OK, David Shuster’s “pimped out” comment, if taken literally, was out of line.

And a temporary suspension and an apology are certainly appropriate.

But c’mon.

Chelsea Clinton is not 13 anymore. She’s a couple weeks shy of her 28th birthday. She’s has a masters from Oxford and has a fat career at a hedge fund.

Nobody needs to throw this young woman a pity party. Sure. She was picked on cruelly as a child growing up in the public eye. But she’s her own woman now. Her role on the campaign trail is certainly open for debate.

OK. Schuster did so tastelessly. But does Chelsea really need mama bear coming to her rescue, demanding that an [otherwise] excellent journalist be fired?

Gimme a break.

[Note: I tried to post Shuster's apology video and it sent the site all screwy. I'm having to repost this again, and we unfortunately lost 5 comments. Sorry.]

Didja hear? There’s a rumor that Barack Obama is secretly a Muslim. No really, I read it in the Washington Post….

The first rule of recovering from a bout of shitty journalism is to stop defending it. That’s true whether you’re the New Republic, the National Review, or the esteemed Post.

Unfortunately, Bill Hamilton, the Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor in charge of politics, is standing by his paper’s front-page smear of Obama.

His excuse (via Politico.com)?: “We didn’t say it was a false rumor. To me, a rumor is not true.”

Now, I don’t know how you get to be Assistant Managing Editor of one of the nation’s newspapers of record without a basic command of the English language. But to belabor the obvious, the definition of rumor is not untrue information, it’s: “A piece of unverified information of uncertain origin.”

That’s the thing about rumors: Some are true and some aren’t. Rumors that Kevin Garnett was headed to Boston this summer? All too true. Rumors he was getting traded to Golden State? Tragically false.

Hamilton’s excuse that it would have somehow been redundant to call a rumor “false” is hackery, and he knows it. And the same word applies to the story he edited.

The job of any newspaper worth its pulp is to verify information. But far from debunking demonstrably false rumors about Obama, Hamilton and the Post sloppily propagated them.

That’s the truth. Hamilton and his paper need to acknowledge that, stop clinging to their story, and issue an apology and a correction.

It’s unbelievable that a man of Willard Romney’s $400-million-dollar means didn’t personally hire lily white Tufts graduates for $40/hour to tend his lawn after he got busted with illegal immigrants tending his garden the first time.

But no. The night after Rudy belittled him for his “sanctuary mansion,” Mitt got caught with Mexicans sweeping his tennis court.

The real question is what did Romney do to so offend The Boston Globe?

They flew to Guatemala to track down immigrants for the first story. Ever since they’ve had photographers and reporters staking out the governors house waiting for a relapse.

This is good, fair journalism in its execution, mind you. But don’t tell me the assigning editor didn’t have an ax to grind…

The cartoon:

The front-page smear story that provoked it:

Foes Use Obama’s Muslim Ties to Fuel Rumors About Him

By Perry Bacon Jr.
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 29, 2007; Page A0

In his speeches and often on the Internet, the part of Sen. Barack Obama’s biography that gets the most attention is not his race but his connections to the Muslim world.

Since declaring his candidacy for president in February, Obama, a member of a congregation of the United Church of Christ in Chicago, has had to address assertions that he is a Muslim or that he had received training in Islam in Indonesia, where he lived from ages 6 to 10. While his father was an atheist and his mother did not practice religion, Obama’s stepfather did occasionally attend services at a mosque there.

Despite his denials, rumors and e-mails circulating on the Internet continue to allege that Obama (D-Ill.) is a Muslim, a “Muslim plant” in a conspiracy against America, and that, if elected president, he would take the oath of office using a Koran, rather than a Bible, as did Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), the only Muslim in Congress, when he was sworn in earlier this year.

(Hat Tip: The Plank)

It’s one thing to be a bad debate moderator. It’s another thing to be a biased debate moderator.

Check out the interference CNN’s Wolf Blitzer ran for Hillary last night in this exchange with Obama:

CNN.com – Transcripts
BLITZER: Let me bring in Senator Obama, because you’ve been among those critical of Senator Clinton. You’ve suggested she’s triangulating — whatever that means — on some of the key issues.

Funny that Wolf should suddenly find this vocabulary so challenging. After all, he defined the word himself on CNN Newsroom the morning of the debate:

“[Hillary's] going to have to take some clear-cut positions, otherwise she’ll be accused of waffling or triangulation, as some of the pundits call it, and that’s not necessarily going to be good for her.” (via Nexis)

So Wolf identifies triangulation as Clinton’s primary weakness in the morning. And then tries to make Obama look like an asshole for calling her on her triangulation in the evening.

What a douche dislikeable fellow.

Betraying Its Own Best Interests – New York Times

Did MoveOn.org get favored treatment from The Times? And was the ad outside the bounds of acceptable political discourse?The answer to the first question is that MoveOn.org paid what is known in the newspaper industry as a standby rate of $64,575 that it should not have received under Times policies. The group should have paid $142,083. The Times had maintained for a week that the standby rate was appropriate, but a company spokeswoman told me late Thursday afternoon that an advertising sales representative made a mistake.

The answer to the second question is that the ad appears to fly in the face of an internal advertising acceptability manual that says, “We do not accept opinion advertisements that are attacks of a personal nature.” Steph Jespersen, the executive who approved the ad, said that, while it was “rough,” he regarded it as a comment on a public official’s management of his office and therefore acceptable speech for The Times to print.

By the end of last week the ad appeared to have backfired on both MoveOn.org and fellow opponents of the war in Iraq — and on The Times. It gave the Bush administration and its allies an opportunity to change the subject from questions about an unpopular war to defense of a respected general with nine rows of ribbons on his chest, including a Bronze Star with a V for valor. And it gave fresh ammunition to a cottage industry that loves to bash The Times as a bastion of the “liberal media.”

UPDATE: Out of what the group calls “an abundance of caution,” MoveOn has unilaterally decided to pay the difference between the standard ad rate and what they had paid for the “Betray Us” ad. In a press release, MoveOn honcho Eli Pariser wrote:

MoveOn continues, of course, to stand by the content of the advertisement and to urge citizens and their elected representatives in the Congress to focus on the continued dishonesty of the Bush Administration and the American blood and treasure being lost in a war for which the Administration has no exit strategy. Certainly that issue is more worthy of the attention of the electorate and the media than the mistake of an advertising representative or the wording of an advertisement.

The minute the Imus situation blew up, did you know exactly what was going to happen? If so, you might enjoy Matt Taibbi’s vicious new column, in which not one of the major players — Snoop Dogg, major media, Al Sharpton — is spared a bit of mercy. Check it out and let us know what you’ve learned in the wake of the latest, lamest “censorship” battle.

Some people call him a smug blowhard, some call him the one true dissenter against the Bush administration. (In the new issue of Rolling Stone, we call him “The Most Honest Man in News.”) But whether you subscribe to his particular brand of angry liberal eloquence or despise it, there’s little denying the man, to borrow a line from Slim Pickens in Blazing Saddles, uses his tongue purtier than a twenty-dollar whore. Thanks to the magic of YouTube, here’s a purely subjective collection of five special comments where his words cut the deepest. (more…)