg said that his memory is hazy and his convoluted account is nearly incomprehensible. So why is nobody at The Atlantic trying to clarify what is otherwise an extreme embarrassment for them?

As regards the issue of whether he should condemn Goldberg’s rush to use the massacre to score points, Fallows argues (a) that others did not condemn Goldberg either, and (b) he didn’t see ‘Mumbai’ until Goldberg had already tried to walk back some of its extremism. Left unaddressed, I think, is whether Fallows and The Atlantic should condemn it now that he realizes it was originally as indefensible a post as the Jennifer Rubin piece he denounced. Goldberg has not admitted that he was wrong to post it. Quite the contrary, he continues to defend the decision. Goldberg is still trying to portray the controversy disingenuously as criticism that he merely ‘suspected’ al Qaeda’s involvement in Norway. That is intellectually dishonest (not to say crazy given that people can go back and read what he wrote).

crossposted at Flapola

Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic, and journalistic ethics

On Friday, just after the horrific attacks in Norway, Jeffrey Goldberg posted this two-paragraph screed, “Mumbai Comes to Norway,” in which he pinned the blame squarely and without equivocation upon Islamic terrorists: “Jihadists did this in Norway because they could.” Of course, he had no substantive evidence for the inflammatory assertion. Any rush to judgment is foolish. This was reprehensible. Some of his critics would also say it is characteristic of Goldberg’s work.

Since then no apology has been forthcoming from Goldberg. Quite the contrary, on Saturday he doubled down, posting “On Suspecting al Qaeda in the Norway Attacks.” This purports to be a defense of other writers who similarly had rushed to denounce Muslims for the murders. However that is disingenuous; Goldberg plainly intended the piece as a roundabout way to justify his earlier ‘Mumbai’ post. And yet he managed to say almost nothing specific about what he’d actually written the previous day, though some of what he did say about ‘Mumbai’ was inaccurate and disingenuous. Remarkably, he didn’t even provide a link to ‘Mumbai’. (After I wrote to him criticizing his failure to link to his own work, he published a ridiculous revision of ‘Suspecting’ on Monday in which he blamed that failure on vague technical problems; apparently we’re supposed to believe that his own ‘Mumbai’ post was the one relevant link he was prevented somehow from including.) Thus, Goldberg’s purpose in ‘Suspecting’ was to persuade readers that he had had every reason to join others in blaming Islamists in ‘Mumbai’, and hence was not himself to blame.

In the aftermath, nobody else at The Atlantic has criticized either of Goldberg’s controversial posts much less called for an apology. Indeed, none of their writers have even mentioned them.

This despite the fact that James Fallows on Saturday rebuked the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin and called for an apology for her own rush to judgment. Fallows repeatedly updated that post as he recorded how much time had elapsed without an apology from Rubin. Her piece, as reprehensible as it is, was surely no more extreme than what his Atlantic colleague Goldberg had written and then defended. In fact, Rubin’s original post had acknowledged, by the back door, at least the possibility that the attacks in Norway were not the work of Islamic terrorists. Goldberg’s ‘Mumbai’ post, by contrast, originally expressed total certainty in blaming Muslims.

Fallows’ denunciation of Rubin was quickly joined by two other colleagues at The Atlantic, Steve Clemons (here and here) and Ta-Nihisi Coates. Nevertheless none of them to date has said a thing about their colleague Goldberg’s two controversial posts.

I wrote to Fallows on Saturday asking why Goldberg did not owe an apology as well. In correspondence over several days, Fallows repeatedly defended his colleague, minimized his journalistic lapses, accepted Goldberg’s ridiculous self-justifications or offered his own, and avoided as far as possible taking any action to hold Goldberg to account for such gross unprofessionalism.

It gets even worse.

On Monday I gave Fallows evidence showing that Goldberg had substantially revised his original ‘Mumbai’ post sometime later on Friday, making himself appear less imprudent by appending a final (third) paragraph. That paragraph mentions the possibility the attacks were the work of a right-wing terrorist. This radical revision of the original post was in line with the police report that afternoon about the blond Norwegian who had been arrested. But Goldberg did not mention that he’d made any changes to ‘Mumbai’. His silence left the reader to assume that his absolutely confident assertions about Islamic terrorists at the top of the post were really intended all along to be taken as just one of several possible theories, including the scenario he mentions at the end.

It is egregiously wrong to revise a post so substantially as to alter its meaning or intended interpretation without signaling that a revision was made. In terms of journalistic standards, an unacknowledged revision as radical as this is just as reprehensible as Goldberg’s original offense of rushing out inflammatory allegations without evidence to back them up.

Fallows response upon receiving this information was, at first, to say nothing more than he hadn’t known about the unacknowledged addition of the third paragraph. (I should add that, in his first email to me on Saturday, Fallows had based his defense of Goldberg entirely on this third paragraph, which he described as the “caveat” that raised Goldberg’s post above the level of Rubin’s. To my mind it was transparently an afterthought, one that scarcely mitigated Goldberg’s clear intention to pin the blame on Islamists. But for Fallows it was the key that made it permissible to criticize Rubin while saying nothing about his colleague.)

So I pressed Fallows again about what he would do now that he did know of the unacknowledged revision. Fallows finally said that he would look into it.

A short time afterward on Monday evening, Jeffrey Goldberg revised his ‘Mumbai’ post again, this time in order to justify his failure earlier to mention the first revision. His rambling excuse is such gibberish that a reasonable interpretation would be he intended it to be nearly incomprehensible. It reads like the blather you’d associate more with a Jeffrey Lebowski than a journalist at The Atlantic. This update is easily the most ridiculous thing I have ever seen in the established news media.

UPDATE ON THE PREVIOUS UPDATE (Monday the 25th): A number of readers have pointed out that my previous caveat give the impression that it was an instantaneous caveat, when in fact it wasn't. It was written a short while after the original post went up, and was labeled "Update" originally (I've since affixed the word "update" to it again. What happened was that I was driving and had connectivity problems, and so when I added further updates (below), I inadvertently erased the whole post, and had to rescue it from a Word document, but in re-posting that word document (or most of it—I saved only most of it) I dropped the word "update," along with a couple of other things. And then I thought I had saved it and posted it, when it fact the "save" didn't go through until a later "save" of another update. When the post went out on my RSS feed, I believe it still had the word "update" in it. Though I don't know for sure, but will check my RSS feed when I get back. I'm sorry this sounds so confusing, but I want to clear up the impression that I folded in caveats later without saying that they were added later. In truth, I can't figure out what happened, because I thought when I wrote the aforementioned caveat, it had successfully posted, when it seems that it hadn't.

i barely understand the previous paragraph. Suffice it to say I don't want to leave anyone with either the impression that the caveat paragraph was posted simultaneously with the original content of the post, or that it was added hours or days later. I wrote it almost right after I posted originally, but it apparently wasn't saved into text until one of the next times I opened up this post. My bad—no blogging and driving for me. And of course it was my bad not to lard even more caveats into the post in the first place.

