Being A Villager

by digby

…means never having to say you’re sorry.

Following up on dday’s post below about the return of one of the original spite girls, Ceci Connolly, I thought it might be useful to remind everyone of the indefatigable Bob Somerby’s coverage of her journalistic blitzkrieg against Al Gore during election 2000. It’s all here and it’s all ugly.

Here’s just one tiny little example of Ceci Connolly’s journalistic malpractice:

Yesterday, Gore told a middle school class about his Vietnam service:

CONNOLLY (paragraph 2): Even though he and his parents opposed the war, Gore said he volunteered for the Army because he “thought it was the right thing to do.”

(3): Co-teaching Sandy Simpson’s history class, Gore described his months as a military journalist but said he could not remember his lottery number. (It was 30, a number that would have guaranteed being drafted had Gore not volunteered.)

We’ll let you decide why those last pointless facts are in this morning’s paper.

What Connolly absent-mindedly forgot to mention: Gore signed up for the army on August 8, 1969. The lottery came in December. When he volunteered, Gore had no way of knowing what his number would be. It’s not all that clear what it means to say that he even had a lottery number. Careful readers, though, can read the inferences in Connolly’s latest creation.

(We can’t prove it came from there, of course, but this is the kind of “fact” that would have come right out of the GOP oppo research department that all the kewl kidz were uncritically gobbling up with the same gusto they slurped down those Dove bars on Bush’s campaign plane.)

Ceci Connolly is still writing snotty, fictional scripts about people she doesn’t like. Dana Milbank is making junior high school drama class videos. Froomkin’s out on the street.

The worst thing about the right wingers calling the Washington Post the “liberal media” isn’t that it’s factually inaccurate — it’s that they are making liberals look so bad by lumping us in with these people.

Update: Speaking of Milbank, Julia reminded me of this:

MILBANK: You know what it is, Howie, I think that Gore is sanctimonious and that’s sort of the worst thing you can be in the eyes of the press. And he has been disliked all along and it was because he gives a sense that he’s better than us—he’s better than everybody, for that matter, but the sense that he’s better than us as reporters. Whereas President Bush probably is sure that he’s better than us—he’s probably right—but he does not convey that sense. He does not seem to be dripping with contempt when he looks at us, and I think that has something to do with the coverage.

There you go.

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