My favorite little aside in the Pein piece is this:

These supposedly damning rants [by Bill Burkett], alluded to in USA Today, The Washington Post, and elsewhere, are not really any loonier than an essay in Harper?s or a conversation at a Democratic party gathering during the campaign. While Burkett doesn?t like the president, many people in America share that opinion, and the sentiment doesn?t make him a forger.

Two points:

The fact that Burkett fits right in with the Harpers crowd and Democratic Party operatives pretty much encapsulates the problems with both sets.

And no, the forgeries make Burkett a forger.

Idiot. (Okay, that’s a third point and self-evident, but I had to say it.)

David Hailey

In other words, he uses forgeries to defend forgeries. And if you read the article, he uses the debunking of Hailey’s work by WizBang as vindication of Hailey.

My head hurts.

Corey Pein is taking advantage of the imminent release of the Thornburg report on the Rather Gate matter. Positioning himself, Corey Pein, in an obvious attempt to attract attention to himself, Corey Pein, and improves his, Corey Pein’s, chances at pulling down a job with one of the major news organizations, especially CBS.

This whole line of comments here has Corey Pein out there, front and center repeating Corey Pein, Corey Pein and Corey Pein over and over again.

I think the 15 minutes of Corey Pein is about over. Now he is just a Pein in the ..

Talk about short attention span. This is the reason that news reporting of economic and scientific matters are pathetic in the press to the point of being more wrong than right all of time.

This piece clearly would seem to indicate that Columbia trains them that way, good grief.

With journalism like this it’s easy to see just how Enron could get away with it for so long; they just bored them into submission.

I’ve never met a philosopher who will play the same game in front of a truck,amazing how unsceptical they can become.î

Alas, I would also like to convince Bill Gates to trade bank accounts with me. If indeed everything is relative, then I’m sure he won’t mind. The postmodernist/deconstructionist agenda is solely premised upon the principles of extreme skepticism. I will offer you another example. We take for granted that all human beings eventually die. Anyone who lived 600 years ago is most certainly dead today. However, an extreme skeptic will declare that maybe this isnít true in an absolute sense. This is why human societies must instead embrace the principle of reasonable certitude. If we donít, civilization collapses and we return to our savage roots. Some things are beyond reasonable dispute. This is definitely the case with the Dan Rather documents. They are fraudulent. Case closed.

What strikes me after following these incidents (Rathergate, etc.), not to mention the MSM’s coverage of our activities in Iraq vs. reading actual milbloggers who are there, is the almost total lack of expertise on the part of journalists in almost every area. This is only highlighted by the expertise of bloggers in every area of life, politics, military affairs, typography (the Yourish post is a revelation but then so was reading Dr. Newcomer’s dissection of the forgeries in September), film (Roger), diplomacy, and so on. Journalists like the sloppy Pein and so many others are being shown up constantly by true experts. People in their pajamas – right. The only tools many journos are left with now are contempt and disparagement. Bloggers, especially when they display fine writing and civility besides their expertise (such as Powerline’s posts today), truly do make the MSM look like the ankle-biters they’ve become. It’s not pleasant but it is vastly amusing, as well as educational.

For those of us without our heads up our dairy errors, that is.

I’ve never met a philosopher who will play the same game in front of a truck,amazing how unsceptical they can become.

Ludwig Wittgenstein played the same game. He remained unconvinced that an elephant was not in the same room with Bertrand Russell and himself. Extreme skepticism leads to madness. Polite society should laugh at the Corey Peins of the world. They are not deserving of respect.