Goldberg’s account of why he failed until late Monday evening to mention Friday’s radical update is not even remotely convincing. My reasons for rejecting his convoluted self-justification will be left to another post (see below). My point here is that, on its face, his Monday evening blather strains credulity. And yet Fallows seems to accept it. He told me nothing about what he learned upon looking into the matter. Instead he just sent me without comment the link to Goldberg’s explanation. Fallows has not responded to my further emails challenging the explanation.

In short, James Fallows is again excusing his colleague Jeffrey Goldberg’s egregious practices. Sad to say, it is not for the first time. One would have thought that Goldberg’s journalistic credentials would be in tatters long before now given the appalling record of inaccuracies, blithe inconsistencies, and gross biases that mark him out as a propagandist in foreign affairs. Are there no professional penalties to be paid for shamelessly advocating for a disastrous war as in Iraq? Evidently not. Goldberg’s friends and colleagues repeatedly have shielded him from justified criticism and even promoted him, no matter what he gets up to.

As so often, there appears to be a double standard among Beltway insiders. Those whom one is friendly with are good and serious people simply because one knows them to be, and therefore one’s friends must be placed effectively above criticism. No amount of public embarrassment is allowed to pierce this bubble of impunity.

And there can be few things more embarrassing than the preposterous and pathetic self defense Goldberg published on Monday evening in the final revision of ‘Mumbai’. Never mind for now Goldberg’s obvious disingenuousness, or his tone or the rather terrified-sounding gobbledy-gook prose. I would note simply that the premise of his explanation – that vague technical difficulties were to blame for his failure over three full days to mention the radical revision on Friday of the ‘Mumbai’ post – is nearly identical to the unconvincing explanation he’d already offered in ‘Suspecting’ for his failure to provide a link back to ‘Mumbai’.

I can’t help but notice that Goldberg had posted a longish series of uncontroversial things on Friday and Saturday at The Atlantic, without ever mentioning or seeming to have technical difficulties. But on Monday, as he sees himself under criticism for what clearly was highly controversial writing, Goldberg suddenly became all chatty in his updates to both ‘Suspecting’ and ‘Mumbai’ about how technical difficulties had been undermining him right and left, two and three days earlier, thus spoiling all his very admirable intentions. Curiously, they were spoiling his intentions only with regard to the inflammatory posts. The non-controversial posts all managed to bypass the technical gremlins somehow.

I’m reminded of the phony-sounding, convoluted narratives that undergraduate students offer up so often when they’re caught red-handed in something like plagiarism. Vague and nearly incomprehensible technical difficulties, as it happens, often turn out to be the actual culprits – not the authors themselves, apart that is from their acknowledging some slight element of sloppiness in not overcoming a series of almost unparalleled challenges in order to compel those pesky machines to do things right.

And so too with Jeffrey Goldberg, who assures us that despite his best of intentions it was the machines that made his two controversial posts seem unethical. But he’s set the record straight now because he wouldn’t want to leave his readers with the impression that he radically revised his ‘Mumbai’ post without acknowledging the revision. Except, that is, for the three days in which he did give that impression.

Fallows was right that Rubin owed an apology for her terrible misuse of the terrorist attacks in Norway to push her own agenda. He is wrong not to call for an apology from Goldberg as well. The Atlantic needs to sanction Goldberg for that reprehensible ‘Mumbai’ post, as well as for revising it later to make it seem less extreme while leaving readers for three days to assume that no repairs had been done to it. His excuse mongering on Monday also warrants an investigation, though I doubt it’s possible ever to get to the bottom of whatever it is Goldberg is claiming.

I am leaving to a second post, which can be found here, my detailed description of what Goldberg posted and when, and my analysis of that. I’ll also discuss Fallow’s record in this a little further.

Update, Wed. July 27: This evening at 6:39 ET, shortly after these two pieces were posted and crossposted at two other sites, the google cache for the original version of Goldberg's 'Mumbai' post was overwritten with the current version of the page. However I have a screen grab of the original version, should anybody wish to consult it. I have quoted its text in its entirety.

Update Two, Friday July 29: James Fallows finally responds here to the allegations of wrongdoing and hypocrisy. It’s pretty thin stuff. He states that Goldberg was having connectivity problems “that morning” and would have to be crazy to lie about the circumstances of his unlabeled update to ‘Mumbai’ (from later in the day).

Also, our system logs changes, and any of us would be additionally crazy, knowing that, to pretend that something happened if it didn't.

Setting aside the fact that Goldberg has said some pretty crazy things – for example, rushing to blame the Norway attacks on Muslim terrorists – apparently neither Fallows nor Goldberg has made any effort to dig out those logs to prove that Goldberg misled his readers accidentally as he claims. As I’ve noted repeatedly, it should be a simple thing to produce that evidence if it actually backs up Goldberg’s story. Further, Goldberg said that his memory is hazy and his convoluted account is nearly incomprehensible. So why is nobody at The Atlantic trying to clarify what is otherwise an extreme embarrassment for them?

As regards the issue of whether he should condemn Goldberg’s rush to use the massacre to score points, Fallows argues (a) that others did not condemn Goldberg either, and (b) he didn’t see ‘Mumbai’ until Goldberg had already tried to walk back some of its extremism. Left unaddressed, I think, is whether Fallows and The Atlantic should condemn it now that he realizes it was originally as indefensible a post as the Jennifer Rubin piece he denounced. Goldberg has not admitted that he was wrong to post it. Quite the contrary, he continues to defend the decision. Goldberg is still trying to portray the controversy disingenuously as criticism that he merely ‘suspected’ al Qaeda’s involvement in Norway. That is intellectually dishonest (not to say crazy given that people can go back and read what he wrote).

crossposted from Flapola

No Shame at The Atlantic?

