Andrew Sullivan flatly disagrees: "I've now read and re-read Senator Dick Durbin's comments on interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay. They are completely, perfectly respectable. The rank hysteria being perpetrated by some on the right is what is shameful."
The Downing Street debate is still hot and heavy, and NYU's Jay Rosen deconstructs what happened:
"What journalists call news judgment used to be king. If the press ruled against you, you just weren't news. But if you weren't news how would anyone know enough about you (or care) to contest the ruling? That's what having singular influence was all about. The way it works today, the World Wide Web is the sovereign force, and journalists live and work according to its rules.
"Now if there's something newsworthy coming out of the U.K. but neglected in America the political blogs in America and other activists online keep talking about it. Quickly the story's unjust obscurity will reach a political player who can change that by acting in a newsworthy way, lending fresh facts and additional reason to cover the story.
"By such means the appeal of news judgment starts to take shape. This happened within a week when John Conyers began circulating a letter to President Bush -- signed by 88 Democrats -- that demanded from Bush an explanation. The Knight-Ridder Washington bureau, increasingly a dissident voice on these matters, treated that letter as news in a May 6 report. (The signers were up to 122 by the time Conyers sent his letter.)
"Players in politics, reading the blogs (or in the case of Conyers, writing for them), pick up the chatter and amplify it. Radio talk show hosts, also reading the blogs, and getting the e-mails from activists, amplify the chatter some more. Columnists who weren't a part of the consensus pay attention, seeking vindication for their own judgment. And all these players together mount the appeal. They go into Supreme News Court and say: 'the press denied us, but we have a case.'"
Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum responds to a post (excerpted here yesterday) about the Sunday Times of London using copies of the memo:
"The wingnuts are getting desperate. Captain's Quarters, in a nostalgic attempt to recreate the glories of Rathergate, suggests that the Downing Street Memos aren't real. Why? Because Michael Smith, the reporter who got hold of them, had them retyped to protect his source and then returned the originals. Jonah Goldberg feverishly calls CQ's revelations a 'must read.'
"Now, unlike the Killian memos that were at the center of Rathergate, there are quite a few principals in this case who either wrote or received these memos and therefore have absolute knowledge of whether or not they're genuine. The first memo, for example, was written by Matthew Rycroft and distributed at the time to David Manning, Geoff Hoon, Jack Straw, Peter Goldsmith, Richard Wilson, John Scarlett, Francis Richards, Richard Dearlove, Jonathan Powell, Sally Morgan, and Alastair Campbell. So far, not a single one of these people has claimed they're fake."
John Hinderaker of Power Line, a blog that helped lead the charge on the National Guard memos, is skeptical:
"I very much doubt that the documents are fakes, for two reasons. First, to my knowledge no one in the British government has denied their authenticity. The 'Downing Street memos' are much different from the CBS National Guard documents in this important respect: the CBS documents were ostensibly authored by Jerry Killian, who had been dead for twenty years. The Downing Street documents, on the other hand, were allegedly authored by, and relate to meetings recently conducted by, a group of men who are very much alive and well. I can't conceive of a reason why they would fail to attack the documents' genuineness if there were a basis for doing so . . .
"The Downing Street memos, while interesting, are innocuous. If someone went to the trouble of faking them, I would expect him to fake something better."
Finally, I thought I knew of all the accomplishments in Ted Koppel's long and storied career, but the New York Post has unearthed a new one:
"Busty actress Sally Kirkland tattles that curiously-coiffed 'Nightline' anchor Ted Koppel was the first man to lay a hand on her ample bosom.
"Kirkland, 60, says Koppel made his move when he was a 17-year-old senior at Manhattan's McBurney HS and she was 14-year-old freshman at Nightingale, when they were riding in the back of a horse-drawn carriage after his prom."
One in a long line of Koppel firsts.
