An Open Letter to Talking Points Memo re Joe Willson Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, July 3, 2007:

And with that knowledge, I have to say that the claim that Wilson's charges have been discredited, disproved or even meaningfully challenged is simply false. What he said on day one is all true. It's really as simple as that.

Click Here or at Permalink to Read More...

There's a tendency, even among too many people of good faith and good politics, to shy away from asserting and admitting this simple fact because Wilson has either gone on too many TV shows or preened too much in some photo shoot. But that is disreputable and shameful. The entire record of this story has been under a systematic, unfettered and, sadly, largely unresisted attack from the right for four years. Key facts have been buried under an avalanche of misinformation. The then-chairman of the senate intelligence committee made his committee an appendage of the White House and himself the president's bawd and issued a report built on intentional falsehood and misdirection.

No one is perfect. The key dividing line is who's telling the truth and who's lying. Wilson is on the former side, his critics the latter. Everything else is triviality.

Dear TPM:

I respect Josh Marshall, recalling him fairly well from Princeton 15-odd years ago. Marshall has basic credibility with me, in that I have never seen a factual claim made by Marshall (or his staffers) proven false without an admission of that by Marshall. To my knowledge, not once. An 850 credit rating with me.

But Josh, in this post you have put your credibility on the line by calling out as liars those who have accused Wilson of being a liar. You have not stated that those claimants are mistaken, or that they are taking an overly aggressive read on ambiguous facts, or have made logical errors or communicated poorly. You have accused them of deceiving the public and the press with specific intent about Wilson's state of mind and accuracy in his initial statements, i.e the "strong" thesis.

As back-up, you claim yourself as an expert and, essentially, argue from your own authority only – you know that they are liars because you are the expert, therefore we are damn fools if we think otherwise. No links to your primary "ur-posts" in TPM on this topic, no itemization of FireDogLake's take down, etc. Now I believe that you ARE an expert, that you ARE right, that Wilson WAS right and that many of Wilson's accusers ARE liars and all are wrong. But I am a civil libertarian who hates George Bush and Cheney and their right-wing horde of orcs already, so that's not much of an act of faith to ask of me. That's belief, not knowledge on my part. Those who don't have my own liberal anti-Bush bias and my ancient acquaintance with Josh Marshall have no reason to be persuaded.

Just as not every decent soul in 1973 needed to be a hard-core Watergate conspiracy theorist, not everyone needs to be a deep-sea Plameologist. The finer points of the Plame/Wilson/Libby saga have not been my hobby. But if you take a very strong thesis accusing others of being liars, you must bring the back-up with you to retain your own credibility. Otherwise, it looks like irrational and irresponsible exuberance in defense of your admitted "friend" Joe.

Respectfully,


Bruce Godfrey