Wrong yet again

Digby comments on a familiar topic: the right-wing's ability to consistently get away with being wrong. This time it's the Jamail Hussein witch hunt.

This particular incident is just one of many and it's what allowed so much of what's happened over the last few years to happen. The right's professional noise machine is creating a disorienting inability on the part of many journalists and citizens to be able to distinguish reality from fantasy --- and it's making it possible for someone like the president to be completely unresponsive to the people.

We keep expecting that reality is going to change things. For instance, we logically thought that the president would have to begin to withdraw in Iraq once his popularity tanked to unprecedented lows and his party lost the election. Instead, he just carries on, no matter what happens out here in the real world, because in the world the right wing has created, this last election shows that he has a mandate to escalate the war.

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Likewise, I would have thought that Michele Malkin would be compelled to issue a mea culpa for her jihad against the AP once it was proved that they didn't make up their source. Nothing. In fact, Eason Jordan chastizes the AP for its attitude rather than the relentless "critics" many of whom commonly accuse them of being in league with terrorists.

The AP erred in part by responding in a hot-headed, antagonistic way to questions about the existence of Jamil Hussein and the credibility of AP reports featuring comments from Captain Hussein. The AP's harsh statements fueled the suspicions of critics and those who otherwise would give the AP the benefit of the doubt.

The AP is a professional news organization which is subject to criticism like every other news organization, but there are very few people who think that the violence in Iraq is being fabricated for political reasons and they are the only "critics" who fail to give the AP the benefit of the doubt in its war reporting. These "civil war deniers" are centered in the most feverish quarters of the right wing blogosphere and talk radio.

This incident is just one of many (as Greenwald lays out here) in which the rightwing blogosphere has been caught making these kinds of errors. But if Eason Jordan is any example, they have not only failed to lose credibility, the more obvious the error, the more credibility they actually gain. This is new and I don't think we fully understand the ramifications of it yet.

The only thing you can compare it to would be if holocaust denial were to be considered perfectly acceptable. Just as the right continues to emulate its great enemy the Soviet Commies, it's morphing before our eyes into its own version of its new enemy, Iran. The irony is that the violence they are so intent upon denying is violence perpetrated by the Mahdi Army --- Iran's kissin' cousins. What a tangled web we weave when we try to operate in complicated situations with nothing but a lizard brain.