Hewitt Blog

After Ames the next big straw poll will be the balloting at the Texas GOP State Convention. Townhall.com is helping to organize it, and I will be broadcasting from the
Fort Worth Convention Center on Friday, August 31 and perhaps even Saturday, September 1. Thousands of grassroots Republicans will participate in the live poll to select the leading 2008 GOP presidential nominee, and will be another key marker of early momentum in a key Super Duper Tuesday state. The event doesn't have the buzz that Ames does --yet. Stay tuned.


 

I can see from Hugh's post that the Romney campaign has made its decision not to participate in the YouTube debate. You heard it here first! (Of course, I kid.)

While I can certainly appreciate the desire to avoid "set up" questions, it is intellectually dishonest to simultaneously attack the Democrats for running from Fox News while raising the red flag at agenda journalism in the form of CNN/YouTube. I couldn't agree more with what one of the Republican candidates said about this:

"Why is it that the Democrats wouldn't even go on Fox, but we Republicans are happy to sit there and have Chris Matthews of the Carter administration, former chief of staff to (ex-House speaker) Tip O'Neill? We're happy to sit there and have him dish questions to us, but they won't even go on Fox."

That candidate? Mitt Romney.

For years, we have rightly derided the media's farcical defense of its "layers upon layers of fact checkers and editors." And yet that is what Hugh is asking to see more of. Yes -- the media "posed" questions via YouTube that they would never have actually asked themselves. That's what bloggers do everyday, isn't it?

Hugh says, "Go to all the networks and talk to all the journalists, yes" (but not YouTube users). But why should it matter if I am a journalist? Do we now believe that journalists are the fount of all knowledge and wisdom? Isn't the vigorous belief that they are manifestly not what the right-blogosphere was founded on? You know where I learned that? Hugh Hewitt's Blog: The Information Reformation That is Sweeping Our World.

It's not that we look old by rejecting this debate -- and that we do. It's that we look like CBS executives tut-tutting at the 2008 version of the pajama-clad bloggers that brought down Dan Rather, with their messiness and lack of editorial control.

Hugh also argues that "the format diminishes the importance of the presidency, at least as it was managed by CNN." The gripping fear of appearing "unpresidential" is what weighs heavily on the minds of the campaign's high commands. Okay, that sounds legitimate in theory. But we had a controlled experiment in that on Monday night. Did all the snowmen and music videos make Hillary Clinton appear "unpresidential?" I'm sorry, but I saw the same debate you did, and they didn't. The Democratic candidates proved themselves unfit to lead by the content of their answers, not by who was asking the questions. Arguably, Mitt's best moment in the first debate was when we took out that idiot questioner who asked what he hated about America. As commenter manfred put it in response to my earlier post:

I am not sure, though, that I agree that being President or running for President means you are too dignified for odd-ball questions. You are running to represent the people -- not to be king. I think we mystify the office too much already. He is not our superior -- he is our servant. He serves at OUR pleasure, and he should never forget that or get too big for his britches (or her, as the case may be in a bit more than a year). If a question strikes you as being silly, answer it with grace. It needn't be an embarrassing moment -- it can show what you are made of.

I'm no CNN fan either, Hugh. I hope that now that the CNN/YouTube debate is for all intents and purposes dead, it can reconstituted as a Fox News/YouTube debate and scheduled at a time that is convenient for all the candidates.

But here's the difference between this and any ordinary debate. In an open source environment, both conservatives and liberals have an equal opportunity to shape the outcome. Concerned about loaded questions? Have the Republican National Committee and other conservative groups send emails to their massive lists encouraging submissions. State parties should set up video cameras at shopping malls in GOP base areas taking questions and uploading them. This can be a powerful galvanizing moment in bringing thousands more Republicans online. We would have been better as a party for having it in its full glory.

Some Republicans will look at their candidates pulling out and fall in line. But we need to look at the bigger picture here. The Republican Party faces a demographic and technological emergency in 2008. We are losing an entire generation of voters -- and once lost, it will be very, very, very hard to get them back. Refusing to engage them on their own terms, in their choice of media, won't help things.

