Beyond the Pale

Let me join the legion who deride Daniel Okrent publicly naming the author of a piece critical of Adam Nagourney and then saying that he hoped that Nagourney's kids die in some future Republican War that the Times helps bring about. This, apparently, is what set Okrent off.

Publicly naming a private individual is bullshit. Okrent is supposed to be looking out for the interests of the readers as the so-called "public editor". Thisi is the same type of bullshit that Steno Sue Schmidt engaged in at the Washington Post to get another critical letter writer fired.

This blog has a readership that is middle-sized for a blog and I get occasional troll infestations -- nothing like the big boys obviously. I have banned some folks on occasion. But even here, I've never outed anybody. In fact, even the notorious Phil Parlock once had someone in comments publish his various phone numbers and I went and deleted them. I did this because I did not feel it was fair to him, even though getting his name in the papers was an obvious goal of his as a GOP Operative.

But what is more, while the words are over-the-top, there is some accuracy in what the letter writer that so angered Okrent said. The NY Times, by having one of its reporters, Judith Miller, so intimately involved (so many interpretations possible for that phrase) with folks lying about the actual situation in Iraq, helped make the Bush Administration's case for war.

Meanwhile, the same NY Times that derides a federal prosecutor who has gotten a judge to hold the same Judy Miller in contempt for not outing a source, who may have committed a crime, publicly outs a private letter writer. The Irony Meter just hit the top of the scale.

I think that a commenter, Pram, upon Atrios' comments page sums it up pretty well:

Somewhere in Iraq there is a 19 year old kid right now being ordered to his death. Nobody's *hoping* he'll die, he's being ordered to die, and by golly he's going to do it for real. He signed up to protect America, but he doesn't want to die to win Bush's election and he's scared shitless. When he buys it, his buddies will freak out and cry and rage and go crazy and they'll do that for the rest of their lives. Some hours later the souls of his parents will be crushed and they won't regrow. His girl friend who got pregnant the night before he left Iraq will raise his kid without a father. He'll come back under a flag and almost noone will be able to witness it. Bush will denegrate his sacrifice by lying about the war, and the whore media will pretend that things like that don't even happen.