AMERICAN DIGEST: Useful Idiots Archives

Useful Idiots

Career First: Senator Harry Reid Apologizes for Telling the Truth

"Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid apologized on Saturday for saying Barack Obama should seek — and could win — the White House because Obama was a "light skinned" African-American "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one." -- Chicago Tribune

With his apology for the truth, Reid joins Vice-President Joe Biden on the shamed truth-teller podium for his 2007 remark: ""I mean, you got the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy."

Posted by Vanderleun at Jan 9, 2010 4:50 PM | Comments (4) | QuickLink:

Fact Checking? At the New York Times? Shirley, You Jest.

Error slut Alessandra Stanley is at it again at the New York Times with An Appraisal - Cronkite’s Signature Mix of Authority and Approachability. Now there are corrections and corrections, but by any order of magnitude this is a whopper.

Correction: July 22, 2009 -- An appraisal on Saturday about Walter Cronkite’s career included a number of errors. In some copies, it misstated the date that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed and referred incorrectly to Mr. Cronkite’s coverage of D-Day. Dr. King was killed on April 4, 1968, not April 30. Mr. Cronkite covered the D-Day landing from a warplane; he did not storm the beaches. In addition, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969, not July 26. “The CBS Evening News” overtook “The Huntley-Brinkley Report” on NBC in the ratings during the 1967-68 television season, not after Chet Huntley retired in 1970. A communications satellite used to relay correspondents’ reports from around the world was Telstar, not Telestar. Howard K. Smith was not one of the CBS correspondents Mr. Cronkite would turn to for reports from the field after he became anchor of “The CBS Evening News” in 1962; he left CBS before Mr. Cronkite was the anchor. Because of an editing error, the appraisal also misstated the name of the news agency for which Mr. Cronkite was Moscow bureau chief after World War II. At that time it was United Press, not United Press International.

I'll give her a pass on the "editing error" of UP vs. UPI since that's laid off on some functionaries at the times that are laughably referred to as "editors." The rest of the roster, however, is just down to the kind of sloppy drivel that Stanley has become infamous for. I'd call for a special Dumbth Award with oakleaf cluster for getting the date of the moon landing wrong 3 (Three!) days before the 40th anniversary of same, but it is all too typical of this Timesian's bumbling career of error.

Craig Silverman @ CJR sums up her recent career score in Wrong, Wrong, Wrong, Wrong, Wrong, Wrong with

Stanley has been responsible for nine corrections so far this year. By my count in Nexis, she had fourteen corrections in 2008, twelve in 2007, and fifteen in 2006. Averaging just over a correction a month is not something to be proud of. But that’s still better than before she attracted so much attention. Stanley had twenty-three corrections in 2005, the year everyone noticed her predilection for error, and twenty-six in 2004. Perhaps the decline in corrections between 2005 and 2006 was in part due to the attention focused on her.

But it goes beyond that when we reflect that the correction itself references an "editing error." With an error rate such as Stanley's you have to ask if there was any editing oversight at all on the story? Slim to none would be my guess.

This also raises into high relief the "fact based reality" of a lot of Times stories. After all, it cannot have been news to the newspaper that Walter Cronkite was, for many years now, on the way out. It cannot have escaped the people responsible for obituaries at the Times that they'd best keep their files up-to-date and factually bulletproof. Are these files kept in a New York Times fact lock-box so that scribblers such as Stanley can't access them? Is Wikipedia blocked at the Times much as Twitter is blocked at the White House? Or has the culture of lies, misdirection, "unnamed sources" that have no names, Obamallatio ™, and obfuscation set in so deeply at the New York Times that they just don't give a damn any longer?

I suspect it is the latter. Maureen Dowd avoids it all by just pulling her pungent quotes from "unnamed sources" out of her email or her ass. Maybe Stanley should do the same. The lingering question about her continued employment turns the crude question "Who do I have to blow around here to get a job" on its head to become, "Who does Stanley have to not blow at the New York Times to get fired?"

Posted by Vanderleun at Jul 24, 2009 2:13 PM | Comments (1) | QuickLink:

Anything to Declare?

"Visas? I don't got to show you no steenkin' visas!" You'd think some people would at least try to stay on the down-low, but no. Marco Lugo walked through Miami International Airport Monday after arriving on a flight from Mexico City for a family visit.

Posted by Vanderleun at Apr 27, 2009 6:15 PM | Comments (2) | QuickLink:

"AIG Cribs Tour:" Drive-By in Connecticut

Where's a suicide bomber when you need one? On the bus? Of course....

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun at Mar 21, 2009 7:35 AM | Comments (13) | QuickLink:

Rush vs Doofus: Once Again I Am Proud, Damned Proud, Not to Be a Republican

Michael Steele, the Already Rusting Great New Hope of the Republicans, beclowned himself -- not for the first and not for the last time -- when he offered up the brain-dead observation:

"Rush Limbaugh is an entertainer. Rush Limbaugh's whole thing is entertainment," Steele said. "Yes, it is incendiary. Yes, it is ugly."

