Let's get real.

So. Something resem­bling war breaks out between Georgia and Russia, and, a little after noon on Friday, Jonah Goldberg strokes his chin and notes, “This could get pretty ugly, pretty fast.” Whereupon National Review’s The Corner reverts to its pre­vi­ous all-John-Edwards-all-the-time format. Until Kathryn Jean Lopez butts in a bit after six p.m. today to note that the con­flict provides fur­ther evid­ence that Barack Obama is a wimp.

Okay, then. Look, I’m not gonna tell the National Review how to run its blog, but it is a bit rich for Byron “Sergeant” York to com­plain therein about sud­den MSM (that’s “main­stream media” to you) overkill on Edwards without noti­cing the plank in his own eye. I think one thing the folks doing vic­tory laps over the Edwards affair can­’t wrap their minds around is that most putat­ive pro­gress­ives stopped much caring about Edwards well before he dropped out of the race in January. I nev­er much cared for the guy myself. But I’m not here to talk about my own polit­ic­al pref­er­ences. I’m here to talk about…well, select­ive memory. Byron “Sergeant” York at NRO’s The Corner, Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit, Roger L. Simon aka them­an­whoin­ven­ted­moseswine at Pajamas Media, and of course the estim­able Mickey Kaus are all crow­ing about how the MSM’s sup­pres­sion of the Edwards story is one of the biggest clangs in said MSM’s con­tinu­ing death knell, and it’s just a little…I don’t know, what’s the word? Disgusting?

Now that you’ve got the gen­er­al ten­or of this post, I’ll jump. 

It’s not just, or even a little, about how all these guys were meta­phor­ic­ally shak­ing their fists at the main­stream medi­a’s men­dacity in ignor­ing the Edwards’ story in the National Enquirer when they them­selves were quite bliss­ful in their ignor­ance of at least one “Bush Drinking Again” account brought “to light” by the Enquirer in recent years. It’s not about how their com­menters seem to, as they will, let their out­rage gal­lop way ahead of the facts on the table; Mommynator over at Simon’s perch rages, “The lying, treas­on­ous MSM (LTMSM) didn’t cut Vito Fossella of Staten Island, NY any slack. That’s because he has an R after his name. He basic­ally did the same thing – had an affair, fathered a child – as Edwards. Only dif­fer­ence is, he resigned.” Yes, Fossella did indeed resign, as at the time that his indis­cre­tions were exposed, he held pub­lic office. Edwards—and I sup­pose we ought all be grate­ful for this—has noth­ing to resign from. (And yes, in case you’re won­der­ing, I do find it stag­ger­ing that he had the nerve to run for pres­id­ent. But again, I’m not thor­oughly bothered, as he nev­er was close to hav­ing my vote.)

But you know, not to sound like some kind of pussy-ass paci­fist femme or any­thing, but as squal­id at Edwards’ con­duct has been, nobody, you know, has yet been killed as a res­ult of it. I’m just say­ing. But let’s move on for the moment. 

One of Instapundit’s many mus­ings on Edwards and the MSM was par­tic­u­larly piquant:

SO NOW THAT WE KNOW THAT THE PRESS COVERED FOR EDWARDS – just as, pre-invasion, they covered for Saddam – that raises a ques­tion: What else are they not telling us for fear it will hurt the Democrats’ prospects?

The post appar­ently motiv­ated a fair num­ber of out­raged e‑mails, which I infer were less out­raged by Reynolds’ pecu­li­ar implic­a­tion of some kind of mor­al equi­val­ence between Edwards and Saddam than by the notion that the “press” “covered for” Saddam. Armed with such ammuni­tion, Reynolds moved in for the kill with an update. You can almost hear his insip­id “Heh. Indeed.” refrain amp­li­fy­ing into a reverb-drenched “Bwahahahaha!”

UPDATE: Once again, the lefty memory hole is revealed, with email like this:

That’s got to be one of the most insane and stu­pid things I’ve read in a long time.
“Covered for Saddam”? WTF are you talk­ing about, what kind of drugs are you on? The only thing the media covered regard­ing Saddam was the admin­is­tra­tions efforts to lie us into a war… some­thing you were quite a part of.

