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Josh Marshall’s Premature Victory Lap

It is easy to win arguments if you refuse to acknowledge when your facts are completely wrong

By: Dan McLaughlin (Diary)  |  February 27th, 2009 at 05:07 PM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

This post by Josh Marshall on the Jindal/Lee story is really hilarious. Marshall smugly insists that Erick’s original post has no facts in it, but he stubbornly refuses to quote his citations to primary sources and video. We laid out the case here further as to why those facts, now supplemented by video of Sheriff Lee himself confirming that Jindal was in his office the day after the hurricane and was hands-on involved all week, demolish the essential points TPM was trying to make. What were TPM’s core points?

(1) That Jindal made up being in Lee’s office in the days after Katrina and thus the whole anecdote was fabricated
(2) That Jindal was actually 75 miles from the action and played no role in responding to Katrina

I dare Josh Marshall to defend either of these positions now; he can’t even try, which is why he doesn’t address the facts in his post, preferring to congratulate himself. At this point, his site has shifted the goalposts entirely (a Marshall specialty) and is reduced to picking at whether a statement by Jindal’s spokeswoman somehow suggests that Jindal oversold the story (the argument now seems to be whether he implied that he was there when Lee was ordering the boats out, rather than when Lee was taking grief for doing so, and whether this was Tuesday or Thursday that it happened), none of which remotely resembles the original charges.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for him to admit that his story has been utterly discredited. He’s just going to declare victory and move on to the next smear job.

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  • 6eorge Jetson
  • johnt

    It’s part of the fantasy world they live in. They have constructed a personal universe and self image that will not allow for error or self doubt. Try and number the times a liberal or any number of liberals have admitted to being wrong. You want to use all your fingers counting,

  • Martin Knight

    … and he will continue to be a liar.

    It should not surprise us that his co-bloggers at TPM would also be liars. In fact, I do believe that Zachary Roth was very well aware of what he wrote being false when he wrote it.

    I believe Roth deliberately refused to get in touch with people he was well aware could confirm or deny Jindal’s anecdote but he chose not to because he knew the answer.

    So just remember this and you’ll be fine; Josh Marshall is a liar. He simply is. He is a dishonest partisan smear artist with no sense of morality or decency.

    Expecting him to retract a falsehood he and his cohorts deliberately spread to smear a political enemy simply doesn’t make sense. That’s just who he is and that’s what his readers love about him.

    Personally, I’m surprised Bobby’s wife hasn’t yet been targeted by Marshall and his goons.

    • http://moelane.com/ Moe Lane

      NT

      • Martin Knight
        • smagar

          “Is (Insert name of WaPo or NYT reporter who’s furthering Marshall’s lie) Knowngly Enabling A Lie?”

          Write front-page stories on Redstate with titles like that. Call out reporters BY NAME. Accuse them of professional malfeasance. Force them to respond.

          Remember Sen Lindsey Graham’s performance on the Alito hearings? I think he set a good example for us, in terms of tactics.

          Feingold and Kennedy had planned on waging a silent, fingerprint-free smear campaign against Alito, implying he was a racist. Their hope was to, if not stop his nomination, at least wound him fatally. From behind the safety of the shadows.

          Graham would have none of it.

          “Are you a closet racist” he asked Alito openly, in front of the world. It was a rhetorical question: Graham then went on to defend Alito against the charge.

          But, by dragging Team Feingold out into the open, Graham brought the light of public attention onto what they were doing. And the anti-Alitos buckled.

          I remember Feingold spluttering in rage. It was easy to see why; he knew his cover had been blown.

          These NYT and WaPo reporters who enable Marshall will be more likely to stop if they are called out, by name, and challenged to explain why they gave credence to Marshall’s crap. Why are they repeating stuff that’s obviously false? Why aren’t they challenging Marshall’s assertions when they interview him. (IF they interview him,that is).

          Make the media the target. They’re less popular nationally than Nancy Pelosi.

          Our stance should be that it’s not Josh Marshall who’s the problem. The man is who he is.

          No, the problem rests with those MSM reporters who, by simply repeating what Marshall says without challenging it aggressively, enable him and give him credibility.

          When an MSM reporter asks what we think of Marshall’s criticisms of Jindal, we should look at that reporter and ask, with a disbelieving look on our face, “You, a professional reporter for the MSM, are taking this allegation by Joshua Michael Marshall seriously?”

          When the come back and say, “Uh, well, there are those who would say that Marshall is a powerful voice in the blogosphere,” we should respond “Yes, and there are those in our country who think that black helicopters flown by Zionist agents secretly run our country. MY question to YOU was why YOU, a professional journalist, bestow credibility on Joshua Michael Marshall.”

          At this point, they’ll suddenly run up on a hard commercial break. .

  • Streiff

    at a personal level in 2003. Since then iit has gotten worse. A more loathsome bunch of cretinous pinheads is just difficult to imagine.

    • IJB

      I have hated these guys, and all the people like them, for at least a decade and a half now.

      Whatever people around here want to say about colleges being “indoctrination centers”, to a minority of us they were instead a clear window into the soullessness of those on the Left. It was by far the best education I got in college.

  • rightfreedom

    Why can’t we just show that Jindal was in the office when the conversation happened? With a cell phone record or something? Like, “he wasn’t 75 miles away, he was right here talking to him!”

    • Streiff

      nt

      • rightfreedom

        Is there a video that shows Jindal and sheriff Lee together when Lee “told the boaters to ignore the bureaucrats and go start rescuing people?”

        We could shove that in Olbermann’s fat face!

        • http://moelane.com/ Moe Lane

          Try a different strategy.

    • http://www.ssce.net/Web-Articles/Web-articles-indexed-authors.html#authors-l JLenardDetroit

      On every Network…. contrasted by video of the Liars making the false accusations….

  • Finrod

    They’re trying to do the same thing to Jindal that they did to Bush over the infamous sixteen words in his State of the Union speech.

    • Dan McLaughlin

      rougly 3-4 times per day between August and November.

  • RawFuse

    [There's an upper limit to how long we'll humor people like this. - Moe Lane]

    “(1) That Jindal made up being in Lee?s office in the days after Katrina and thus the whole anecdote was fabricated
    (2) That Jindal was actually 75 miles from the action and played no role in responding to Katrina”

    From The Hill (9/6/05):

    ?Rep. Bobby Jindal (R-La.) may have lost his home in Kenner and his district offices in Metairie and Covington, but he has not been able to return to the area to assess the damage. He and his wife, Jolly, and their children, Seilia, 3, and Shaan, 1, have been staying with his parents in Baton Rouge.?

  • http://moelane.com/ Moe Lane

    …that somebody sits you down and explains objective reality to people like yourself, and it doesn’t work – one comes to the conclusion that it really isn’t about anything except the color of Jindal’s skin.

    Blam.

    • http://www.ssce.net/Web-Articles/Web-articles-indexed-authors.html#authors-l JLenardDetroit

      Period… Since they know their audience is LAZY and won’t bother to seek out the Truth/Facts they simply repeat the lie over and over….. No doubt this clown will now go to Daily-Kook and proclaim how we wouldn’t listen and proclaim what a hero he is for having been here….

      TROLLS, MOBIES, Democrats =