As discussed here, The Atlantic disgraced itself over the weekend with two posts about the Norway attacks by Jeffrey Goldberg, subsequently updated disingenuously and bizarrely. Goldberg initially blamed the Norway attacks on Muslim terrorists, and then rather than retract and apologize for his reprehensible first post, he performed stupefying back-flips trying to justify the unjustifiable. In addition, three other Atlantic authors (James Fallows, Steve Clemons, and Ta-Nehisi Coates) made common cause in rebuking a Washington Post author (Jennifer Rubin) for her own grotesque rush to judgment, but nevertheless have managed to avoid even mentioning their colleague Goldberg’s offenses. Fallows in particular was notified of one especially egregious impropriety Goldberg engaged in, but rather than condemn it Fallows appears to have accepted Goldberg’s dubious and convoluted excuses. It’s a bundle of journalistic lapses shamelessly committed and just as shamelessly swept under the carpet.

The purpose here is to describe the events as I understand them and assess them in detail.

On Friday July 22, Jeffrey Goldberg posted “Mumbai Comes to Norway”. The link is to a cache of the original version of the post. The text reads:

I'm following news of the Norway attacks like the rest of you, and am curious to see, among other things, Norway's response. I hope it is not to pull troops out of Afghanistan; this would only breed more attacks. So, why Norway? It doesn't seem likely, on the surface. There are many countries with more troops in Afghanistan than Norway; and there are several countries whose newspapers have printed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. My first reaction is two-fold: 1) Jihadists did this in Norway because they could. Norway is pretty well-known among homeland-security types for being among the softer, less-defended countries of the West, and 2) Norway is making moves to expel a jihadist called Mullah Krekar, who is one of the founders of Ansar al-Islam, the al Qaeda-affiliated group that operated in Iraqi Kurdistan with some help from Saddam's intelligence services. This could be a message about his coming deportation.

Of course, asking the question, "Why did jihadists attack (x)?" could lead people to believe that these sorts of attacks are responses to particular events. They are not. At the deepest level, they are responses to Western existence.

It is inflammatory. The entire piece, beginning with the title, presumes that the attacks were of course committed by Muslims. There isn’t even the slightest trace of doubt about that. The second bombastic paragraph could not be more sweeping or authoritative: Islamists seek to kill us because we exist, and softness invites attack. That is rhetoric in search of evidence, which Goldberg was eager to find in the current massacre.

Journalistic ethics, which don’t encourage rushing to judgment, certainly would have required Goldberg to issue a retraction as soon as possible after it became clear that afternoon that the only suspect in custody was a native Norwegian.

Instead, Goldberg revised ‘Mumbai’ by bolstering his second paragraph with two further sentences and adding a third paragraph. The third paragraph mentions the possibility that it was a case of right-wing terrorism, only to suggest further ways that it could still be linked to Muslims. He also remarks that he is “confused” about who was responsible. The effect of this radical revision was to make his extremely imprudent, one-sided, and indefensible original post seem less so.

Later that evening Goldberg made three further revisions to ‘Mumbai’ with stray thoughts and links. These are labeled “UPDATE”, “UPDATE 2”, and “UPDATE 3”. By stages he seems to be relinquishing his obsession with the non-existent Muslim connection.

Here is a cached version of the updated ‘Mumbai’ from around dawn the following morning. Notice that the original, radical revision still is not set apart as an update (in fact it begins in the middle of the second paragraph), and thus gives the impression that the third paragraph in particular was actually part of the original argument.

I'm following news of the Norway attacks like the rest of you, and am curious to see, among other things, Norway's response. I hope it is not to pull troops out of Afghanistan; this would only breed more attacks. So, why Norway? It doesn't seem likely, on the surface, if this is jihadist in origin. There are many countries with more troops in Afghanistan than Norway; and there are several countries whose newspapers have printed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. My first reaction is two-fold: 1) Jihadists did this in Norway because they could. Norway is pretty well-known among homeland-security types for being among the softer, less-defended countries of the West, and 2) Norway is making moves to expel a jihadist called Mullah Krekar, who is one of the founders of Ansar al-Islam, the al Qaeda-affiliated group that operated in Iraqi Kurdistan with some help from Saddam's intelligence services. This could be a message about his coming deportation.

Of course, asking the question, "Why did jihadists attack (x)?" could lead people to believe that these sorts of attacks are responses to particular events. They are not. At the deepest level, they are responses to Western existence. I know that this sort of statement sounds too Bushian for some people, but I tend to think that many hardcore jihadists—i.e. ones who are willing to murder innocent people—develop a deep desire to murder infidels, and only then go looking for specific places to do this murder, and only then gin-up weak rationalizations for the murder. In other words, the list of ostensible grievances is endless.

Of course, this could an act of right-wing extremism, perhaps in reaction to the rise of radical Islamism in Europe. I'm as confused as the rest of you are about the authorship of these attacks. There have been early claims of responsibility by jihadist groups, followed by denials, followed by reports that a blonde "Nordic-looking" man was the one who opened fire on the youth camp. Was this "Nordic-looking" man an Adam Gadahn-type, or someone not motivated by jihadist ideology? Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Here's an interesting story from Atlantic.com about why jihadists seem to have it in for Norway, if indeed this attack was jihadist-inspired. And because this might be domestic right-wing extremism in origin, I'm looking for something to read about Norwegian extremist groups. If anyone has any recommendations, I'll post and link.

UPDATE 2: This looks promising -- http://bit.ly/rlnhB2

UPDATE 3: I'm sure someone on the Internets has pointed this out already, but if these are the acts of a Norwegian lone wolf—massive car bomb and point-blank massacre in a different location hours later—then this guy is a true terror prodigy, the Muhammad Atta of Norway. Terrorism is hard to do. This is one of the reasons the U.S. hasn't been hit by an organized plot since 9/11. Most psychopaths are incompetent at killing. This is our saving grace.

Later that morning an “UPDATE 4” was appended to ‘Mumbai’, which is how the post remained for more than two days, until Monday evening.

A blogger who posts at AbsurdBeats tells me that on Friday she read the original unrevised version of ‘Mumbai’, and later several times returned and saw the radically revised version before any of the further revisions that were marked as an “UPDATE” had been added. At no point did she see any indication that the radical revision (the 2nd/3rd paragraphs) was acknowledged as an update. On Monday evening she commented about that fact in this thread at The Atlantic:

It was two paragraphs straight-up on jihadis and why they might attack Norway, with, if I remember correctly, some mention of the impending deportation of Mullah Krekar; it could even have been those first two paragraphs of what is now a much longer post.

