Lie Like Mike

In his review of Sidney Blumenthal's The Clinton Wars, Chris Hitchens takes a page from the late Michael Kelly's G.O.P. playbook. In the once not-so-bad The Altantic Monthly, Hitch starts a paragraph decrying the misrepresentations of "spin doctors" and ends the same hoisting himself by his own Shit-'n-Spin:

The privatized and privateering class of spin doctors, advisers, consultants, fundraisers, and reputation mongers displays a weird combination of cynicism and naivet�. It knows better than anyone else what the candidates and parties are really like. But it is compelled, when disgust or alarm reaches a certain pitch, to act as if only a member of the "other" faction could stoop so low. This falsity and cheapness has now reached a point where, palpable as it is even to half indifferent readers and viewers, it may have become invisible to the participants themselves. Not long ago in this magazine David Brooks mapped a political sociology elaborating on the notion that the country was in theory divisible between heartland "red" districts and more coastal "blue" ones, the colors showing (rather counterintuitively, perhaps) a respective difference between Republican and Democratic areas. Soon afterward one of Bill Clinton's reliable yes-men, Paul Begala, issued a response, asserting that it was in "red" districts that gay men like Matthew Shepard were lynched, or black men like James Byrd were dragged behind pickup trucks until they died.

Yes, falsity and cheapness in political punditry have reached a point where they may have become invisible to their purveyors, like Snitch himself. Because the last sentence of the previous paragraph relies on a cheap trick that Mike Kelly got busted on long ago.

Joe Conason and Bob Somerby revealed this fraud three years ago, when Kelly selectively quoted the same sentence from Begala. Joe C. explained:

This does violence to what Begala actually wrote, as Kelly must have known when he wrote his dishonest attack. Innocent readers of Kelly's column would have no way of knowing he had left out the sentence that immediately followed that recitation of horrors. "But that's not the whole story either," Begala wrote, adding, "My point is that Middle America is a far more complicated place than even a gifted commentator like Mike Barnicle gives us credit for. It's not all just red and blue�or black and white."

Snitch is just as dishonest as Kelly was when he originally tried this sleazy stunt.

Is the glib Brit just recycling Kelly columns out of laziness, or is he deliberately distorting what Begala said? In other words, is Chris guilty of cynicism or naivet�? And why does Chris feel compelled to "prove" that only a member of the "other" faction would lower himself into Snitch's own gutter?