Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Scooter Guilty And Other Political Snippets With Nary A Link In Sight



Your best source for the Scooter Libby trial results is Firedoglake, but they are asking no direct links due to the number of people interested in reading what they have to say. In short, Scooter was found guilty on four counts. He might, of course, get pardoned later on by president Bush.

The Libby trial is a good example of those blogging tasks which require specialization. Other similar ones are the current federal prosecutor firing bout, though I plan to write a little about it later on. But mostly these kinds of cases must be closely followed by someone with legal expertise for the blog posts to be worthwhile.

Other areas have no such requirements. For instance, the recent mini-interest in Hillary Clinton's accent. Is she pretending to be a southerner when it benefits her? Candy Crowley thinks so:

CANDY CROWLEY, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: I think what this does do is feed to that image that Hillary Clinton is very, very studied, that she does everything with a purpose, and that she makes her message so that it points toward a particular audience. So, that's where the harm is in this.

Yup. It would have been fun to have a similar mini-interest session in the accent of our president and his brother. How come are they so different? How does one acquire a false Texan accent in Connecticut? And how harmful is this? But we didn't get that session, for some reason.

Then there is the Walter Reed scandal. Is it just extra evidence that somehow perfectly good people turn bad the minute the government enters into the picture, as right-wingers would like us to believe? And if so, how can we reconcile this with a lot of evidence showing that the Veterans' Administration health care provision has on the whole worked very well for not very much money? Or with the recent privatization of many of the parts of Walter Reed which now malfunction? I'm going to write more on this one, too.