It is astoundingly easy to prod a radical right-wing blogger into making a complete ass of himself. All you have to do is point out the facts, and the baseless accusations and outright lies start flowing like water.
Case in point: Jay Stephenson. He posted a screed yesterday, in which he excoriates the ACLU for daring to point out that the collection of telephone calling records by the NSA is a violation of the law. In the course of his tirade, Jay made the following claim:
To this point, each and every legal scholar who has looked at the program has agreed that no laws have been broken.
Unfortunately for Jay, this claim is false. In the comments, one Jason Sonenshein correctly noted that George Washington University Law Professor Orin Kerr doesn’t appear to conclude that no laws have been broken, and cited a set of recent posts on Eugene Volokh’s site as evidence. And a very simple Google search will turn up documents like these discussions of the legal problems with the NSA phone-records collection program.
After Jason posted the links to Volokh’s site, all that was necessary to set Jay off was for me to call him on his bullshit. Jay and his co-ranter Gribbit proceeded to unleash a torrent of abuse, none of which included the slightest support for Jay’s original claim. As of this writing, the two geniuses still haven’t posted a single citation in support of their now toned-down claim that “almost every legal scholar who has looked at the program has agreed that no laws have been broken”. Really? Then why can’t Jay or Gribbit name these ‘legal scholars’?
I’ll mention only in passing Gribbit’s hilarious attempt to turn a single typo I made in my comment into an attack on my intelligence. He was ably smacked down by another commenter. And the attempt to claim that a cartoon of a “liberal idiot” is my own self-portrait is an exceptionally clumsy lie. A quick search at Google Images traces this image back to a post made last October at a blog called Moonbattery. The fact that Jay chose to add this ad hominem attack to the body of the post is especially humorous, given his admonition in the comments:
We need to keep the conversation civil if it is to foster debate. The name calling and accusations need to stop.
It’s an unpleasant but undeniable fact that many hard-right bloggers are all too willing to abandon reasoned discussion for abuse and invective. If Jay Stephenson wants civil conversation — and he has given no indication to date that he truly does want that — he’d best start by changing his own style.
UPDATE 05/28/06 3:11 PM EDT: Four days after being informed that the claim that “every legal scholar who has looked at the program has agreed that no laws have been broken”, Gribbit hasn’t bothered to post a correction. His dedication to truth and factual accuracy is truly awe-inspiring.
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May 27th, 2006 at 10:32 am
Dixie
He wasn’t lying in the first place because he changed “Each and every” to “almost every”? Woooboy.
And Gribbet, not Jay, wrote it, so you’re the liar. We’ll just airily wave aside (1) your stored page which shows the “by Jay” at top without the Jay and Gribbet sentence at the bottom and (2) Jay’s date for the post as 5-24 at 10:27 p.m. with Gribbet’s link to the post on 5-25 at 2:34 a.m. (Time zone change shows the trackback in comments at 1:43 a.m.), and (3) Gribbet wrote it, but he was incapable of getting the ACLU graphic to show at the top of his post, and (4) when Jay was “accused” of writing lies, he changed Gribbet’s work (gasp!) and struck out at the meanies calling him a liar! (Slap, slap—the white glove flashes out.)
Oh, and Jay’s getting shafted. Gribbet’s post (with “Each and every” still in place) on his site says “by Mr. Gribbet” only, and there’s only the generic link back to Stop the ACLU Blogburst.
I was entertained when Laura Bush recited a poem she claimed to be written by her husband, then a couple of weeks later laughed at the idea that people believed he had written it—just because she said so. The repeat exercise here is just lame.