August 06, 2008

Kevin Drum/Washington Monthly deletes yet another comment (Obama's Global Poverty Act)

Kevin Drum obviously doesn't want his readers to know how much of a hack he is, since either he or someone else at Washington Monthly keep deleting comments from me and apparently from others as well.

The latest in this long line was left earlier today on a post about Barack Obama's Global Poverty Act. It was left on washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2008_08/014237.php, which links to blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_plank/archive/2008/08/05/this-just-in-obama-is-a-secret-agent-from-the-u-n.aspx from Jonathan Cohn.

Here's the comment, as posted:

------
Let me get this straight: Jonathan Cohn admits he knows nothing about this, but he's basing his mockery on a "quick Google search" and he admits he might be missing something. And, since all the complaints about this are coming from rightwing sites, well, then it's not really necessary to look into the claims, right?

And, then Kevin Drum does an even more hacky job than usual by simply linking to someone else's hackwork.

If there are any intellectually honest BHO supporters, start here and then tell us why the figure quoted is wrong.

Remember: the key part of that is to be intellectually honest, that is unlike Kevin Drum and Jonathan Cohn.

[Note: WM and/or KD have a habit of deleting or editing comments without notice, so this comment may disappear or be different from what I posted. Search for "kevin drum" at my site for examples of comments that were deleted.]
------

UPDATE: I left another comment saying the following:

------
Here's the comment that was just deleted from this thread. Needless to say, this comment will probably be deleted too.
------

Guess what: I was right. At the WM link, out of 22 comments there are only two that have any value whatsoever: one links to the votegopher link (also left in comments here), and another that says "Just read the bill. It's typical Obama. All rhetoric and no substance. Probably unconstitutional as it violates the separation of powers." None of the others address the bill but are simply attempted "jokes", rants about how the GOP is evil, and so on.

The bottom line is that nothing Kevin Drum says can be trusted. By deleting comments from those who disagree, they're removing any fact-checking from their site. Kevin Drum could lie about something obscure and then simply delete all the comments that point out the lie. Anyone who took Drum at his word would have been misled.

Regarding the votegopher comment in comments here, I left this comment there (whew!):

------
It would be fair to state that this bill could start a process that would result in the U.S. spending the amount claimed; see for instance this estimate from the WorldBank: peekURL.com/z1doski

Note also this from the bill: "The year 2007 marks the mid-point to the Millennium Development Goals deadline of 2015." That implies that the bill wants us to continue on the path to meeting that deadline, and doing that is going to require us to spend a lot of money, in addition to doing a lot of other things covered by the MDG.

Maybe next time we can look forward to this site discussing those other MDGs and admitting that BHO obviously wants us to meet all of them.
------

Posted to Bloggage at August 6, 2008 10:30 AM