Insider poopology

Time Saving Truth from Falsehood. By François Lemoyne, 1737.

Just about the same time as I got the message from Mara Liasson that the new rules on insurance coverage for family planning were all part of Obama's 11-dimensional election strategy which involves getting Rick Santorum the Republican nomination—actually it's not her fault, I made most of it up—the august Markos was coming up with a similar idea: that Democrats should go vote for Santorum in the upcoming primaries and caucuses that allow it, starting with Michigan, by way of, if not actually nominating Santorum, at least making Romney's victory as painful and exhausting as possible; he called it Operation Hilarity.

High-minded Kossacks rose, however, in protest against the plan, which smacked [jump]
to them of Nixonian duplicity.* Don't know if these are the same intensely moral people who feel that Peter Gleick shouldn't have shown anybody his documented proof that the Heartland Institute was shamelessly conspiring to deceive the American people on the subject of climate science, a deception that could contribute to the destruction of life on the planet as we know it, because he got the documents under a false name. I mean, it's just not cricket. Not rugby, even. If Tom Brown wouldn't do it to Harry Flashman, we certainly shouldn't do it to people that are deliberately putting Bangladesh, the Maldives, most of Louisiana, and countless other places in mortal danger for the sake of a few dollars! Heavens, what would Dr. Arnold say?


I can't get over the bizarre ideas floating around these days on the subject of journalistic ethics, you know, where it's all defined by the rule book, without regard to the context of the infraction, so that it applies equally and identically to outing the celebrity with a girlfriend or boyfriend or whole closetful of wet suits and auto-asphyxiation devices on the one hand and revealing a conspiracy that's going to cause serious harm to thousands of people on the other.

If somebody made a movie about Peter Gleick it would star Tom Hanks and emphasize the clandestine side of it, with dead drops and vaults over walls and so on, and the audiences—including all the wingers!—would cheer him on like crazy, and when the villains busted him on a technicality they'd get booed. And for that matter, if there were a movie about James O'Keefe, it would be one of those teenage grossout comedies where the plot is an elaborate plan for the protagonist to impress girls and get laid—which would not happen until after he'd been humiliated into total abject surrender, and openly admitted it was a stupid idea. Why are people capable of seeing these narrative lines so clearly in the theater and blind to them when they're in real life? It's such a mystery.

Anyhow, Kos has come back today to let us know that the Obama campaign—or rather its uncoordinated superPAC—has mounted its own Operation Hilarity in Michigan, burying Romney in attacks on his preference for shutting down the auto industry, to get Santorum the win. And Kos hasn't given up either—so good on 'im, as they say under the Southern Cross.

*Actually they had a more serious fear, to be fair: that Santorum might somehow get elected, which would be even a worse disaster than if Romney did. Personally I don't think so: I figure Santorum is too stupid himself, and too despised by the upper ranks of the Republican party, to be anything but an obstacle to their plans and his own, whereas Romney would have a certain kind of mechanical effectiveness.