The Other McCain : Page 2114 : "One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up."

Having already discussed his unspeakably vile “Jungle Fever” smear on Sarah Palin, now we learn — via Ace of Spades — that McGinniss expended considerable effort pursuing a story that depicted her father Chuck Heath as having created “a lynch mob mentality.”

Rob Port at Say Anything was contacted by McGinniss because Port’s father was an Alaska State Trooper involved in the investigation of a case where a school teacher molested several girls. The school board fired the principal of the school for failing to take action after receiving accusations against the teacher. Chuck Heath, himself a teacher and evidently a friend of the principal, felt that the principal got a raw deal and protested against the career-destroying termination.

When Rob Port declined to discuss the case (Rob’s father remains good friends with Chuck Heath and the Palin family) McGinniss then forwarded to Rob someone else’s e-mail account of the controversy that including the “lynch mob” accusation, as well as the claim that “Chuck Heath resorted to violence — death threats, veiled threats, verbal violence, the complete disregard for the welfare of the affected children — against board members (women only) who were trying to protect the children of the district.”

McGinniss then told Port that, unless his father was willing to give his side of the story, he would “have to pay attention” to that “version of events.” (Rob has posted the e-mail exchange in PDF form.)

Now, what McGinniss is doing here is a familiar reporting trick, using information gathered from one source as leverage to get further information from another source. But the way he’s going about is reckless and irresponsible. By transmitting a lengthy written account of this story from someone he says was “deeply involved” in the controversy, McGinniss risks exposing his source’s identity. He further runs the risk of a defamation accusation, by transmitting to a third party an accusation against Chuck Heath made to him by his original source.

McGinniss’s publisher will certainly have a lawyer go over his manuscript to ensure that it doesn’t put the publisher at risk of a libel claim. But I guaran-damn-tee you any competent lawyer would have a screaming fit to know that McGinniss had e-mailed to someone else this “lynch mob” story about Chuck Heath. Such things are not done.

Let me explain with a hypothetical example:

Suppose that someone tells me that Joe McGinniss has a habit of purchasing stray cats at the local animal shelter and then ritually torturing the cats to death. Now, if I want to pursue an article about Cat-Killer McGinniss, I can contact the animal shelter and ask if, indeed, he’s made multiple purchases of stray cats. But if the clerk at the animal shelter asks why I want to know this, I can’t tell the clerk about the allegations that McGinniss has inflicted heinous torture on the poor creatures at the Satanic altar in his basement. Because to repeat such unsubstantiated accusations might put me at risk of a slander suit.

OK, so I go down to the county courthouse and try to look up police reports, to see if maybe Joe McGinniss’s neighbors have filed any nuisance complaints about the pitiful howls of stray cats being hideously mutilated during the midnight coven gatherings where McGinniss and his fellow Servants of Darkness offer their bloody ritual homage to Beelzbub. But if the court clerk asks me why I’m searching the archives, I can’t say, “Oh, just trying to find the documentation of the ghastly crimes committed by Joe McGinniss, the Satanic Cat Torturer.” Again, this would put me at risk of a slander suit.

Perhaps the layman might say to a professional journalist in such a (hypothetical) situation, “Why not just start out by asking McGinniss himself if the accusations are true?” And my answer would be, “Of course, he’d deny it. Satanic cat-killers are all notorious liars.” Besides, asking McGinniss himself would tip him off to the effect that someone had spilled the beans on his cult’s rituals, and he’d orchestrate a cover-up which might involve the brutal murder of anyone suspected of breaking the Servants of Darkness oath of silence.

From this hypothetical example, you see what I’m talking about. By forwarding to Rob Port that e-mail chock-full of potentially actionable defamatory statements about Chuck Heath, Joe McGinniss may have put himself in serious legal jeopardy. Beyond that, McGinniss may have compromised his source’s anonymity. If Chuck Heath is the violent lynch-mob leader the source claims, there’s nothing to stop “Lynch Mob Chuck” from putting two and two together, figuring out who this “deeply involved” source is, and then leading his posse of Wasilla thugs on a rampage of violent vengeance against the source.

Rob Port doesn’t seem to get the wild recklessness of McGinniss’s actions in this instance. Instead, Rob reaches a more mundane conclusion: “The moral of the story, though, is that McGinnis is a slime ball.”

And I wouldn’t trust him around cats. IYKWIMAITYD.

Did You Know the Word ‘Miscegenation’ Was Invented by Democrats as a Smear?

