We’ve seen conservative bloggers make some pretty extraordinary efforts over the years to disparage the relevance of “the MSM,” but this distracted offering from Uncle “Comma Splice” Jimbo has to be, by contrast, one of the laziest. Denouncing one of his co-religionists for taking this NYT piece by Damien Cave seriously, Jimbo unleashes a stream of non-thought to the effect that — while Cave was super awesome on Bill Maher a few weeks back — his skepticism toward The Surge cannot stand:
Allah[pundit] seems to feel that this and Cave’s rep as an honest broker give tremendous weight to his assessment of current affairs in Iraq. I do not. Cave is a reporter for the NYT, and despite Burns and Gordon’s solid work on the war, that is still a strike against you . . . .
And there you have it, he was a technology writer for Salon, wrote for a little paper on local stuff, wrote for that noted defense industry journal Rolling Stone and now he brings all that relevant experience to bear informing the rest of us on a counter-insurgency operation following an invasion that deposed a brutal dictator in a situation complicated greatly by religious strife . . . .
Actually Damien Cave is as qualified to write on war as I am to write on neuro-surgery. I could research a piece and talk to some doctors and sick people and read some stuff and go to some hospitals and watch some surgery and take some pictures, and in the end I would produce a piece that was mostly factual, but provided no actual insight or really useful information. It would be a ignorant [sic] layman’s look at an incredibly complex topic. Anyone who used my piece for any important decisions would be a fool.
Well I will answer Mr. Cave quite simply, I don’t dispute a single thing he reports. I simply don’t consider him a valuable source of information on the conflict and neither should anyone else. Just because the NY Times thinks he is qualified to be a war correspondent doesn’t make it true, actually it probably works against his credibility.
And that’s pretty much it from Jimbo. No ponderous trips to Google to measure Cave’s reporting against other accounts; no hyperventilations over the reporter’s political biases, as disclosed by something he wrote five years ago; no questions about whether his sources actually exist or whether he’s married to someone who helped land him a job. Instead, he offers undiluted fallacies of association, useless hypotheticals, and loads of poor grammar. A winning combination!