Apparently these people have for­got­ten Eason Jordan and “The News We Kept to Ourselves.” I star­ted to put a link to that in the ori­gin­al post, but I thought I’d see if there were any out there dumb enough to walk into the trap. And there were. Much more on the Eason Jordan story is roun­ded up here.

Ah, yes, Eason Jordan, the “not anti-war, just on the oth­er side” side’s most ven­er­ated voice. Whose rationale for keep­ing quiet could more logic­ally be attrib­uted to a desire to pro­tect sources and col­leagues than “cov­er” for Saddam. But let’s not even con­sider that. Professor Reynolds, I’ll see your Eason Jordan, and I’ll raise you a Judith “I was proved fuck­ing right” Miller.

To bring this post back to its host blo­g’s cine­mat­ic roots, some­times one is reminded of this exchange from Dr. Strangelove:

Ambassador de Sadesky: Our dooms­day scheme cost us just a small frac­tion of what we had been spend­ing on defense in a single year. But the decid­ing factor was when we learned that your coun­try was work­ing along sim­il­ar lines. And we were afraid of a dooms­day gap. 

President Muffley: This is pre­pos­ter­ous. I’ve nev­er approved of any­thing like that. 

de Sadesky: Our source was The New York Times.

And here we might do well to exam­ine anoth­er example of MSM intransigence, an example fea­tur­ing that most favored tar­get of Reynolds, et.al. Here are a few para­graphs from Jane Mayer’s recent book, The Dark Side:

A meas­ure of the pro-administration mood occured inside the New York Times, where Carlotta Gall, a British stringer based in Afghanistan, filed a story on February 5, 2003, about the deaths of [falsely accused and imprisoned ter­ror­ist sus­pect] Diliwar and anoth­er Afghan detain­ee. It sat for a month, accord­ing to Eric Umansky, who wrote about the American cov­er­age of the war on ter­ror in the Columbia Journalism Review, finally appear­ing a little over a month before the U.S. inva­sion of Iraq. “I very rarely have to wait long for a story to run,” Gall said. “If it’s an invest­ig­a­tion, occa­sion­ally as long as a week. 

Her story, Umansky found, was at the cen­ter of an edit­or­i­al fight. Her piece was “the real deal. It referred to a hom­icide. Detainees had been killed in cus­tody. I mean, you can­’t get much clear­er than that.” Roger Cohen, then the Times’ for­eign edit­or, told him, “I pitched it, I don’t know, four times at page-one meet­ings, with increas­ing urgency and frus­tra­tion. I laid awake at night over this story. And I don’t fully under­stand to this day what happened. My single greatest frus­tra­tion as for­eign edit­or was my inab­il­ity to get that story on page one.”

Doug Frantz, who was then the Times’ invest­ig­at­ive edit­or, said that Howell Raines, then the Times’ top edit­or, and his depu­ties “insisted that it was improb­able; it was just hard to get their mind [sic] around.” Eventually, the paper ran the story, bur­ied on page four­teen. “If it had run on the front page, it would have sent a strong sig­nal not just to the Bush admin­is­tra­tion but to oth­er news organ­iz­a­tions,” Frantz said. Gall con­cluded there had been a reluct­ance to “believe bad things of Americans” that had chilled the pur­suit of truth even inside the most esteemed daily news­pa­per in the country.

But Glenn Reynolds and Roger L. Simon think you ought to be really steamed that the New York Times was­n’t Johnny-on-the-spot with news about where a failed Democratic pres­id­en­tial can­did­ate had been dip­ping his dick. 

If that’s not bull­shit, I don’t know what is. 

By the way, Diliwar’s story is recoun­ted in detail in Alex Gibney’s too-little-seen doc­u­ment­ary Taxi to the Dark Side. And Roger Cohen, far from being a hero of that old standby “The Left,” is fre­quently tarred with the “wank­er” brush in the irrev­er­ent pro­gress­ive blogosphere.