Posted on September 14, 2011September 15, 2011Comments

Nineteenth-century American newspapers were, in general, partisan in their politics, and the New York World was a Democrat paper. In 1863, two writers for the World, George Wakeman and David Goodman Croly, wrote a 72-page pamphlet that was published anonymously with the title, Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro.

The title term of the pamphlet was a new coinage, from the Latin words for “mix” and “race,” and the subject was decidedly inflammatory. During his 1858 debates with Democrats Stephen Douglass, Abraham Lincoln had been forced to stipulate that while he was opposed to slavery, he was not an advocate of “social equality” and certainly not in favor what that loaded phrase implied, “amalgamation” as it was then commonly termed. Republicans were very sensitive to such accusations, since even those whites who adamantly opposed slavery were in general horrifed by the thought of “amalgamation.” (Indeed, there was a strong element of white separatism in the “Free Soil” movement, and some Midwestern states had antebellum laws forbidding free blacks from settling there.)

Such was the context, then, within which the Miscegenation pamphlet was anonymously published. Though written by two Democrats, the argument was a sort of deadpan satire, written as a political hoax. The pamphlet argued in favor of interracial unions, asserting that mixed-race nations were actually superior to mono-racial nations, and put that argument into an explicitly political context:

It is idle to maintain that this present war is not a war for the negro … It is a war, if you please, of amalgamation … a war looking, as its final fruit, to the blending of the white and black… Let the war go on… until church, and state, and society recognize not only the propriety but the necessity of the fusion of the white and black—in short, until the great truth shall be declared in our public documents and announced in the messages of our Presidents, that it is desirable the white man should marry the black woman and the white woman the black man.

To further their hoax, Wakeman and Croly sent their disingenuous pamphlet to leading abolitionists, requesting their endorsements, which some of them willingly supplied in letters. The pamphlet was also advertised in abolitionist journals, and then the authors — whose identities were not discovered until years later — sprang their trap.

They provided copies of Miscegenation and of the abolitionist letters praising the pamphlet to an Ohio Democratic congressman, who gave a February 1864 speech in Congress denouncing the pamphlet’s doctrine and its advocates, suggesting that it expressed the Republican Party’s secret radical policy goals. A month later, Horace Greeley of the Republican paper, the New York Tribune, replied to Cox’s speech in an editorial that conveyed a laissez-faire attitude toward interracial marriage. In response, the World — the Democrat paper for which the pamphlet’s anonymous authors worked — published its own editorial, declaring that “the leading Republican journal of the country is the unblushing advocate of ‘miscegenation,’ which it ranks with the highest questions of social and political philosophy.” Thus began a national controversy that continued for months. Continue reading Did You Know the Word ‘Miscegenation’ Was Invented by Democrats as a Smear? →

Obama’s Down. Can GOP Put Him Out?

Posted on September 14, 2011September 14, 2011Comments

“There is only so much disaster-control you can do. When you’re in a disaster, you can spin it as ‘not that bad’ or ‘not my fault’ . . . but you cannot actually spin or speechify a horrific state of affairs into a positive one.”
— Ace of Spades, “Obama on the Ropes? Two GOP Polls Say He’s At His Lowest Point (So Far…)”

Nevertheless, Obama must try the impossible:

Having spent two decades in the pews of Reverend Wright’s church listening to the Hate America Gospel, President Zero is perhaps not familiar with the actual Bible. He therefore may not catch the near-sacrilegious resemblance between his sermon in Raleigh and Christ’s charge to His disciples: “If ye love me, keep my commandments.”

Everyone raised as a Christian will, however, recognize the hint of blasphemy in this spontaneous expression of Obama’s fundmental narcissism, and the cultic implications in the shouted adoration from his liberal flock. It’s a wonder they didn’t cover his path to Raleigh with palm fronds, or bring the blind and deaf to the rally, hoping to be healed by touching his garments. And I don’t doubt many talk-radio hosts will make the most of all that, as well they should.