More to the point, we already face a massive online fundraising gap that will only get worse as our attitude towards the medium morphs from indifference into outright hostility. I've worked at this stuff long enough to know that you get out of the Internet what you put in. I had hoped that things would get better with Hillary as the nominee, but with unforced errors like this, now I'm not so sure they will. By trying to maintain an unshakable aura of decorum, by avoiding a tough question or two, we may be winning a battle, but we are losing the war.
 

The YouTube debate was a silly, and at times absurd exercise in giving air time to many idiots separated by an occasional responsible speaker, and the question selection by CNN demonstrated a huge left-wing bias which will inevitably appear in any subsequent YouTube debate organized by the MSM which is overwhelmingly staffed by the left.

When journalists ask questions, they have to at least try to balance the questions (unless it is Chris Matthews). Asking really dumb, offensive, or inappropriate questions usually doesn't happen as a result.

But as we saw with the "insufficiently black" question, the CNN team used the device of the third party video to inject a question that would have embarrassed any anchor posing it.

If the GOP candidates agree to this format, expect a series of cheap shots about all of the top tier candidates. Patrick worries that the Republicans will appear behind the times if they take a pass. Perhaps, but if that means skipping a no win set-up where MSM agenda journalists work for weeks to put a video shiv into one or more of the Big Three, I am for it. The second tier folks will no doubt show up hoping for a Hail mary moment, but Giuliani, Romney and Thompson ought to say no thanks.

To illustrate,take a look at this story --a bit of agenda journalism that Jonathan Martin at Politico.com told me on air today is built on a story that has been floating around for months. Imagine some YouTube video asking Rudy why he's defending a suspected pedophile. No MSMer would dare ask such a loaded question, but imagine what the gang at CNN would do. They covered for the Dems with a series of overwhelmingly left-biased questions at the first YouTube debate, with a very few tough, serious questions thrown in. That dynamic would change completely in a GOP YouTube debate --they or their counterparts at a different network will be gunning for the Republicans, and the question set will be designed to embarrass or ridicule.

Go to all the networks and talk to all the journalists, yes. It was cowardly for the Dems to refuse to debate on Fox with folks like Brit Hume and Chris Wallace asking the questions. It was a good move to let Chris Matthews moderate the first debate, and also for the device of read questions to be introduced there (especially since the Politico team was far more interested in serious questions than CNN was.)

But skip the set-ups. Not only is it ridiculously bad politics, the format diminishes the importance of the presidency, at least as it was managed by CNN.

 

Over the last few hours, I'd been hearing buzz that GOP candidates were going wobbly on the CNN/YouTube debate. I was dismissive. Given the huge earned media hit the Democrats got this week, the fact that even the highly partisan questioners acquitted themselves better than Chris Matthews did in the first debate, and the sponsorship of the powerful Republican Party of Florida, I didn't think the GOP candidates would make the political mistake of passing up it up.

I was apparently wrong. Rudy Giuliani is unlikely to participate, according to an official source.

And Mitt Romney wouldn't commit, dissing the "snowman question."

Mitt Romney didn't like some of the more frivolous trappings and told the New Hampshire Union Leader that "I think the presidency ought to be held at a higher level than having to answer questions from a snowman."

I would now expect numerous candidates to bail, just like they did at Ames, citing the lack of a frontrunner.

This is a big mistake. The Democrats are afraid to answer questions from Big Bad Fox News Anchors, and the Republicans are afraid to answer questions from regular people. Which is worse?

It's stuff like this that will set the GOP back an election cycle or more on the Internet. No matter the snazzy Web features and YouTube videos they may put up, if they're fundamentally uncomfortable with the idea of interacting with real people online, what's the point?

Having spent the better part of a decade working at the intersection of politics and the Web, I can't help but feel of a deep, deep sense of dismay that we're missing something so basic. This is EXACTLY why I am afraid that we will be outraised by $100 million or more in 2008.

Yes, some of the questions on Monday were trivial. Yes, they were partisan. (I expect many of the 9/17 questioners to be partisan Republicans.) Yes, they were messy. But so is democracy. And the fact that some place so much faith in the broken mainstream media over a benign format like this one says a lot about the difficult straits the Republicans are in right now.

Perhaps the rest of the field will prove me wrong. 