There was no "Of course, this could an act of right-wing extremism, perhaps in reaction to the rise of radical Islamism in Europe. . . . " That was added later, although, lacking an "update" notice, makes it appear as if it were a part of the original post.

The apparent implication, that Goldberg had been audacious in transforming his commentary to such an extent, was troubling so I searched for and found a cached version of the original post from Friday afternoon (which is linked and quoted above). I sent this evidence of an unacknowledged revision to James Fallows (with whom I’d been corresponding about Goldberg). He said he’d look into it. Shortly afterwards, late on Monday evening, Goldberg revised ‘Mumbai’ a final time. The passage quoted below begins with the second paragraph and includes all the changes he made then:

Of course, asking the question, "Why did jihadists attack (x)?" could lead people to believe that these sorts of attacks are responses to particular events. They are not. At the deepest level, they are responses to Western existence. I know that this sort of statement sounds too Bushian for some people, but I tend to think that many hardcore jihadists—i.e. ones who are willing to murder innocent people—develop a deep desire to murder infidels, and only then go looking for specific places to do this murder, and only then gin-up weak rationalizations for the murder. In other words, the list of ostensible grievances is endless.

UPDATE: Of course, this could an act of right-wing extremism, perhaps in reaction to the rise of radical Islamism in Europe. I'm as confused as the rest of you are about the authorship of these attacks. There have been early claims of responsibility by jihadist groups, followed by denials, followed by reports that a blonde "Nordic-looking" man was the one who opened fire on the youth camp. Was this "Nordic-looking" man an Adam Gadahn-type, or someone not motivated by jihadist ideology? Stay tuned.

UPDATE ON THE PREVIOUS UPDATE (Monday the 25th): A number of readers have pointed out that my previous caveat give the impression that it was an instantaneous caveat, when in fact it wasn't. It was written a short while after the original post went up, and was labeled "Update" originally (I've since affixed the word "update" to it again. What happened was that I was driving and had connectivity problems, and so when I added further updates (below), I inadvertently erased the whole post, and had to rescue it from a Word document, but in re-posting that word document (or most of it—I saved only most of it) I dropped the word "update," along with a couple of other things. And then I thought I had saved it and posted it, when it fact the "save" didn't go through until a later "save" of another update. When the post went out on my RSS feed, I believe it still had the word "update" in it. Though I don't know for sure, but will check my RSS feed when I get back. I'm sorry this sounds so confusing, but I want to clear up the impression that I folded in caveats later without saying that they were added later. In truth, I can't figure out what happened, because I thought when I wrote the aforementioned caveat, it had successfully posted, when it seems that it hadn't.

i barely understand the previous paragraph. Suffice it to say I don't want to leave anyone with either the impression that the caveat paragraph was posted simultaneously with the original content of the post, or that it was added hours or days later. I wrote it almost right after I posted originally, but it apparently wasn't saved into text until one of the next times I opened up this post. My bad—no blogging and driving for me. And of course it was my bad not to lard even more caveats into the post in the first place.

UPDATE: Here's an interesting story from Atlantic.com about why jihadists [… etc.]

Even if one cares to believe this explanation, it is not an adequate excuse. Goldberg left the first revision unacknowledged for three days. He acknowledged it only after he learned somebody had discovered the situation, and did so only on a post that most readers had long since left behind.

It’s also disingenuous. “A number of readers” pointed out how he had misled? What number? It looks as if Goldberg prefers not to admit that he acted only after I turned over to Fallows a cache of his original post. (The term ‘caveat’ is how Fallows had been describing Goldberg’s third paragraph in our correspondence; see below.)

And as regards his “my bad not to lard even more caveats into the post in the first place”, there were no caveats whatever in the original post. Not one. To talk about “even more caveats” is to deny the very nature of his original post. How extraordinarily ironic to conclude this update with a fiction that denies the very consequence of the update.

As regards the substance of his explanation, it is nearly incomprehensible, perhaps intentionally so. I have rarely read such gibberish. To me these seem like the plaintive and desperate words of somebody who has been caught red-handed in an unethical operation. In so far as I understand the ‘facts’ Goldberg alleges, I don’t find them credible. Here are some reasons why:

(a) The first revision actually began in the middle of the second paragraph. That’s hard to square with his explanation. He would have had to have ‘dropped’ two hard returns as well as the word “UPDATE” in his Word document when (as he claims) he reposted the whole text. He would also have to have forgotten within a very short time that he had updated and that there were now meant to be four rather than three paragraphs. Besides, Word documents don’t tend to delete late changes when you close them, unless you put some effort into losing material.

(b) All four other updates are numbered in order (except the second, which is simply labeled “UPDATE”). How does it happen that the first “update” has so little purchase that it doesn’t even affect the numbering system?

(c) His claim that he was distracted from blogging while driving, while barely possible, suggests he should be arrested for recklessness.

(d) The “UPDATE” in the post’s title and in its web address appeared only some 2 ½ to 5 hours after ‘Mumbai’ was originally posted, to judge by a review of cached pages from The Atlantic (see e.g. the google caches of Derek Thompson’s posts that day). Goldberg claims (above) that he added the ‘caveat’ paragraph “almost right after I posted originally” and not hours later, and that initially he notified readers that the ‘caveat’ was an ‘update’. So why does neither the title nor the web address for ‘Mumbai’ include ‘update’ until hours later on Friday evening?

(e) Goldberg posted other things at The Atlantic on Friday afternoon and evening with no apparent technical difficulties.

(f) His vague tale of repeated, obscure technical difficulties compounded by his own haplessness plus an astoundingly convenient three-day episode of amnesia sounds contrived. I’ve heard all too many similar tales from undergraduates when they’ve been caught plagiarizing papers. Such tales make a virtue of patheticness, and Goldberg’s explanation is nothing if not pathetic.

(g) Just as his excuse here is predicated on insurmountable technical difficulties, so too his excuse with regard to a lapse in his second controversial post (see below) is predicated on insurmountable technical difficulties. Both excuses were dredged up and published on Monday, after Goldberg found his lapses facing criticism. In both instances, the alleged technical difficulties evidently impinged on his work only to the extent that he was facing criticism.

(h) His explanation does not appear to be subject to proof. Apart from some probably unverifiable claims about technical difficulties, it ends up being a non-explanation. Goldberg says “I can't figure out what happened” and he leaves himself ample room to evade, revise or abandon the few assertions he does seem to make.

