Whether or not Robert Scheer is a CIA operative, he must still have some sort of "secret sauce" to explain his staying power. Luke Ford, surely one of the most entertaining and insightful writers about people and social situations, reports on a panel discussion at the Writer's Guild featuring Scheer and David Horowitz among others.
Robert Scheer Wins Writers Guild Debate On Style, Wit[read the whole thing. Ford doesn't have permalinks, but if it's no longer on the main page, look in his archives for the entry of May 30]. The answer, in a nutshell, is that Scheer is a charming witty fellow and he panders to an audience of close-minded and intolerant jerks, of which there is no dearth in Los Angeles.
...
The evening showed how politically and analytically useless Hollywood people are. There's something about being an artist that predisposes them to political and moral stupidity.The biggest surprise of the evening was not the large number of heckling interruptions when Horowitz spoke or how rude the crowd was to him and less frequently Titley. No, for me it was the charm and humor of Robert Scheer. He was hilarious.
And I am a conservative Republican. I came prepared to hate Scheer. I'd read Cathy Seipp tear Bob to pieces. I'd read him cut up on LaExaminer.com and Instapundit.
Scheer is a man of genuine wit .... I was charmed and amused by him...[he] just comes up with zingers naturally.
Matt Welch says he has (fondly) known Scheer for 15 years and that Ford's description rings true. In the comments: "Bob knows how to play to the home crowd, and he's got one hell of a home crowd in L.A.".
Like Michael Moore, it seems, Scheer entertains his fan base by telling them what they want to hear, the version of events that they wish were true. But Scheer's "journalism" is no more journalism than Moore's "documentary" is a documentary. So don't expect the Los Angeles Times or the San Francisco Chronicle to drop Scheer any time soon. These institutions are not in the business of disseminating news, they are in the business of selling newspapers. And Scheer must represent what their most loyal readers seem to want to buy.
Stefan: "Like Michael Moore, it seems, Scheer entertains his fan base by telling them what they want to hear, the version of events that they wish were true."
I would respect the conservative blogdom's tireless and tiresome bellyaching about something like this if a single one of them had the courage to say something about this:
"We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories," Bush said in an interview conducted Thursday. "They're illegal. They're against the United Nations resolutions, and we've so far discovered two.
"And we'll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them."
Of course, the claim that "We found the weapons of mass destruction" is not only untrue (see here; no U.S. official has claimed that we found any weapons), it's ridiculous. Where are the tens of thousands of liters of chemicals Bush alluded to in his State of the Union? What about the nuclear weapons program that could make a bomb in six months? No, just two trailers, two trailers that alone cannot produce WMD (they would need additional equipment) and which the CIA (who helped pump all the false estimates of WMD in Iraq in the first place) concludes were "likely" used for production of biological weapons. Don't be so sure.
Why can Bush falsely state that the U.S. found WMD and get away with it and Robert Scheer get an unending barage of criticisms for not directly quoting the administration?
Sounds to me like Bush is "entertaining his fan base by telling them want they want to hear, the version of events they wish were true."
Posted by: Harry on June 2, 2003 12:51 PM Harry, take the blinders off. First off, the Clinton adminstration also claimed Iraq had WMD, so did the intelligence services from Germany to Russia to Israel. As has been pointed out at other sites and blogs and even hardcopy newspaper editorials(The Dallas Morning News) Iraq never accounted for tons of chemical and biological weapons. They claimed to have destroyed the stuff but provided no prove, their behavior was that of people trying to drag out and delay the search and of people trying to hide something.
During and after the war stuff no one on the outside knew of was found, tunnels under tunnels, a cache of weapons that included intact warplanes, and so on. Iraq is a good sized country with plenty of space to hide/bury stuff in. To argue that the search for WMD is a failure is nothing but impatience servicing a leftist "WE LOVE SADDAM MORE THAN THE US! AND WE HATE BUSH WITH AN IRRATIONALITY THAT RIVALS THE CLAIMS OF THE FLAT EARTH SOCIETY!" line.
Oh yes, the president did overstate on the bio-war trucks as WMD when they are just production facilities (still violates the Resolutions), however to buy the cover story of hydrogen production requires a real want-to-believe, see above.
You want to be taken seriously, but keep displaying a willfull lack of knowledge, a willfull twisting of events, and a willfull belief in untruths-so long as they are anti-Bush/Republican/right/American.
I doubt any of this will make an impression, of course, you are enjoying your self awarded status as lonely possessor of THE (left wing) TRUTH too much.