Posted by Generalissimo

Not 24 hours ago, Senate majority leader Harry Reid threw a tantrum and arm twisted the rest of the Senate Democrats, most notably Barack Obama, into throwing out a border security amendment offered by South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham as being not germane to the homeland security appropriations bill. Last night, $3 billion dollars of funding for Border Patrol agents, 700 miles of fencing, 300 miles of vehicle barriers, all of the recommended steps to regain control of our Southern border, that, to Democrats, was not germane to homeland security.

Fortunately for America, Harry Reid slept on it. He arose this morning refreshed, with a more clear head, and took to the Senate floor this morning. This is what he had to say.

I say to my friend from Texas, what a difference a night makes. As you know, as some know, not very many, Senator Cornyn and I, Senator Graham and a few others, we were trying to work something out on this border security, and Senator Cornyn and I were the last two to speak on this issue. And like a lot of things around here, if you don’t get your way, you kind of throw a tantrum a lot of times. And I didn’t get my way, so I thought I would throw just a little tantrum. And the evening has brought to my attention that I was wrong, Senator Cornyn was right. I hate to acknowledge that, but that’s basically valid. And so having said that, Mr. President, and swallowing a bit of pride that I shouldn’t have had, I now ask unanimous consent that when the Senate resumes consideration of HR2638 today, which will be just in a few mintues, that the time until 11:35 be for debate with respect to the Graham-Pryor border security amendment. And that has Senator from Texas language in there.

Yes, Harry Reid threw a little tantrum. If you want to hear it, you can go here. Reid got caught off-guard yesterday by a Republican amendment to the homeland security appropriations bill, an amendment that would have embarrassed Reid two ways. It would have cut the legs out from under Ted Kennedy in that the amendment virtually ignored all of the liberal provisions written by Kennedy that caused so many conservatives to abandon support and openly revolt against the comprehensive immigration bill earlier this summer. This amendment focuses on an increase in funding for many of the security first provisions conservatives have been looking for. It’s not enough, but it’s a good start. The other embarrassment to Reid would be that the Republicans hijacked the floor agenda yet again, showing that Reid’s management skills as majority leader were questionable at best.

So in order to prevent being embarrassed, Reid put Barack Obama on the spot, for no other reason than he happened to have presiding officer duty at the time, having him rule that border security not be germane to homeland security. The Senate voted largely along partisan lines to support that ruling.

Today, Reid realized that was probably not the smartest move he’s made this year, which considering the Iraq and immigration gaffes he’s made in the last seven months is saying something, and reversed himself. After eating crow on the Senate floor, and an hour or so of debate, the Senate voted 89-1 to approve the Graham amendment, attaching it to the homeland security bill, meaning that in a less than one day span, about 40 Democratic Senators reversed themselves.

Barack Obama abstained from voting, which coming on the heels of walking the plank yesterday, adds to the doubt as to whether the first term Illinois Senator has the political acumen required for the presidency. If he would flipped a coin to decide how to proceed on these two votes, yesterday and today, the odds are he would have at least gotten one right, instead of making an error yesterday, and not even bothering to take the opportunity to correct the mistake today.

It’s good to know, however, that the Senate Democrats can get something right when it comes to national security…provided their leadership can sleep on it and have a second shot at it the next day.

 

Matthew Yglesias wants people to stop being mean to The New Republic, thus establishing young Matthew as a key component of the Mary Mapes school of journalism, where truthiness in the causes of the left forgives all. "All these people need to stop," exclaims Ygelsias. "They need to take a deep breath. They need to apologize to the people at TNR who've wasted huge amounts of time dealing with their nonsense."

Ace, though, isn't heeding Matthew's heartfelt plea to let the New Republic get back to the work the American people expect them to do.

John Podhoretz makes the point that the key question is whether Beauchamp's allegations are true, but I think John is wrong to conclude that the circumstances of how Beauchamp came to be published are irrelevant. How The New Republic selects its correspondents and how it checks their work are of course central issues in judging the magazine's reputation both in the present and going forward. How its own writers react to the unfolding controversy also reflects on them, which is why I keep checking The Plank to see when the gang over there will decide to step up and defend the magazine or announce their dismay.

I recall how the editorial staff at the Los Angeles Times staged a mutiny when the paper entered into the (in journalism circles) infamous Staples Center deal.

