Redstate

By dpayton Posted in User Blogs — Comments (0) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Where to start on this one.  Here's the source piece from the Washington Times about Harry Reid hinting at confidential FBI information on a judicial nominee.

Minority Leader Harry Reid strayed from his prepared remarks on the Senate floor yesterday and promised to continue opposing one of President Bush's judicial nominees based on "a problem" he said is in the nominee's "confidential report from the FBI."

Those highly confidential reports are filed on all judicial nominees, and severe sanctions apply to anyone who discloses their contents. Less clear is whether a senator could face sanctions for characterizing the content of such files.

"Henry Saad would have been filibustered anyway," Mr. Reid said on the floor yesterday, about the Michigan Appeals Court judge who is nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit.

"All you need to do is have a member go upstairs and look at his confidential report from the FBI, and I think we would all agree that there is a problem there," Mr. Reid continued.

Republican staff members and supporters of Mr. Bush's nominees were outraged.

"Can you think of a better way to trash someone's reputation?" Sean Rushton of the conservative Committee for Justice asked after seeing a transcript of the remarks. "Say that there is bad stuff from an FBI investigation in a file somewhere and leave that hanging. This is character assassination of the lowest order and completely improper."

I'll second that emotion.  Reid knew full well he couldn't give out specifics, so he opted to let folks' imagination run wild.  This is a smear, plain and simple.

Well, OK, apparently not simple enough for Kos.  First, Kos calls this story a smear on Harry Reid, of all people.  Look, if quoting you verbatim is a smear, you can't blame the reporter.  What's Kos' reply?  Smear Charles Hurt, the reporter.  He quotes blogger Matt Singer of "Left in the West", who "did some digging", and notes that the only reporting Hurt's done on DeLay are favorable to DeLay.  Yet if you actually read them, they're pretty balanced.  One of them even mentions the payment for one of the trips coming from Jack Abramoff, which both puts DeLay in a bad light and also runs counter to Singer's claim that Hurt is easy on Abramoff as well.  And that's just in perusing the first 3 entries in the Google search Singer suggests.  

Secondly, Singer goes after one of the sources Hurt uses in his piece; Manuel Miranda.  Hurt has apparently used him quite a bit in the past.  OK, let's put him aside for the moment.  What about Sean Rushton, Sen. Orrin Hatch or Michael Bouchard, who also appear in the article?  Or even Mr. Reid himself, the prime source?  Hurt's information wasn't single-sourced, and besides, the main thrust of the article are Reid's words on the Senate floor.  The best Singer and Kos can do is take jabs at the opinions of one of Hurt's sources for a comment and in doing that suppose that they've ruined the story's credibility.  Kos calls Hurt a "partisan hack", but at least Hurt reported facts and reaction to those facts.  Kos and Singer simply say that one guy gets quoted too much, and misrepresent Hurt's writing.  That's partisan hackery.

Utterly absent from Kos' post is any reference or reaction to the actual quote by Reid.  So he ignores the crux of the matter, and yells about all sorts of side issues, and he still refers to a "Right Wing Noise Machine"?  Please, with all the noise Kos and his folks make, that meme either needs to be properly attributed to the the Left Wing, or it should be retired.