credibility

I meant to hit this story yesterday. It also exemplifies the problems I’ve posted about in the past when it comes to MSNBC.

Markos and Joe Scarborough got into a little Twitter back and forth a couple of months ago:

JoeNBC: The Sestak story is as unbelievable a cover story as Nixon throwing little Checkers under the bus. A farce on it's face. Luckily for the White House, the media has been negligent on this story since Day 1. The press will let this laughable story slide.

markos: Like story of a certain dead intern. RT @JoeNBC: Luckily for the White House, the media has been negligent on this story since Day 1.

Markos: But if you want to talk about bullshit "scandals", @JoeNBC, there's this one about Joe Sestak and the White House you might've heard of.

JoeNBC: @markos Unbelievable. You have a long history of spreading lies suggesting I am a murderer. This is the 3rd or 4th time by my count.

Markos: @JoeNBC, I've never suggested you're a murderer. I've noted media hypocrisy in going after Gary Condit. But he was Dem. You aren't.

JoeNBC: Anyone in media who interviews @markos, know that you're extending your credibility to someone who regularly suggests that I'm a murderer.

Markos: A bit touchy, @JoeNBC? Links for where I accuse you of being a murderer please.

Joe Scarborough, a person of such thin skin that he will block anyone that disagrees with him on Twitter, didn’t like that. Like a child being picked on in school, Joe ran and told the teacher principal, or in this case, the president of MSNBC. That resulted in this email being sent to Markos:

Markos,

This is just to priceless:

The FBI, alleging a plot to wiretap Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu's office in downtown New Orleans, arrested four people Monday, including James O'Keefe, a conservative filmmaker whose undercover videos at ACORN field offices severely damaged the advocacy group's credibility.

FBI Special Agent Steven Rayes alleges that O'Keefe aided and abetted two others, Joseph Basel and Robert Flanagan, who dressed up as employees of a telephone company and attempted to interfere with the office's telephone system.

A fourth person, Stan Dai, was accused of aiding and abetting Basel and Flanagan. All four were charged with entering fedral property under false pretenses with the intent of committing a felony.

James O’Keefe is a blogger for Andrew Brietbart’s BigGovernment web site and was one of the filmmakers who “exposed” ACORN. Over night O’Keefe became a hero of the right. I wonder how they will treat him now?

“The 30,000 additional troops that I am announcing tonight will deploy in the first part of 2010 – the fastest pace possible – so that they can target the insurgency and secure key population centers. They will increase our ability to train competent Afghan Security Forces, and to partner with them so that more Afghans can get into the fight. And they will help create the conditions for the United States to transfer responsibility to the Afghans.” 

“Because this is an international effort, I have asked that our commitment be joined by contributions from our allies. Some have already provided additional troops, and we are confident that there will be further contributions in the days and weeks ahead. Our friends have fought and bled and died alongside us in Afghanistan. Now, we must come together to end this war successfully. For what’s at stake is not simply a test of NATO’s credibility – what’s at stake is the security of our Allies, and the common security of the world.”

“Taken together, these additional American and international troops will allow us to accelerate handing over responsibility to Afghan forces, and allow us to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011. Just as we have done in Iraq, we will execute this transition responsibly, taking into account conditions on the ground. We will continue to advise and assist Afghanistan’s Security Forces to ensure that they can succeed over the long haul. But it will be clear to the Afghan government – and, more importantly, to the Afghan people – that they will ultimately be responsible for their own country.”

source

Of course the White House thinks their study is not credible:

The White House possesses no archived e-mail messages for many of its component offices, including the Executive Office of the President and the Office of the Vice President, for hundreds of days between 2003 and 2005, according to the summary of an internal White House study that was disclosed yesterday by a congressional Democrat.

The 2005 study -- whose credibility the White House attacked this week -- identified 473 separate days in which no electronic messages were stored for one or more White House offices, said House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.).

This goes hand in hand with the White House saying that they don't believe any emails are missing. So then they are just ignoring the law and rulings from the court? That sounds like either a misdemeanor or a high crime to me.

A press conference today with the Army's top brass said that their is no lack of funds causing the problems at Walter Reed, but rather it was a "failure of leadership". This is something I had pointed out here , however the right-wing darling blogger, Michelle Malkin, decided to not talk about the actual "failure of leadership" and rather spin it into some partisan created problem, once again proving she has no credibility to her outrageous allegations.

For someone like Malkin, who constantly tries to flaunt her false support of the troops, to take a situation as serious as this and make it grounds for partisan bickering is appalling. She tried to say it was the left using it as a partisan issue, but I haven't seen where that occurred. So we called Bush on it. Isn't he the Commander in Chief? Even the White House is admitting failure in the military on this now, so is she calling the generals and White House liars? Instead of creating a faux partisan fight over this, why don't she work to get the problems addressed? I guess it goes down as further proof of her actual lack of support for our troops.

Remember a couple of weeks ago when there was all this talk that Canada was using coins with radio transmitters to spy on us? The Defense Department put out a warning about them and everything. It was something that sounded so James Bond(ish).

Well now we have the Defense Department issuing their own mia culpa on this:

Reversing itself, the Defense Department says an espionage report it produced that warned about Canadian coins with tiny radio-frequency transmitters was not true.

The Defense Security Service said it never could substantiate its own published claims about the mysterious coins. It has begun an internal review to determine how the false information was included in a 29-page report about espionage concerns.

The service had contended since late June that such coins were found planted on U.S. contractors with classified security clearances on at least three separate occasions between October 2005 and January 2006 as the contractors traveled through Canada.

"The allegations, however, were found later to be unsubstantiated following an investigation into the matter," the agency said in a statement published on its Web site last week

So in a world where our credibility is shot, this is the best we can do? Before you go accusing another nation (especially a neighboring nation) of espionage, you better be damn sure you got the evidence to back it up. This sounds like something good for our new Senate Intelligence Chairman, Jay Rockefeller, to ask questions about. If this type stuff is allowed to go on then we might end up invading a country for weapons they don't have. Oh wait!

Mike Brown now has his new career ahead of him. That career is a consulting
business on how to handle disasters. This from

Scripps Howard:

Ousted FEMA director Michael Brown, who was vilified over his handling of
the Hurricane Katrina disaster, plans to make a fresh start in Colorado,
selling his expertise about how emergency planning can go right or so very
wrong.

"You have to do it with candor. To do it otherwise gives you no
credibility," Brown said Wednesday. "I think people are curious: 'My gosh,
what was it like? The media just really beat you up. You made mistakes. I
don't want to be in that situation. How do I avoid that?' "

In an interview with the Rocky Mountain News, Brown acknowledged key
mistakes he made while overseeing the federal response to the hurricane that
ravaged Louisiana and Mississippi. He also lashed out at the media and
discussed plans to base his fledgling consulting business in the
Boulder-Longmont area of Colorado, where he lived before joining the Bush
Administration in 2001.

Article continues

here.

Well now considering the testimony Brown gave before Congress on the failure,
I guess his expertise will fall along the lines of "don't take the blame, put it
on others". He might also include a crash course on "how to enjoy a meal while
people die".

If should be interesting to see if his business flies. His only real disaster
experience came from the very job he lost.

If being a failure at something that costs lives means success then perhaps
Charles Manson could open up a consulting business on leadership.