shameless

Newsweek is admitting to starting an international political firestorm, which got actual people killed, caused civil disturbances, endangered the lives of American troops and significantly set back US efforts in the war on terror because they ran a story from an anonymous source who cannot even remember if he told them what they said he told them. Their efforts at “confirmation” yielded a denial and a non-denial from Defense officials, but no confirmation. In predicate calculus, Newsweek asserted P. Their attempts at confirmation yielded ~P and Null. Hence they concluded P, which is wrong, wrong and wrong. It is wrong from the pont of view of elementary logic. It would be wrong anywhere, even in the Andromeda Galaxy. But apparently it is right at Newsweek.

—The Belmont Club

The only place in recent memory where I've encountered Newsweek-on-dead-tree is the oil-change shop that services our cars. Each time that I've been there in the past two years, the Iraq war has figured prominently in the magazine's pages. Each time I've been shocked by the tone of the coverage, which reminds me of nothing so much as that found in newspapers such as the UK's Guardian. But the analogy is by no means exact: the Guardian, like most British papers, is openly partisan, while Newsweek still claims to be objective.

Once upon a time it was enough to call such claims farce. It becomes something else entirely when eagerness to score points against the Administration and our military gets real people killed.

I'm just catching up on news after our vacation, and have nothing new to add to this discussion. If somehow you've missed the whole story, try Austin Bay, or Roger Simon, or of course InstaPundit (in particular here and here and here).

Meanwhile Andrew Sullivan, busily redefining torture to include draping a prisoner in the Israeli flag, is still an ass.

UPDATE: See also Irshad Manji's take, for perspective from a rather unorthodox Muslim.

Is there anyone out there that is more shamelessly devoid of character than Andrew Sullivan? Even after Newsweek retracted its story, Sullivan was still trying to defend his baseless torture assertions.

Sullivan's blog reminds me of a bad 80's horror movie; just when you think he's dead, he comes back to inflict more pain. However, instead of actually scaring the audience, he gets a room full of people rolling their eyes at how asinine he is.