digital emunction

In lieu of original thought, a few items of possible interest:

+ John Conroy is back! But he’s on WBEZ now instead of writing for the Chicago Reader. (This is not exactly news, but a story today–not up yet on the WBEZ website–reminded me to mention it.)

+ Emily Wilson (the classicist, not the poet) reviews John Tipton’s Ajax: “He succeeds brilliantly at creating a living, contemporary Sophocles. His version is a chilling mirror.” (The original’s in The Nation, but trapped behind a paywall.)

+ Marty Riker interviews the Flood fellows: “Just for the record, I was not, in fact, an angry young man. Confused and obnoxious, but not really angry.”

+ Aufgabe’s editors undo “Numbers Trouble”: “Should we be thankful or irritated that the draft is gendered?”

+ Danielle Allen speaks for herself on the Obama Muslim smear: “Worse than mud.”

+ Kent Johnson is still not sure about “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island”: “‘It is a real mystery, that poem.’”

Tumbling on the heels on that last story is this item from the No Good Deed Goes Unpunished Department: it turns out that Andy Martin, the original promoter of the Obama Muslim smear, has now decided to smear… that’s right, the person who called him out in the Washington Post: Danielle Allen.

Here’s some highlights from the ridiculous press release that Martin put out today. If you have any questions about the talents, intelligence, or reliability of Prof. Allen, I happily direct you here and here and even here.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled buffoonery:

“In so far as my contact with the Post,” Martin will state, “Mr. Mosk accurately reports my role and, as far as I can remember, correctly reports our interview.

“But Mosk produced an incomplete form of journalism. He writes a long article about Danielle Allen, but she is a very suspicious character to say the least. [Read more]

Today, in a posting on his “Rough Sketch” blog at the Washington Post Dana Milbank perpetrated one of the most grotesque examples of hatchet journalism I’ve seen in a while. I’ll get to the particulars soon enough, but first it’s worth setting a little context.

Milbank was reporting on the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s speech at the National Press Club this morning, a speech that marked the third public appearance of Barack Obama’s former pastor in the last couple of days. The first appearance came on Friday, when Wright appeared in a PBS interview with Bill Moyers. The second came yesterday, when he spoke at the Detroit NAACP’s Freedom Fund dinner.

The Moyers interview was so uncontroversial that one commentator had to wonder why we hadn’t heard more about it. But the question-and-answer period after today’s Press Club speech gave the media just the kind of thing it was waiting for. Joe Klein of Time said that “Wright’s purpose now seems quite clear: to aggrandize himself–the guy is going to be a go-to mainstream media source for racial extremist spew, the next iteration of Al Sharpton–and destroy Barack Obama.” Amy Sullivan, also at Time, said bluntly that Wright’s performance at the National Press Club “can only be described as a political disaster.”

Only small-t time will tell if Sullivan is right–one sign she’s correct is that Obama is already inching his way onto the denounce-and-reject road. [UPDATE 4/29: The inches have become miles.] But it only takes one look at the transcript of Wright’s appearance at the Press Club to see that Klein’s characterization of it as “racial extremist spew” is ridiculous.

Milbank’s post is worst of all. [Read more]