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It’s Monday again and “The Gates” in New York’s Central Park are coming down, but Gannongate is still around. In this edition, RAB at “Why are we back in Iraq?” nails Jeff Gannon for lifting a story from Bob Allen at the Associate Baptist Press and passing it off as his own. This example — one of many — has got RAB giving advice to future students of Gannon’s work:
Allen: “Roberta Combs, national Christian Coalition president, made unannounced visits in cities across Alabama Aug. 6 to tout the Republican governor’s tax plan, according to a story by EthicsDaily.com.”
Gannon: “The national Christian Coalition broke with the state organization when its president, Roberta Combs made unannounced visits in four cities across Alabama on August 6 to speak in favor of Riley’s plan.”
RAB’s advice:
Jeff Gannon “journalism” students, as you can see from that last example, the Jeff Gannon style of “journalism” means that when you steal from a source you don’t have to even cite the source that the source that you stole from cited.
Moving on, while actually moving backwards, two conservative bloggers like what they’re reading about the past presidential election in a couple of this week’s news magazines. Vodka Pundit, the self-proclaimed “only conservative in Western Massachusetts,” links to a paragraph from John Leo’s “Can Liberalism Survive?” in this week’s U.S. News as his “must-read and quote of the day”:
Liberals have been slow to grasp the mainstream reaction to the no-values culture, chalking it up to Karl Rove, sinister fundamentalists, racism, or the stupidity of the American voter. Since November 2, the withering contempt of liberals for ordinary Americans has been astonishing. Voting for Bush gave “quite average Americans a chance to feel superior,” said Andrew Hacker, a prominent liberal professor at Queens College. We are seeing the bitterness of elites who wish to lead, confronted by multitudes who do not wish to follow.
(Whether Hacker qualifies as a “liberal” is another matter — he’s better known as a social conservative but economic liberal — but that’s another story entirely, a bothersome nuance of the sort that neither Vodka Pundit nor John Leo has much patience for.)
For more “Republicans-are-better-than-Democrats at the game of politics,” Robert Clayton Dean at Samizdata.net celebrates the words of Michael Barone who, in Dean’s mind, is “truly the dean of American political analysis.”
All along Dean thought the best way to win an election was to motivate the base, and it was this effort, writes Barone in this week’s National Journal, that put Bush in the White House for his second term. Barone acknowledges the gains made by the Dems in turning out the base, but as Dean rehashes, “They were, however, buried by Republicans using a new networked model for campaign organization. As a result, the Republicans under George W. Bush may well have turned the Democrat’s flank, inaugurating an era of Republican dominance.”
Dean recommends a thorough read of the piece because, “Peddling its insights at cocktail parties will make you seem smarter than you are, and isn’t that the ultimate payoff for all the blogs you read?”
If that last line was a bit too much to stomach, then point your browser to the discerning eyes (check out the picture) of the Blonde Sagacity. She thinks the steroids controversy stealing the sports headline are over-hyped. She points to Bryant Gumbel’s comments that steroids are an answer to the “grueling schedules” that today’s players must endure, and further, she argues:
If you could have taken a shot in the butt in college before midterms that would have enhanced your memory, would you have done it? You would still have to study your ass off, but you’d remember more.
I guess I have never seen the big deal about steroid use. I did a paper on it for a genetics class I took and what I found was — if done in moderation and not stacked for months on end — they weren’t the ball-shrinking horror the media makes them out to be.
–Thomas Lang
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