Nevertheless, talk is just talk and what we need now is action to maximize the strategic momentum gained by Tuesday’s triumph. Continue reading Obama’s Down. Can GOP Put Him Out? →

Democrats Discover the SCOAMF Factor

Posted on September 14, 2011September 14, 2011Comments

“The Democratic Party’s rare loss of a congressional seat in its urban heartland Tuesday, accompanied by a blowout defeat in a Nevada special election, marked the latest in a string of demoralizing setbacks that threatened to deepen the party’s crisis of confidence and raise concerns about President Barack Obama’s political fortunes. . . . In a high-level campaign conference call Tuesday afternoon, Democratic donors and strategists commiserated over their disappointment in Obama. A source on the call described the mood as ‘awful.’”
— Jonathan Martin, Ben Smith and Jake Sherman, “Twin Defeats Spark Democratic Fears,” Politico

Nothing is sweeter in politics that those occasions when you deliver a victory so shocking in its implications that it sends the opposition into an existential crisis. Tuesday’s special election in New York’s 9th District — echoed by the lesser-noted GOP landslide in Nevada’s 2nd District — was such an occasion and, as the commentariat rushes to analyze and interpret this historic event, conservatives need to avoid liberal efforts to distract from the real message: Barack Obama is a Stuttering Clusterf**k of a Miserable Failure.

Democrats don’t want to admit this, for obvious reasons. Three years ago they interpreted Obama’s election as ratifying their own deepest beliefs — that the Republican ascendancy of 1994-2006 was a political mirage, that the conservative movement’s ability to influence the national discourse was on the wane, and that demographic trends were leading toward a permanent progressive majority. Years of efforts and many millions of dollars expended to attack and discredit conservative voices — the Media Matters/MSNBC onslaught against Fox News, talk radio, Andrew Breitbart, et al. — were designed to suppress criticism of the progressive message. And with Obama’s election in 2008, liberals got their hands on a cudgel that they were eager to wield with bloodthirsty zeal: If you don’t vote Democrat, you’re a racist! Continue reading Democrats Discover the SCOAMF Factor →

Could Anthony Weiner Offer Jim Moran Some Life Coaching?

Posted on September 14, 2011September 14, 2011Comments

by The World’s Youngest Blogger

Review dad’s posts below. I’m not even two months old yet, and it’s as obvious as an empty milk bottle that the government has run the country dry with spending too much.

Continue reading Could Anthony Weiner Offer Jim Moran Some Life Coaching? →

That Puts Stacy And Me At +7, Right?

Posted on September 14, 2011September 14, 2011Comments

by Smitty

Volokh reproduces a study in institutions and public confidence by the AP-National Constitution Center poll, showing that the extreme/no-confidence value for blogs is –39, but the military is +46. I guess we just sum those figures for this blog, since I’m in the military and Stacy’s the marquee blogger.

Yeah, new math: yeah.

Peopleware Goes To Software

Posted on September 14, 2011September 14, 2011Comments

by Smitty

Megan McArdle makes a point that I think I can clarify a bit:

The jobs that are being automated are the stable, well-paying jobs where you could settle in and know exactly what you’d be doing for years. As Arnold says, if you can define it, you can probably outline it specifically enough to outsource, either to a lower-wage worker somewhere else, or to a computer.

Restated, jobs that involve information management, especially in well-bounded cases, are readily re-stated in software.

So, knowing how to

write code,
administer information systems,
do jobs that have a significant ‘real-world’ component (fixing cars),
involve creativity,
are not easily structured in code (customer service)

are likely to remain longer.

Interestingly, these decades into the information age, one tough nut to crack is picking over somebody else’s idea of an information system, when it comes to maintaining or re-engineering information systems. The Daily WTF is replete with examples.

Years ago, I was working on porting a client/server system to a web-enabled database. ASP against Oracle 8i, to date myself and hint at the fun it entailed. The application was hugely reporting-intensive. The old Project Manager had been retained as a consultant.

You tried to avoid being clever, but I was kind of backed into a corner. So I coded a rather smart .asp file that looked at the user’s request, and then did a lot of surgery to it before presenting something to the database for the query. A messy database schema sort of looked like the logical whole you would have thought it was.

Punchline: the old PM looks at the work, and tells me I have replaced 200+ explicit queries in the original client/server code. I heaved a sigh of relief, because this explained some of the odd column orderings of the reports, which detail I had no interest in capturing.

Back on topic, though, the Information Age has blown away vast swaths of the private sector, and is even now crushing the public sector. Private citizens just do not require the government, especially the federal government, managing their birth, housing, health, education, employment, and retirement. Private citizens do not need legions of civil servants reading email, shuffling from meeting to meeting, and emitting PowerPoint all day. This must stop.

Request to somebody with better data access: can we refer to civil service hires as ‘positions’, and private sector as ‘jobs’? I should like to see what the employment numbers look like without the invisible hand of Uncle Sam stirring the pot.