(i) It is transparently true that on Monday Goldberg could not get even the most basic things right about his ‘Mumbai’ updates from Friday. He slaps the new label “UPDATE” before the third paragraph rather than where it belongs, before the fourth sentence in the second paragraph. So how was he able on Monday to provide so many other florid details (however vaguely described) from his various technical adventures, and how was he certain that he labeled the first revision as an ‘update’, when he couldn’t even remember where the original post ended?

It would be a fairly simple matter to extract evidence to support his story of multiple updates from The Atlantic’s servers, if his version of events is accurate. That would also permit Goldberg to clarify what he says he can’t figure out. However no such evidence or clarification has been forthcoming for the last two days. The matter has simply been dropped.

On Saturday July 23 Jeffrey Goldberg returned to the fray with “On Suspecting al Qaeda in the Norway Attacks.” It purports to be a defense of others, especially Jennifer Rubin, who had rushed to blame the attacks on Muslims without waiting for actual evidence.

Clearly though it was designed at least as much as a justification for his now embarrassing ‘Mumbai’ post. He mentions his own controversial post in passing, but without much information a reader would need to understand what he’d written. It’s especially remarkable that he neglected to link to ‘Mumbai’ or cite its inflammatory title, though he linked to plenty of other people’s posts in ‘Suspecting’.

Some of what he says is frankly disingenuous. His main line of defense is that people like Rubin were justified in their speculation if only because The Atlantic had reposted an old piece by Hegghammer and Tierney on Norway’s problem with al Qaeda. He implies it influenced his decision to write ‘Mumbai’.

So it would have been possible, from reading The Atlantic alone, to suspect al Qaeda involvement in the Norway attacks. I myself suspected this, and wrote so.

The truth is that Goldberg noted the Hegghammer/Tierney article only as a late update to ‘Mumbai’.

He also doesn’t acknowledge that ‘Mumbai’ originally, even more than Rubin’s terrible post, blamed the attacks definitively and exclusively on Islamic terrorists. In fact, he disingenuously said:

To be sure, I wrote into my coverage a bunch of "to be sure" statements, along the lines of "if this in fact a jihadist attack," and, "perhaps this was an act of right-wing extremism," but I certainly suspected al Qaeda involvement initially.

There were not in fact a “bunch” of such statements, even in the fully updated version, just the two phrases he (mis)quotes. In any case the relevant point – about assessing the rush to blame Islamists – is that Goldberg’s original post contained not even one such statement.

On top of ‘Mumbai’, this was disgraceful stuff. I wrote to Goldberg explaining that I found ‘Suspecting’ to be disingenuous about what he had actually written, and asking why he had neglected to provide a link so that readers could assess his assessment of himself. Goldberg didn’t respond, but on Monday he revised ‘Suspecting’ to take account of such criticisms. The revision strikes me as a travesty.

To begin with, although he added a link to ‘Mumbai’ (as well as the title), Goldberg managed to imply that his earlier failure to do it had been caused by technical difficulties. Apparently, too, we’re supposed to imagine that by bad luck it was only his own post that he had been prevented from linking to:

I've added a link to the piece I wrote (I'm having terrible Interweb problems where I am, and this process of adding a couple of links has now been going on for a half-hour) […]

The very chattiness calls attention to its phoniness. The implication doesn’t stand up to scrutiny; was he having “Interweb problems” on Saturday as well? Anyhow there’s really no excuse in an internet apologia not to link to one’s post that one is trying to justify.

Additionally, Goldberg replies to the criticisms of ‘Mumbai’ by turning them into the worst kind of straw man. I[t i]s too preposterous to bother quoting here, but [this] serves as a measure of how seriously [he] engages with legitimate criticisms of his work. Even when he has posted something as scandalously unbalanced as ‘Mumbai’, Goldberg can’t face up to what he has done wrong. He prefers evasion and smokescreens and denial.

This is of course relevant to any assessment of the convoluted excuse he posted later on Monday evening for having failed to label his first revision of ‘Mumbai’ as an ‘update’.

To sum up, we had two posts from Jeffrey Goldberg that fell well short of journalistic standards, in both their original forms and in their disingenuous updates. ‘Mumbai’ in particular was reprehensible from the start and ought to have been corrected, apologized for, and sanctioned.

When I saw that James Fallows had (rightly) rebuked Jennifer Rubin and called for an apology from the Washington Post for her own rush to judgment, I asked Fallows why The Atlantic doesn’t owe an apology as well for Goldberg’s ‘Mumbai’. He replied that he hadn’t read it until after he’d posted on Rubin, but anyway Goldberg had “included some ‘caveats’ that she didn’t.” He meant the third paragraph of ‘Mumbai’.

On Monday evening after discovering that the third paragraph was in fact an unacknowledged revision, I sent the evidence to Fallows. His response was simply to state that he didn’t know about an unacknowledged revision. It was only after I pressed him on it (“And now that you do?”) did Fallows allow that he would “look into this”.

I never learned what the investigation found, but a short time later Fallows sent without comment a link to Goldberg’s final revision of ‘Mumbai’ with its seemingly preposterous excuse for misleading readers.

Even though the ‘caveats’ he mentioned on Saturday had disappeared into thin air on Monday, Fallows did not and has not criticized Goldberg publicly. In fact, neither he nor the other Atlantic authors who took Rubin to task (Steve Clemons and Ta-Nehisi Coates) have so much as mentioned Goldberg’s controversial posts in writing. Fallows at least is well aware of them. This is the purest double-standard, and in Fallows’ case a circling of the wagons.

The Atlantic faces a tangle of journalistic lapses:

(a) Jeffrey Goldberg’s original reprehensible ‘Mumbai’ post

(b) Goldberg’s failure to signpost for readers a radical revision of ‘Mumbai’

(c) Goldberg’s seemingly incredible excuse for (b)

(d) Goldberg’s disingenuous ‘Suspect’ post

(e) the failure, or refusal (?), of Atlantic authors, especially James Fallows, to hold their colleagues to the same journalistic standards they hold others to

It is a harvest of shame.

Update, Wed. July 27: This evening at 6:39 ET, shortly after these two pieces were posted and crossposted at two other sites, the google cache for the original version of Goldberg's 'Mumbai' post was overwritten with the current version of the page. However I have a screen grab of the original version, should anybody wish to consult it. I have quoted its text in its entirety.

Update Two, Thursday: This Goldberg tweet at 7:52 PM on Friday is very probably nearly contemporaneous with the first addition to 'Mumbai' that he actually labeled as an "UPDATE" (which includes this: "I'm looking for something to read about Norwegian extremist groups. If anyone has any recommendations, I'll post and link.") That helps to confirm what I said here, that the first time his 'Mumbai' title included the word "UPDATED" was between 5:30 and 8:00 PM. The label "UPDATE" did not come into play until five hours after the post originally went up.

