Politico smears Reid

I wanted to get to the phony baloney smear that Politico put out on Harry Reid, claiming that Reid was mean to the generals, but BarbinMD explains it well:

Of course the reason this comment was never reported is quite simple: the bloggers on the call don't remember this quote. I, along with mcjoan and Kagro X, participated in that conference call and none of us heard Reid say it. And of the four other bloggers who were there, Joe and John from AMERICAblog and Jonathon Singer, have no recollection of it. What's more, Politico's John Bresnahan attributes the quote to "several sources familiar with the interview." None of us was contacted by Politico, so who exactly comprises the "several" people they talked to? They're not saying.

As BarbinMD goes on to note, that hasn't stopped this "story" from spreading all the way to the White House. It gets so old. But that's the Republican Noise Machine for you. Efficient, yet unconcerned about the truth and relentlessly unapologetic about its actions.

UPDATE 6:45 PM PDT -- TPM Muckraker has posted a partial transcript of what Reid said.

REID: Look what this Justice Department has done. And now, with the Surgeon General, we have a man here who has written articles that I think are a little questionable as to in our modern society. He's a medical doctor. And don't worry, he's gonna be looked at very closely.

BLOGGER QUESTION: What's the next step on Gonzales?

REID: Well, I guess the President, he's gotten rid of Pace because he could not get confirmed here in the Senate. Pace is also a yes-man for the President. I told him to his face, I laid it out last time he came in to see me. I told him what an incompetent man I thought he was. But he got rid of his Joint Chiefs of Staff chair, but he still hangs on to this failed Attorney General. And I guess he's gonna [inaudible]. We're gonna keep focusing on it. Every day that goes by, it seems he keeps giving. Now we've learned that the immigration judges are all graduates of Regent University I guess.

REID AIDE: Guys, I think we have time to take one more question...

Um--they weren't even talking about Iraq, it was a passing example. The Politico report was utterly misleading. Context does, in fact, matter.

Still, it's an excellent case study in how the right wing noise machine functions, and how organizations like Politico twist things.

Then the White House and the GOP go on the attack, and the truth is buried under an avalanche of ginned-up right wing outrage.

This is the sort of thing to remember the next time someone in the traditional Beltway media starts lamenting how horrible it is that bloggers exist and how you can't trust them because they're partisan. Yeah, mistakes happen, but Politico seems to be making far too many mistakes and sourcing things thinly, and it always seems to work against Democrats. Mighty curious, it is.