No, the “boner” in question has nothing to do with Anthony Weiner’s suspiciously-hacked Facebook account and the picture he most certainly didn’t send to a young woman on Twitter last night.
No, I’m talking about the boner that Andrea Mitchell, crack journalist for MS-NBC pulled last night when she triumphantly reported that Sarah Palin was going to crash the Rolling Thunder event this weekend (via memeorandum). She got information from one of the organizers of the rally that Palin had not been invited and that was enough to for her. Not once did she consider that people might have been in transit to Washington, DC from all over the country, that communications might be a bit scrambled because events were moving very quickly, and that she should get confirmation from another one of the organizers before she ran with her story. No, indeed. Her story made Sarah Palin look like a selfish bully who’d put herself above the memories of fallen heroes and that’s good enough.
Alas for her and her biased narrative, the representative of Rolling Thunder to whom she spoke was wrong. Palin was invited to Rolling Thunder and the person to whom Mitchell spoke did not know that because, as I said, things were moving pretty quickly. But others inside the organization, including the person responsible for dealing with the media, did know and would have set Mitchell straight if only she had asked them. As of 2 PM this afternoon, neither Mitchell nor MS-NBC have corrected their story and it’s still on the MS-NBC web site. I honestly don’t expect they’ll be in a hurry to change it.
And now, links!
- It really was only a matter of time before one of the faithful blamed this year’s tornado outbreak on global warming.
- If I had my way, this Jonah Goldberg article at AEI would be in the hands of every GOP strategist this weekend and there’d be a test on Monday.
- Why, I wonder, is Paul Ryan the only prominent Republican vigorously defending his Medicare plan? It is not at all perfect, but then again, no plan is. It is, however, many orders of magnitude better than the Democrats’ “do nothing and let it collapse after we’ve left office” plan and the GOP is doing itself a great deal of harm by letting Ryan go it alone.
- It probably won’t surprise you to know that the biggest losers of the auto bailout were ordinary folks like you and me who lacked the power and pull of the auto workers’ unions.
- I suspect the cameras will be thick on the ground when the President shows up to “comfort” the many thousand victims of the Joplin, MO tornado.
- R.I.P. Jeff Conaway, star of such superlative television shows as Taxi and Babylon 5 as well as the movie Grease.
Tags: Linky Love
Agree with Jonah Goldberg’s analysis re: MediScare so far as it goes, but a big problem is that nobody on the Republican side of the aisle knows how to do that. Their playbook is incomplete. There is a big gaping structural hole in the right’s long-term strategic capabilities.