Inquiring minds apparently don’t want to know.

Most in the activist old media seem very willing to accept and even perpetuate the president’s argument for not releasing the death photos of Osama bin Laden.

The same media that has fought disclosure issues all the way to the Highest Court in the land, released Abu Ghraib photos, and battled George W. Bush on numerous disclosure issues (remember the terrorist banking disclosure issue?) now seems more than willing to just trust Dear Leader.

It’s like something from the Twilight Zone. “Just trust me” said the Kanamits in that memorable Rod Serling segment, “To Serve Man,” before they led the people away and put them on the menu.

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Greg Sargent is a Washington Post blogger. He’s also a former member of JournoList and a friend of Ezra Klein. Any or all of that may explain why he’s twice used his platform at the Post to claim that there is a media conspiracy surrounding the Daily Caller’s publication of JournoList archives:

The real media conspiracy here is on the right. It’s a conspiracy to pretend that there’s a story here when there isn’t one.

Yes, you read that right. He’s accusing the right of a media conspiracy. It’s the sort of fabulist, black-is-white inversion of reality we’ve come to expect from Media Matters, not from the Washington Post. So let’s take a look at Sargent’s case for a right-wing media conspiracy and see if it passes the belly laugh test.

In his first stab at this claim, he took issue with the headline for one of the Daily Caller’s pieces:

It has this huge headline: JournoList debates making its coordination with Obama explicit. But way down in the 13th paragraph, the story quotes a post from the very same thread in which J-List founder and Post blogger Ezra Klein explicitly rules out any such coordination…In other words, the headline on this story could have been: “J-List founder ruled out conspiracy.”

If the Daily Caller was part of a right-wing conspiracy, why bother to include the line Sargent just quoted, or the one that came immediately afterwards which also depicts a list member rejecting the idea? Wouldn’t the conspiracy be more successful without any contradictory evidence? What Sargent wants us to blithely ignore is statements like this from Todd Gitlin of Columbia University: (more…)

Who else could utter such fatuous nonsense with a straight face but “Booger” Max Blumenthal, ”independent journalist” and son of Clinton flack Sid “Vicious” Blumenthal, who takes to the Independent Film Channel tonight with a documentary about, what else, the “far right” and the Tea Party movement. If these snarky, sneering teasers are any indication of the kind of sophisticated analysis we’re in for, we can hardly wait:

The people I’ve written about have called me everything from a left wing hack to a sociopath to even a self-hating Jew.

Meanwhile, Max — who’s plainly terrified by inanimate objects — fears for the future of a Republic that has such folks as these in it:

Lest we forget, this memorable moment in Blumenthalism: (more…)

The ACORN story is not difficult to understand.  It is about a simple sting operation designed to reveal that a prominent organization routinely aids illegal activity.  When James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles walked into ACORN offices posing as a pimp and prostitute seeking to set up a brothel stocked by underage girls from central America, ACORN employees were only too happy to help – and no doubt, they had been only too happy to help real pimps and prostitutes in the past.

Did those employees commit a crime in offering to help O’Keefe and Giles themselves?  Of course not, because O’Keefe and Giles weren’t actually a pimp and prostitute.  All conspiracy crimes (which this would have been) require that there be an underlying criminal act – if no such criminal act exists, then conspiracy cannot be prosecuted.  This makes sense.  If you and I have a conspiracy to go to Baskin-Robbins, it is not a criminal conspiracy because no criminal act was ever in the offing.  If a guy solicits an undercover police officer posing as a 12-year-old girl online, that’s not a crime unless the state legislature has specifically carved out such a situation.  Similarly, in this case, no criminal act was in the offing because O’Keefe and Giles were never going to set up a whorehouse.

Duh.

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