I’ve tidied up the English in one sentence here, marking additions with square brackets [ ].

Update Three, Friday July 29: James Fallows finally responds here to the allegations of wrongdoing and hypocrisy. It’s pretty thin stuff. He states that Goldberg was having connectivity problems “that morning” and would have to be crazy to lie about the circumstances of his unlabeled update to ‘Mumbai’ (from later in the day).

Also, our system logs changes, and any of us would be additionally crazy, knowing that, to pretend that something happened if it didn't.

Setting aside the fact that Goldberg has said some pretty crazy things – for example, rushing to blame the Norway attacks on Muslim terrorists – apparently neither Fallows nor Goldberg has made any effort to dig out those logs to prove that Goldberg misled his readers accidentally as he claims. As I’ve noted repeatedly, it should be a simple thing to produce that evidence if it actually backs up Goldberg’s story. Further, Goldberg said that his memory is hazy and his convoluted account is nearly incomprehensible. So why is nobody at The Atlantic trying to clarify what is otherwise an extreme embarrassment for them?

As regards the issue of whether he should condemn Goldberg’s rush to use the massacre to score points, Fallows argues (a) that others did not condemn Goldberg either, and (b) he didn’t see ‘Mumbai’ until Goldberg had already tried to walk back some of its extremism. Left unaddressed, I think, is whether Fallows and The Atlantic should condemn it now that he realizes it was originally as indefensible a post as the Jennifer Rubin piece he denounced. Goldberg has not admitted that he was wrong to post it. Quite the contrary, he continues to defend the decision. Goldberg is still trying to portray the controversy disingenuously as criticism that he merely ‘suspected’ al Qaeda’s involvement in Norway. That is intellectually dishonest (not to say crazy given that people can go back and read what he wrote).

crossposted from Flapola

General David Petraeus still lying about progress

Gareth Porter has uncovered a US military document that confirms Gen. Petraeus misled Americans repeatedly in 2010 about supposed progress under his command. It is part of a long pattern of seemingly deliberate deception by Petraeus.

The document, a graph from Task Force 435, demonstrates that the vast majority of Afghans captured during the 2010 surge, initially identified as Taliban fighters, were released by the US military within two weeks. The rate of release within 2 weeks was about 80%. It’s something that the Task Force commander himself acknowledged publicly last November. Porter calculates that subsequent reviews by the US military led to the release of at least another 10% of those initial prisoners within a few months. So the US military recognized that its operations in 2010 had detained large numbers of innocents and no more than 10% of these prisoners were actually associated with the Taliban.

But David Petraeus suppressed that information. Instead, in August 2010 and then again in December 2010 Petraeus released the inflated figures for prisoners and pretended that these represented the number of Taliban fighters who’d been captured. In other words, he deliberately misled the public by reporting 10 times as many Taliban fighters in custody as were actually captured.

Petraeus’ numbers for Talibans killed may also be inflated, though there is no documentation available to serve as a check on those assertions.

Petraeus has a record of deceiving the public. In 2007, when he was under pressure to show progress after six months of the surge in Iraq, Petraeus made a deceptive presentation to Congress. Though that presentation was greatly hyped in advance, it turned out to be extremely flimsy. He provided no written report, and instead showed Congress a series of slides that purported to represent progress in suppressing violence in Iraq, especially in Baghdad.

The problem was, as I revealed at the time, Petraeus’ slides for rates of violence in Baghdad were deceptive. They color-coded the city neighborhoods by sectarian majorities, and on Petraeus’ slides those neighborhoods all remained unchanged during the surge. That was a falsification of the largest factor in the ongoing civil war, the ongoing sectarian cleansing of Baghdad neighborhoods – which reached a peak during the very period Petraeus was reporting upon.

The Pentagon had already produced accurate slides portraying violence on correctly color-coded neighborhoods (for the so-called Jones Report). So it is hard to see why Petraeus’ slides should have been so deceptive on such a basic issue – unless deception was the goal.

In April 2008 Petraeus returned to give Congress another report on progress in Iraq. This time, without explanation or apology for his previously misleading presentation, Petraeus showed slides of Baghdad that were accurately color-coded. Substituting accurate for inaccurate slides was a tacit admission that his earlier presentation had been deceptive.

In his September 2007 testimony to Congress, Petraeus was also accused of relying on selective statistics for sectarian violence, with the purpose of exaggerating the progress achieved under his command.

There appears to be a pattern of falsification by General Petraeus.

crossposted at unbossed.com

Michele Bachmann, dumbest member of Congress?

To be deemed the stupidest member of Congress in these times would be quite a distinction. For years Michele Bachmann has been campaigning for the honor. Her bizarre misunderstandings about basic financial matters, for example, are legendary. Now I wonder whether she’s finally taken clear possession of that title. Speaking in New Hampshire on Friday about one of her favorite topics, the American Revolution, she showed that she has no understanding of the war’s most famous incident:

“It’s your state that fired the shot that was heard around the world, you are the state of Lexington and Concord (sic), you started the battle for liberty right here in your backyard,” Bachmann told a group of Republican activists at a fundraiser here on New Hampshire’s sea coast. “And the question to my fellow members of the House, and there are some, when will we start the battle for liberty in Washington D.C.?

This ignoramus then apparently repeated the same mistake to at least one other audience in NH on Saturday morning…and indeed more than once in the speech.

"What I love about New Hampshire and what we have in common is our extreme love for liberty," the potential GOP presidential candidate said. "You're the state where the shot was heard around the world in Lexington and Concord. And you put a marker in the ground and paid with the blood of your ancestors the very first price that had to be paid to make this the most magnificent nation that has ever arisen in the annals of man in 5,000 years of recorded history."

Politico’s story seems to refer to the same blundering speech on Saturday.

It’s bad enough to be ignorant of this seminal moment in American history. Worse still, Bachmann can’t be bothered to get basic facts straight even as she’s revving up a presidential bid. And she repeats her mistake without any apparent concern for accuracy, nor even an awareness that she’s blathering away in front of an audience that is surely far better informed than she is.

She must find that it pays to be ignorant.

crossposted at unbossed.com

Newt Gingrich, Loving America One Woman at a Time

Presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich, a serial adulterer, has helpfully explained to TV evangelist Pat Robertson’s network that some "not appropriate" things "happened in [his] life" partly due to his patriotism and his superb work ethic.

