Sob Stories

"Kristol's good standing in the Washington establishment depends on the wink-and-nod awareness that he's too smart to believe his own agitprop. Perhaps so. But, in the end, a fake thug is not much better than the real thing."

This got a rise out of the conservative blogosphere, including Power Line's Scott Johnson:

"How is it that Kristol got it right while 'the editors' have disgraced themselves and their magazine?

"We won't find our from Chait. He turns his guns on Kristol, with the venom and crudity that distinguishes his polemical writing. It is Kristol, after all, who had the bad taste to see -- 'immediately' -- the fabulations of TNR's Baghdad Diarist for what they were. In Chati's eyes, this is a manifestation of Kristol's thuggery. Chait condemns Kristol for a lack of interest in the truth. It is Kristol whom Chait finds guilty of 'agitprop.' On the ostensible subject of Chait's column, however, Kristol got it right while Chait and his colleagues peddled a fraud. In his column Chait presents with a classic case of what the psychiatrists call 'projection.' "

Get this: yet another media scandal! It began when two D.C. journos, Kriston Capps and Catherine Andrews, won Fishbowl DC's Hottest Media Types contest. Harmless summer fun, right?

Wrong! Salon's Farhad Manjoo blows the lid off this little scam:

"The contest was not on the up-and-up. Fishbowl's poll often functions less as an assessment of a nominee's hotness -- whatever that might mean -- than of online organizing prowess, and this year, it was even less than that. Capps and Andrews acknowledge that they won only because their online friends -- without their express encouragement, they both say -- built software 'bots' that voted thousands of times for each of them. The bots were distributed on Unfogged, a humorously wonky blog and discussion site popular with D.C. types, within a day of the poll's opening. If you downloaded and ran the software, your machine began tallying up votes for Capps and Andrews faster than a Diebold rigged for George W. Bush . . .

"What's surprising is not that anyone cheated -- online polls are about as trustworthy as Soviet Bloc elections -- but how brazen, and how easy, the cheating was. It's possible to read too much into the breezy contest -- perhaps it's going too far to suggest, as one of the contestants did, that the poll functions as a perfect metaphor for Washington life, in that everyone knew that the only way to get ahead was to play outside the rules. Still, the manner in which people went about pushing themselves is telling. These were media people in Washington; it was probably too much to expect that they wouldn't rig the contest . . .

"ABC News' Jake Tapper put out a brilliant e-mail pitch asking people to ignore his nomination and to, instead, donate money to a nonprofit child mentoring organization -- the unstated message, of course, being that kindness is hot (he lost to the liberal commentator Bill Press, whose GOTV tactics have come into question).

"No one seems to have taken the contest more seriously than Philippe Reines, Hillary Clinton's press secretary, who sent out several missives exhorting his friends to vote -- notes so pathetic that both the New York Times and CNN took pity on him."

So much for journalistic or political excellence: it's all about being seen as hot! By any means necessary.