Actually, it seems to me that the ugly thing going in the Republican Party these days is the cheap effort to "compete" with the style and appearance of the Democratic leadership rather than the substance of its nefarious aims. It certainly cannot be said that the rise of Steele is utterly unconnected to the election of Obama, but if Steele's slam of Limbaugh is indicative of his "substance," I'll wait for the resurrection of "The Know-Nothings or the Whigs before giving allegiance to any party.

I don't know about you, but I am fed up with the current Republican party-animal-line of trashing their supposed constituency.

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun at Mar 2, 2009 2:49 PM | Comments (26) | QuickLink:

Tech Support for Troubled Marriages

Glitch:

Please help! I took my husband's i-phone and found a raunchy picture of him attached to an e-mail to a woman in his sent e-mail file (a Yahoo account). When I approached him about this (I think that he is cheating on me) he admitted that he took the picture but says that he never sent it to anyone. He claims that he went to the Genius Bar at the local Apple store and they told him that it is an i-phone glitch: that photos sometimes automatically attach themselves to an e-mail address and appear in the sent folder, even though no e-mail was ever sent. Has anyone ever heard of this happening? The future of my marriage depends on this answer! - Apple - Support - Discussions - Pictures automatically attach to e-mail? ...

Posted by Vanderleun at Dec 2, 2008 10:50 AM | Comments (4) | QuickLink:

An Old Media Trend I Endorse

Color me with many coats of Schadenfreude. I know, I know. I'm weak. I can't help it, but I just love stories like this: Times Company Stock Hits Another 52-Week Low

"With the new charge and related tax adjustments, the Times had a net loss of $106 million, or 74 cents a share, in the third quarter, compared with a profit of $13.4 million, or 9 cents a share, a year earlier."

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun at Nov 11, 2008 7:17 PM | Comments (6) | QuickLink:

Obamanomics: Already a Day Late and Many Dollars Short

“Talking about they’ll mail it to us. I ain’t worried about that, man. They’re not going to mail nothin’,” said Martin.

Posted by Vanderleun at Nov 6, 2008 1:08 PM | Comments (6) | QuickLink:

More Mush from the Wimps: This Just In from T. Coddington Van Voorhees VII

That stalwart conservative and relentless social bouder, T. Coddington Van Voorhees VII (known as T-Bag to his twinks) has just chimed in with a ripping rant:

"How can I say this, you ask? One look at this Obama chap is all the answer you need. Suave, tanned, unflappable, Harvard connections; it's obvious that here is a man to the conservative manor born. One imagines him at the helm of the Ship of State, basked in the sunlight diffusing through the seaspray over the bow, like some beautiful rugged Othello from a rapturous Ralph Lauren catalog, calmly issuing instructions to the deck crew in that magnificent mellifluous baritone of his. It's that easy-going, almost effortless grace that has all the A-list conservatives like David Frum and Kathleen Parker whispering Reaganesque in hushed tones. Even Peggy Noonan -- the Grand Dame of Gipperism -- has succumbed to Obama's undeniable conservative charms. Just last month I listened to her wax poetic about the Adonis of Chicago between chukkers at the Newport Club polo tournament final. "Why Peggy, you old dowager," I quipped, "I believe you just had an orgasm." - iowahawk: As a Conservative, I Must Say I Do Quite Like the Cut of this Obama Fellow's Jib

Jolly good, what?

Posted by Vanderleun at Oct 30, 2008 1:33 PM | Comments (6) | QuickLink:

Outslicking Slick Willie

Ah, the massed chants praising the leader rising in the background. The glazed eyes. The metronomic nodding. The sprinkling in of 3rd tier celebrities with ordinary people. The ritual gestures. The awestruck worship. The slickness. The repeating slogans. The slowly gathering masses.

When's the last time we saw this kind of popular delusion take hold of crowds?

And people like Ann Althouse are concerned with imagined letters in the night?

[HT: neo-neocon "A cult is born: they believe in him"]

Posted by Vanderleun at Mar 1, 2008 9:38 AM | Comments (14) | QuickLink:

The Conservative No McCain Zone: Big Arguments for a Bad Idea

Some years ago I recall leafing through a slight volume of the collected sayings of New York City taxi drivers. One that stuck in my mind was that of a Bengali driver who observed, "Bicycle messengers, they thirst for death."

Watching the blistering salvos fired against a McCain ascendency throughout the net in the past week has put me in mind of that observation, only applied to the incondite arguments of recondite Republicans:

The gist of the Republican argument against McCain seems to be that he is not pure enough for many conservatives. I submit that that is precisely the point. The pure products of extreme ideology don't win elections in this country. The pure products of ideology start, well, civil wars.

NeoNeoCon has a long exegesis on this bizarre phenomenon at Conservatives jump the shark: party purity über alles where she states the obvious:

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun at Feb 4, 2008 10:34 AM | Comments (92) | QuickLink: