Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?
Yes, Jeffrey "Toilet Training" Goldberg appears really upset at the distribution of his emails. Glenn Greenwald:
"Retraction": Last night, I emailed Goldberg, told him I intended to write about this.... He responded by acknowledging that no such thing had happened and apologized gracefully enough ("You're right, I'm wrong. My apologies"), but then -- assuming I'd be writing about this -- went to his blog... ("I mistakenly said that I thought Greenwald had retracted a particularly dumb charge leveled against me . . . Glenn sent me an e-mail in which he noted that he had not retracted the charge, even after I pointed out to him that it was false.").
I'm not going to re-visit Goldberg's conflicting claims about the Israeli strike -- which just oh-so-coincidentally happened to be expressed each time so as to justify a new war -- because I wrote twice about it just recently.... But just think about it: someone goes on NPR and, when asked by the host about criticisms directed at him, just blurts out that the critic "retracted" the criticism -- a fairly serious charge -- when he must know that that claim is a total fabrication. This didn't happen five years ago, lending itself to a faulty memory. It happened just last week.... Nothing like what he said on NPR ever happened. It's just a total figment of his imagination, a complete fabrication. Who does something like that? Does Jeffrey Goldberg -- one of our nation's most Serious Middle East "reporters" -- ever tell the truth about anything?
UPDATE: Goldberg responds, playing the victim... claiming he merely "confused me with someone else," presumably "someone else" who issued a retraction last week (who?).... He also complains that I "posted our private e-mail exchange, without asking [him] if that would be okay." There was nothing "private" about our email exchange; my whole point in emailing him, as I made explicitly clear, was that I intended to write about this episode and wanted to include his response in what I wrote. The whole exchange was entirely on the record. It's just amazing how devoted to the Cult of Secrecy so many self-proclaimed journalists are.