Language

COHA Strike One: The Missing Link!

Submitted July 29, 2005 - 5:10 pm by Al Giordano
Well, I'm thrilled that COHA has responded and that our humble critique got under their collective skins (and apparently provoked "a large volume" of critiques from others) enough to have brought action:
  • a complete retraction of all the major points of their July 6th press release;
  • a disappeared simulator (What? Did some armed group kidnap Federico Lozano and are they holding him now with Sam Dillon and Peter McFarren in that place where people who "have left" publications without explanation as to how or why they left go? Let's cut to the quick: Was he fired or not?);
  • some angry ad hominem attacks upon me, which I always adore, because, as we say down south, "él que se enoja, pierde," or, "he who gets mad, loses."
Like Jack the Ripper (I kind of like COHA's adjectives that paint me as such), let me take this in parts...

The first substantive response I'd like to offer is about fair-play and clean fighting when the struggle is over ideas and facts.

It is very untoward, for example, to complain, as COHA does, about "what (Giordano) decided to leave out" of my critique when my critique linked to COHA's document in full: a courtesy (and honest journalistic practice) that allowed our readers to see the full context of COHA's statement and decide for him and her selves the merits of the arguments; a courtesy that COHA - so apparently deeply wounded in its thin skin that it lashes out claiming victimhood - did not provide as it mischaracterized entire swathes of my critique.

Thus, COHA complains about "selective" quotation by, um... selectively quoting! That's just bad form and makes COHA seem petty and hypocritical at the very moment when, as it recognizes with this statement, it is having a credibility crisis over the July 6th defamations vs. the Zapatistas.

Here's a clue lobbed inside the beltway from below and outside: If you don't like "selective" quotation, put a friggin' link, gramps, to what you are quoting!

Narco News (two words, not one, how "High School" is that? To mispell the name of your critic as COHA did here?) did that: We linked to COHA's entire text (and we even spelled their name right, as Authentic Journalists try to do), thus, by definition, nothing was left out.

COHA did not link to the critique that got its staff's panties all up in a bunch, though, even as it sobbed (falsely) that it has been victimized by those of us who did link to their whole press release.

But, anyway, as we shall shortly see, that's just a smokebomb on COHA's part to distract from the paucity of its claims to victimhood. Sheesh. It's Washington. Everybody wants to be a damn victim up there even as victimizing the rest of the world is inherent to the insider culture in which they live and work.

Next up... the Liberal's Cry: "Mommy! He called me a racist..."

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