I recall as well how the Jayson Blair scandal engulfed the entire New York Times' organization for weeks.

Well here we have one of nation's oldest --and until recent years-- deeply respected magazines of political opinion mired in a controversy that tells us a great deal about the editorial judgments of its leadership --and its blogging staff.

So I have to disagree with J-Pod: All the details matter in formulating a judgment not just about the Beauchamp piece, but about the magazine's credibility generally and especially with regard to its editorial opinions about the war. If the accusations made by Beauchamp turn out to be complete fabrications, it will not be the worst possible outcome for the magazine. The worst kind of outcome for the magazine is if the accusations, like Mapes' fantasy documents, turn out to be complete fabrications that ought to have been obvious but which were not discovered because of staff politics or ideological blinkers.

It is possible that Private Beauchamp saw the things he saw, and that would exonerate him as a writer, though not necessarily in the eyes of his comrades in the field, from whom we have not yet heard. He may also find that what he though was funny --if true-- turns out not to be funny to the higher command, but in fact the occasion for court martial. I don't know, though I suspect we all will in fairly short order.

I do know that Dean's central point --that TNR published a piece designed to give its readers a horrible impression of America's military which is in fact doing a superb job under very difficult conditions-- hasn't been rebutted by anyone. That TNR is anti-military seems to me as obvious as Mapes' anti-Bush inclination. Certainly a magazine that respected and valued the nation's soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines would not casually publish such a column as Beauchamp's, period.

UPDATE: More from Ace:

Jeff Emmanuel, a special ops vet, offers to be the new Baghdad Diarist.

He won't get the job. For one thing, he's qualified. For another thing, he can't be guaranteed to deliver the anti-military fictions Beauchamp did.

For a third thing, he's not going steady with anyone at TNR.

Allah's got lots of updates, hard to keep up with it all.

 

Don't miss this round-up of the trial of Conrad Black by Mark Steyn. At 7,500 words it is far longer than the typical Steyn column, and take your time reading it. I'll not grab one or two paragraphs, but just one line as a tease to this amazing summary of the Black proceedings: "I wonder whether it wasn't that he just seemed too outsized for the proceedings: to modify Gloria Swanson, Conrad Black was still big, but the case had got small."

Black's lawyers will do well to get this piece attached to and incorporated by reference their appeal brief. Steyn has done a much better job of defending Black than they did.

Steyn's blogging from the trial and his summary piece also underscore what I have written before: The byline is the brand for journalism in the age of new media. If any of the struggling papers had a clue, they'd break the bank and sign Steyn to as near-an-exclusive as they could manage, and then turn him free to write at length about anything going on anywhere in the world, but nudging him towards complicated courtroom dramas. Like Lileks, like Bill Bryson, like a very few others, Steyn seems incapable of writing dull prose, no matter how complicated the subject matter, or remote from the audience the key figures are.

Steyn is so skilled at his craft, he could have made TimesSelect work. (HT: Kausfiles.)
And that's saying a lot.
 

Writes BCB:

Michael Moore and his ilk are singing the praises of socialized medicine. Touting the British, Canadian and even Cuban systems as better than the US. I guess we are not supposed to notice things like this report about the hospitals in Britain. That's where a new study shows that one third of all hospital deaths in Britain could have been avoided. The deaths were attributed to several factors, including gross patient neglect and a lack of professional competence.

Read the whole thing. Don't get sick(ko) in the UK if you can help it.

 

Finally, we have reached the end of the beginning of the “Scott Thomas” affair. Of all the sad media misadventures we’ve seen over the past four years, this one will almost surely go down as the most pathetic.

Here’s one thing we know for sure about Scott Thomas Beauchamp. He went off to war to become a writer. Earlier today, I suggested that he might be this war’s John Kerry. But from reading Beauchamp’s blog, that’s clearly not what he had in mind. As a commenter in a previous post noted, he wanted to be this war’s Oliver Stone or Anthony Swofford – a guy who emerged from his time at war as an artiste in full flower.

I must note how much Beauchamp’s blogging confessionals differ from the comments of the many soldiers I interviewed for “The 9/11 Generation.” To a man, the men I interviewed joined the Armed Forces to serve their country. Beauchamp seems more like the poster-boy for the self-esteem generation as it heads off to war. It was all about him, and his simultaneous quests for legitimacy and artist-hood.

