Marc Ambinder Digs Himself in *Way* Deeper...
Marc Ambinder emails Paul Krugman:
Paul Krugman: Marc Ambinder has emailed me to vehemently disagree with my characterization of his views...
When I read Paul Krugman's chracterization of Ambinder:
What should we have known?: Tom Ridge... has now confirmed what many of us suspected... declarations of a higher threat level were called for political purposes, so as to step on Democratic messages or divert attention from Republican scandals. Yet Ambinder (and others) say that they were justified in ignoring the strong circumstantial evidence that this was happening, and that those who saw the truth in real time could not and should not have been taken seriously. Ambinder initially said that he wasn’t going to listen to people motivated by “gut hatred” of Bush; he’s now apologized, but said that the skeptics still had no right to be that suspicious of Bush administration motives in the absence of hard data...
I see absolutely nothing that Ambinder could legitimately object to.
Paul goes on:
[T]here was... plenty of hard data... the writing of Ron Suskind... discounted not because his reporting was weak, but because it was considered unreasonable to suggest that what was actually happening was indeed happening.... [A]nother point... by 2004 the Bush administration already had an extensive record in many areas where fact-checking was easy, from budget policy to environmental policy. And it was clear from any serious analysis of that record that the Bush people consistently relied on lies and misinformation to sell their policies, consistently abused power for political gain. So why should anyone have presumed that they were behaving differently on national security issues?...
[I]t’s really sad that those who missed the obvious, who failed to see what was right in front of their noses, still consider themselves superior to those who got it right.
Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?
