Today's Blogs

Joe’s Woes

Bloggers preview Tuesday’s Lamont-Lieberman primary in Connecticut, fret about the shutdown of a BP oil field, and hammer Reuters over a doctored-photo scandal.

Joe’s woes: In the Sunday Washington Post (Note: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.), columnist Robert Kagan explores just why Joe Lieberman’s party has turned on him, concluding that Lieberman “stands condemned today because he didn’t recant. He didn’t say he was wrong” about the Iraq war. Bloggers interpret the piece and who wins if Lieberman loses Tuesday’s primary.

Frendo contributor and Lieberman supporter Ryan Willers thinks Kagan hit the nail on the head: “I think he has this exactly right. And Ned Lamont, as a shrewed politician, is capitalizing on it. Now, I’m not saying that there is anything wrong with Lamont doing that; it is what happens in politics. Nevertheless, despite my disagreement with Lieberman on several issues (including Iraq), my vote will remain with him — whether he is a democratic or an independent.”

Liberal political strategist and author Dave Sirota calls the neocons’ defense of Lieberman “a desperate attempt to distract attention from Lieberman’s open, brazen, disgusting, insulting lies about Iraq and Social Security. …This is what it all comes down to, folks. Washington lobbyists, Enron shills, and right-wing neoconservative ideologues in D.C. will keep showering Lieberman in cash and praise because Lieberman has served them so obediently over the years.”

Loadedmouth.com’s left-leaning contributor Sine.Qua.Non’s dismisses Kagan as being “full of … hot air and little substance or mass,” for his defense of Lieberman. “Kagan seem to think that all Democrats in Congress have dishonestly disavowed the war with Iraq, other than, guess who? Lieberman. He also believes the guy is being wrongly targeted. Lieberman is being targeted because he has been and always will be more of a Republican than a Democrat. Check his voting record.”

Lieberman’s decision to run as independent if he loses the primary will only help the GOP, predictsEunomia’s conservative Daniel Larison: “No wonder the Republican ‘Commentern’ has been so enthusiastic for Lieberman–his kamikaze campaign provides the only opening they have for making actual gains in the year of the predicted electoral ‘hurricane.’ “

Read more about the Connecticut Democratic Senate primary here.

Reuters scandal: Reuters announced Monday it would end its relationship with freelance photographer Adnan Hajj, who had doctored photos from the Israeli/Hezbollah conflict. Righty bloggers are analyzing Hajj’s work and leveling accusations of bias.

Score another coup for Little Green Footballs’ Charles Johnson, who helped document the bogus nature of the “Rathergate” memos during the 2004 election. In his first post on the topic, he pointed out where Photoshop’s clone tool had apparently been used to create more smoke than the original photo, depicting the results of an Israeli airstrike. In updates to the post, he questions other work by Hajj. Johnson follows up here, here, and here.

Righty Ed Driscoll has a lengthy and indispensable post tracking Reuters’ attitude toward terrorists since Sept. 11. He does credit the news agency for handling the matter quickly: “They’ve got their work cut out for them, if they wish to regain the trust of many of their readers, in the era of the Blogosphere.” At the OpinionJournal.com’s Best of the Web, James Taranto points readers to the original photo and writes, “We don’t mean to gainsay the difficulty of covering the news in an alien culture dominated by terror and tyranny. But too many news organizations are too willing to turn themselves into propaganda outlets.”

Why were these obviously doctored photos published? For Zion’s Sake has an idea. “Why, other than blatant anti-Semitism or support for the terrorists, are the media so willing to serve as propagandists? They have to understand that pictures kill, that words are as much weapons as sticks and stones, and that the press of the free world is more powerful than the World War II technology missiles used by the Islamic fanatics.”

Thomas Lifson, the editor and publisher of The American Thinker, a site devoted to national-security issues and Israel, uses the Reuters incident point out just why the “mainstream media” is a relic: “As we saw in the Rathergate memos, serious inquiry into media manipulation of public opinion takes place first on the internet, where questions are asked, facts are dug up, analyses tested, and conclusions gradually strengthened as the evidence warrants. It is an interactive and collective inquiry. Adopting the language of the Japanese philosopher and entrepreneur Konnosuke Matsushita, I call this powerful intellectual process, ‘The wisdom of the many.’ “

Read more about the photo-doctoring controversy here.

Pipeline nightmare: BP announced Monday that it shut down production at an Alaskan oil field in Prudhoe Bay because of a pipleine leak in its pipeline. The field supplied the United States with about 8 percent of its oil supply and could be out of commission for weeks or months. The refrain from the blogosphere is “Skyrocketing oil prices, oh my.” 

Steve Soto, a contributor to The Left Coaster, suggests we use the opportunity to get from under the thumb of “big oil”: “At a time of record profits, significantly generated it turns out from refining markups and not the cost of oil itself, it appears that BP isn’t spending any of that money on maintenance or line replacements. I’m sure the shareholders have been happy with their dividends, but this is another great argument why this country’s economy should not be held hostage to Big Oil’s priorities.”

Just add this to the growing list of reasons gas prices are going to skyrocket, saysThe Glittering Eye, a Chicago based blogger: “So, we’ve got instability in the Middle East and the oil-producing areas of Africa, the damage from hurricanes Katrina and Rita left over from last year that took Gulf oil rigs out of production, Mexico’s production likely to decline, and Alaska’s production slowed and likely to decline. Fasten your seatbelts, everybody. We’re in for a bumpy ride.”

Read more about the BP oil-field closure here.