The war-bound artiste had a decided predisposition to what kind of stories he was going to tell. Following in Swofford’s and Stone’s footsteps, he was going to document the absurdity and barbarism of war. It’s a measure of Beauchamp’s immaturity that he decided what his autobiographical story would be before he actually lived it. This is one seriously pitiable individual.

Lest you think I’m going all mushy on you in terms of appraising Beauchamp, let’s be clear – Scott Thomas Beauchamp went to war with the specific goal of ridiculing and belittling the war effort. Yes, he wore the uniform. In virtually all cases, that’s praiseworthy. But in Beauchamp’s case, he wore the uniform as a means by which to make his artistic bones; he knew that in making those artistic bones, he would undermine the efforts of his brothers in arms. In short, he went to war with the specific purpose of weakening the war effort. I doubt he ever thought it through to that extent. In spite of his pretensions to the contrary, he doesn’t seem like a deep thinker who gets off on serious introspection. Nevertheless, there are words that describe his intentions in going to war – very serious words.

These are the acts of not only a pathetic individual, but a morally obtuse one as well. I don’t need to perform a semiotics-based analysis to predict with some confidence that Scott Thomas Beauchamp will turn out to be a sorry figure, albeit an unsympathetic one.

THE REAL VILLAIN OF THE PIECE so far is The New Republic. We still don’t know how TNR and Beauchamp hooked up, but we do know that TNR enabled Beauchamp’s descent into highly publicized pathos. The stuff TNR published will greatly complicate Beauchamp’s immediate future; they’ll probably detrimentally affect the rest of his life. TNR’s role here as regards Beauchamp could be compared to a full-grown adult giving a gun to suicidal grad student.

As for what happens with TNR from this point forward, there are two possible scenarios:

1) Beauchamp’s tales are proven; or

2) Beauchamp’s tales are disproven.

Either way, as I’ve been saying all along, TNR’s conduct here is reprehensible. As regards the potential veracity of Beauchamp’s Diarists, the people at TNR knew that they had a not-particularly-reliable narrator working for them in Baghdad. Or given their rigorous fact checking procedures, they should have known. The fact that they ran his stories with minimal if any corroboration, especially in light of TNR’s recent history with stories that were too delicious to check, can’t be chalked up as a coincidence.

TNR employed as its Baghdad correspondent a guy who was there specifically to mock the war effort while he hopefully advanced his own career as a writer by doing so. Beauchamp’s champions (not that I’m aware of any) have the potential defense that he was a young man who didn’t know any better. TNR’s editors do not. They gravitated to Scott Thomas Beauchamp because he would have the “moral authority” necessary to slander the troops with impunity, a moral authority that Franklin Foer and company of course lack.

One other note: Scott Thomas Beauchamp’s life will be a smoldering ruin when this affair has run its course. His partners in crime at The New Republic will still have jobs and careers. Will they see Scott Beauchamp in their nightmares? And will they see the 160,000 honorable and noble troops that together they conspired to malign?

Compliments? Complaints? Contact me at Soxblog@aol.com.

 

The posters at the FreeRepublic thread are very rough on the soldier, but most of the ire should be directed at the Beltway geniuses at the New Republic who allowed this young man to publish a column that would obviously lead to the controversy it quickly ignited, as well as to the blowback from his fellow soldiers for the general slander he perpetrated. Having to use a pseudonym in an era of milblogging was the obvious giveaway that the piece would start an investigation.

Sliming the war and the people fighting it requires sacrifices, of course, and the New Republic's editors were willing to let Beauchamp make his on behalf of their cause.

I note that the second post on a blog believed to be Beauchamp's, the soldier notes "I'm reading On The Road again." Amazon.com notes that this book "is not only the soul of the Beat movement and literature, but one of the most important novels of the century. Like nearly all of Kerouac's writing, On The Road is thinly fictionalized autobiography, filled with a cast made of Kerouac's real life friends, lovers, and fellow travelers."

The shade of Walter Lippman has suffered enough in recent years, but here's another chapter in the decline of a once great magazine with which to torment it.

Michelle Malkin has much much more.