Newt Gingrich: “There’s no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate. And what I can tell you is that when I did things that were wrong, I wasn’t trapped in situation ethics, I was doing things that were wrong, and yet, I was doing them. I found that I felt compelled to seek God’s forgiveness. Not God’s understanding, but God’s forgiveness. I do believe in a forgiving God. And I think most people, deep down in their hearts hope there’s a forgiving God.

There’s more blather along those lines at the CBN link. It’s clear that Newt, having sought and (apparently) obtained God’s forgiveness, is now seeking the presidency. These are the lines along which he hopes to defend his repulsive personal life.

The first tactic will be to describe his vile behavior using passive/semi-passive circumlocutions (‘mistakes were made’). The second is to be photographed with God at his side as often as possible, preferably doing His work castigating non-Christians and the non-forgiving.

And thirdly, Newt plans to trumpet his squalid record as further evidence he’s a super duper patriot. I can already envisage his campaign motto for 2012:

Loving America One Woman at a Time!

crossposted at unbossed.com

When senators won’t take your call

This nauseating NYT profile of David Koch does have one perhaps unintentionally revealing passage. The very rich personage in this puff piece is quoted here referring to a prank call made last month by a Koch impersonator to the governor of Wisconsin, a conversation in which Scott Walker earnestly reassured the fake-billionaire that he could be counted on to crush the public unions.

Mr. Koch joked that the call could cause him problems. “I was thinking to myself, ‘My God, if I called up a senator or a congressman to discuss something with them, and they heard ‘David Koch is on the line,’ they’d immediately say, ‘That’s that fraud again — tell him to get lost!’ ” he said with a laugh.

I wonder how many non-rich Americans presume that, in the natural course of things, they can simply ring up a senator in Washington to “discuss something with them”? This is the explanation for the Supreme Court’s rather curious insistence that giving money to political causes has to be viewed as a form of free speech. For without it, how can you be sure that your phone call to a senator will even be taken?

Update The new danger that his calls might be ignored seems to be an obsession now for David Koch. He said something very similar in a Boston Globe interview: the other day:

"Right now, if I make a call to some important person and say my name is David Koch, they’re probably going to reject the call, thinking I’m another fraudster."

I wonder which people qualify as unimportant?

crossposted at unbossed.com

The drowning technique called waterboarding

It's good to see that the New York Times has finally decided to call a spade a spade. For years it has followed the Bush administration’s lead in using euphemisms and circumlocutions to describe the notorious and plainly illegal interrogation techniques inflicted on prisoners held overseas and accused of terrorist activities. Though it has expressed some pride in the alleged candor of its terminology, the Times had always avoided calling torture by its name.

In particular, the Times employs several evasive phrases to describe so-called waterboarding: ‘the near-drowning technique’; ‘the simulated drowning technique’; and most bizarrely ‘the controlled drowning technique’. Collectively, they ratify the position adopted by the Bush administration by insinuating that drowning can be something other than drowning in the right circumstances. But drowning describes the filling of lungs with liquid, nothing more or less. It’s not something that can be ‘simulated’ or ‘near’, and ‘control’ is beside the point. You wouldn’t apply any of those terms to castration, say, if the government inflicted that on prisoners and then worked to reverse or mitigate the damage done. So why did the Times try for so many years to soften the plain fact that the US government was having men drowned?

Now at least the Times is starting to find the courage or sense to state the plain truth. In just the last day in an editorial as well as in an article reviewing Donald Rumsfeld’s memoir the NT Times has taken to using the unadorned expression "the drowning technique called [or 'known as'] waterboarding".

It seems that the Times made a recent decision to permit, perhaps even to prefer, honest language in this regard. On Jan. 19th of this year it posted an article on Guantanamo prosecutions by Charlie Savage that also used the same frank expression.

It appears that the Times was feeling its way tentatively toward candor back in November of 2010. On Nov. 14th it referred to "the drowning technique called waterboarding" in an article about an investigation of Dr. James E. Mitchell, a rogue psychologist who promoted torturous interrogation techniques under the Bush administration. However 4 days earlier it had used and subsequently retracted that language in an article on the Justice Department’s failure to prosecute anybody for destroying CIA videotapes of several interrogations that employed torture.

This appears to be an interesting case study in the Times’ timidity in the face of Orwellian language. The article as originally published contained the following details [highlighting is mine]:

The role of once-secret memorandums about interrogation techniques by politically appointed lawyers in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel has been controversial. The documents, which leaked in 2004 when the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib was in the headlines, asserted that the president, as commander in chief, has the constitutional power to override anti-torture statutes. The memos also claimed that certain techniques — like stripping prisoners naked, keeping them awake for long periods, slamming them into walls, and subjecting them to the drowning technique called waterboarding — did not amount to torture

More than two months later (sometime after Jan. 15, 2011) At some later stage the article was revised. Only the newer version is available at the Times’ website. The most extensive alteration, indeed the only one that I find (this is not indicated by the Times), is that the foregoing paragraph was edited down to produce the following:

Mr. Holder was referring to once secret Justice Department memorandums asserting that certain interrogation techniques, like stripping prisoners naked, keeping them awake for long periods, slamming them into walls and subjecting them to waterboarding, would not violate antitorture laws.

In the original version I highlighted the parts that were removed subsequently. You can see how much that is purely factual has been stripped out of the original, all of it quite unflattering to the Bush administration. The later omissions included the phrase "the drowning technique", which was not even replaced by one of the Times' traditional evasive phrases.

It seems that the Times wasn’t quite ready last November to see the stark language of truth being used. But the policy of evasion regarding waterboarding (at least) has now been reversed.

Admittedly, the Times has twice in the past described waterboarding as “the torture technique”, in an editorial from 2008, and in a second one from 2009. But as far as I can determine it has never stated that candidly as a fact in a news story. And in any case it is only quite recently that the Times has become willing to go on record describing waterboarding as “the drowning technique”.

So two cheers for the new found courage of the New York Times’ sort-of convictions.

Update: It's not certain when the editing down of the Nov. 10 article happened, so the wording was revised to reflect that.

crossposted at unbossed.com

Birthright citizenship ninnies

Over and over I'm amazed at the people who pass themselves off as experts on the "controversy" of birthright citizenship in the US. Nearly all of them exhibit a profound and perverse ignorance of both history and law. Typically they present the matter (falsely) as a question of whether the Fourteenth Amendment went too far in granting citizenship to all children born here - including (shudder) many sprang from the wrong sort of parents.

