Likelihood of Success

Taylor Marsh reprints a frank Margaret Carlson email, in which she just plain acknowledges she hasn’t much use for the Junior Senator. (Via Insty.) Marsh takes this as an admission of media bias; I just don’t see it. In fact, if Carlson claimed she had no political preferences, I’d be suspicious, but here she’s just being honest. How is this proof that she’s gunning for Hillary in her work?

I once got a similar email from Margaret’s soulmate, Helen Thomas, myself. I asked her why she had referred to President Bush as having “lied” in some column or another. She promptly and honestly responded that of course Bush had lied to trick us into going to war in Iraq.

Sent: Wednesday, August 18, 2004 5:18 PM

To: helent@hearstdc.com
Subject: Bush lied?

You maintain several times in your article that President Bush deceived the
U.S. and based his policy on falsehoods. What are these falsehoods?

Ronald D. Coleman

From: Helen <helent@hearstdc.com>
To: ‘Ronald D. Coleman’ <rcoleman@xxx.com>
Date: Aug 23 2004 – 1:24pm

No wmd; no threat; no ties to al qaida – helent

It puts Thomas among the moonbats to say that, but she has plenty of company, and much of that in newsrooms; and is it any surprise that that’s her view? This doesn’t prove that her reporting is biased… for that you have to actually read the columns. I didn’t even blog about the email because it struck me as a “dog bites man” story.

I’ll take Carlson’s frankness and Thomas’s tinfoil-hatted honesty over the pretense of objectivity any day.

But I wonder how offended Marsh would be by Thomas’s email to me? Or does it matter less because, after all, that doesn’t constitute treason from the political line, or appropriate political gender loyalty?

Instapundit:

ELEANOR CLIFT: “Al Gore on the second ballot: A scenario that a few weeks ago seemed preposterous is beginning to look plausible to some nervous Democrats looking for a way out of the deadlock between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.”

This seems more like a pundit’s dream than anything that’s likely to happen. But to the extent that Democratic leaders are seriously talking about this, it’s a poor reflection on both Clinton and Obama.

Not hardly any of this makes sense to me.

“Plausible”? In what galaxy? The Democratic Party — the party of tokenism, identity politics, “diversity” and quotas — throwing out the two survivors of an essentially democratic primary system, a woman and a black man, in order to “look for a way out of a deadlock,” and choosing a puffy white male millionaire son of a U.S. Senator? The same Democratic Party whose entire political premise is an essential mindless lockup of female and black votes, and then-let’s-see?

And… Al Gore? Does anyone besides the thinnest layer of elite liberal moonbats think of him as a white knight?! (And what exactly size horse would he have to ride on these days? Talk about “footprints”!)

Not only does that not make sense to me, but neither does Glenn’s characterization. “Dream”? More like an acid trip. Unless Democrats are willing to reconsider the wisdom of “destroying the village in order to save it,” which isn’t too likely considering how nice they’ve decorated their village, it’s positively bizarre — and especially as a scenario for answering John McCain, a candidate already attractive to the center.

But, by all means, be my guest, Democrats. Please!