Here's Marc Lacey of the NY Times repeating this idiocy once again:

The next big immigration battle looming on the horizon centers on illegal immigrants’ offspring, who are granted automatic citizenship like all other babies born on American soil. Arguing for an end to the policy, which is rooted in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, immigration hard-liners describe a wave of migrants like Ms. Vasquez stepping across the border in the advanced stages of pregnancy to have what are dismissively called “anchor babies.”

It's about damn time that somebody set these clowns straight. Bigotry is all fine and good, I suppose, but how are we supposed to have a properly divisive public debate on this non-issue when the facts are all turned upside down?

Birthright citizenship is NOT "rooted in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution". It dates back to the Declaration of Independence, even before the (current) Constitution was adopted. English Common Law had traditionally made people born in English lands (including these colonies) subjects of the King.

As Supreme Court Justice Noah Swayne said in 1866 (United States v. Rhodes):

"All persons born in the allegiance of the king are natural-born subjects, and all persons born in the allegiance of the United States are natural-born citizens. Birth and allegiance go together. Such is the rule of the common law, and it is the common law of this country…since as before the Revolution."

So it was simply assumed in 1776 that all people born in the states would become citizens; there was no need for an explicit assertion of that Common Law principle in the text of the Constitution (which does however refer to 'natural-born citizen[s]', thus demonstrating the principle was recognized).

All the 14th Amendment did, therefore, was to extend the normal expectation of birthright citizenship to the former slaves. For goodness sakes, how else could residents of America become citizens before 1865 if not for the principle that birth here made you a citizen?

I'm not going to discuss the more complicated question of how and when aboriginal Americans became US citizens, since that is not relevant to the faux-controversy du jour.

I will however mention this: Not only was this "issue" never seriously contested until recently, we can observe the principle of birthright citizenship being confirmed in federal court in the early 19th century...long before the 14th Amendment. For example, in 1830 (Inglis v. Trustees of Sailor's Snug Harbor) a court case involved the question of citizenship for children born here during the Revolutionary War. This is a nice case for our purposes. The Supreme Court found that children born in New York in 1776 in the months before the British occupation possessed automatic American citizenship, whereas children born afterwards while the British army actually held the city became English subjects at birth.

In short, birthright citizenship is rooted in English Common Law, not in the 14th Amendment. Those who pretend that they're addressing a "controversy" about how the 14th Amendment was intended to apply are simply talking nonsense.

PA GOP violates the law and the rights of service members

I’ve just received a flier in the mail from the Pennsylvania GOP that’s in clear violation of military law. It supports the re-election of Republican Congressman Charlie Dent (PA-15) and attacks his Democratic opponent, John Callahan. The flier, promoting Dent’s supposed support for military veterans, prominently employs a large photo of combat troops from the 1st Army Division. They are listening intently to an unseen speaker, presumably while on tour in Iraq or Afghanistan. At least one name tag is clearly visible.

Large bold letters accompany the photo: “Charlie Dent has received an “A” rating from the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America and he’s endorsed by the VFW.” Under the photo, very small print provides a disclaimer of sorts: “This photo does not imply endorsement by the Deparatment of Defense or any of its branches of the U.S. military.”

What the disclaimer does NOT say is that the PA GOP obtained permission from the DOD to use the photo in such a partisan campaign advertisement…much less the permission of the individual service members. I cannot believe that the GOP did obtain such permission because that would never have been granted. The US military has always been, from its very constitution, strictly apolitical.

The UCMJ prohibits all active duty personnel from engaging in political activities that would tend to represent a military service member as aligned with a particular candidate or party. Any allowable political activity must be conducted out of uniform. Here is a summary of DOD directives on permissible and impermissible political activity:

Any activity that may be viewed as associating the Department of Defense or the Department of Transportation, in the case of the Coast Guard, or any components of such Departments directly or indirectly with a partisan political cause or candidate shall be avoided.

[…]

Members of the Armed Forces on AD engaging in permissible political activities shall…

3. Refrain from participating in any political activity while in military uniform, as proscribed by DoD Directive 1334.1 (reference (f)), or using Government facilities or resources for furthering political activities.

Without their knowledge or permission, these soldiers have been co-opted against military regulations into Charlie Dent’s re-election campaign.

For any party to use a photograph of active duty troops in a partisan campaign ad is despicable. The PA GOP needs to apologize and Rep. Dent should distance himself from this attempt to use the US military as props in his campaign.

How do you subdue a people who will fight to the death over pine nut foraging rights?

Herodotus records a Delphic oracle warning the early Spartans against trying to subdue Arcadia “where men eat acorns”. When the Spartan military marched into Arcadia anyway, they met disaster. Acorn-foraging became a by-word for the ruggedness of the famously indomitable population in that remote mountainous region.

So I took notice when I came across this SIGACT among the nearly 92,000 Afghan war documents published yesterday. It’s a report of September 2007 from the remote province of Nuristan, along the Pakistan border. This region was the setting for Kipling’s “The man who would be king”. Here’s the part of the report that caught my attention:

There is a feud/civil conflict developing between 3 villages (Nanglam, Mashpah, and Malel) over pine nut foraging rights. 1 Afghan national has been killed, and 2 injured. Waliswol Muhammad Ali is attempting to mediate.

So how does anybody imagine that coalition forces can ever impose their will upon a population that is willing to fight to the death over pine nut foraging rights?

A simple question encompassing a world of problems for the US-led occupation. Afghans are desperately poor, their economy rudimentary, and their society rough hewn. They fight to defend their honor and minor slights can lead to feuds lasting generations. Even where ethnic and sectarian rivalries are absent, such as in Nuristan, social fractures between families and villages are the very stuff of the social fabric. I cannot conceive why any outsiders would suppose they could ever bend such people to their will.

Indeed Nuristan now is firmly back under Taliban rule. Americans increasingly came under brutal attack in the province, as a 2008 document singled out the by NY Times shows. Less than a year after this report, the US military suffered its worst casualties of the war in an attack at the village of Wanat. A little more than a year later, the US withdrew all its forces from the province after one base was nearly overrun.

For all the confusion of bad intelligence and chaos on the ground in Afghanistan, the evidence of these Wikileaks documents could hardly be clearer about one thing: Coalition forces are way out of their depth in trying to get a purchase on rural Afghan society.

crossposted at unbossed.com