Yesterday this comment was left in the comment thread of one of my posts:
It is easier to attack than defend since the attackers can say anything. Truth doesnt matter. They can forge emails and forget to mention that they knew about the IRS investigation because they instigated the IG audit.
I think that makes an interesting juxtaposition with this:
It has long been part of the Washington game for officials to discredit a news story by playing up errors in a relatively small part of it. Pfeiffer gives the impression that GOP operatives deliberately tried to “smear the president†with false, doctored e-mails.
But the reporters involved have indicated they were told by their sources that these were summaries, taken from notes of e-mails that could not be kept. The fact that slightly different versions of the e-mails were reported by different journalists suggests there were different note-takers as well.
Indeed, Republicans would have been foolish to seriously doctor e-mails that the White House at any moment could have released (and eventually did). Clearly, of course, Republicans would put their own spin on what the e-mails meant, as they did in the House report. Given that the e-mails were almost certain to leak once they were sent to Capitol Hill, it’s a wonder the White House did not proactively release them earlier.
The burden of proof lies with the accuser. Despite Pfeiffer’s claim of political skullduggery, we see little evidence that much was at play here besides imprecise wordsmithing or editing errors by journalists.
or, said another way, it is the White House that is lying. The remarks of IRS official Lois Lerner, too, have been riddled with lies:
In some ways, this is just scratching the surface of Lerner’s misstatements and weasely wording when the revelations about the IRS’s activities first came to light on May 10. But, taken together, it’s certainly enough to earn her four Pinocchios.
It is possible to tell a lie with good intentions and it is possible to tell the truth with less than pure intentions. That doesn’t make it any the less important to distinguish between the truth and lies.
If your yardstick for heroes and villains is truth-telling, you’ll find precious little heroism these days.
Could be. Maybe it was just an accident that the notes inserted the words “State Department” that were not in the originals. That can be attributed to spin or misunderstandings. I think the more obvious issue is the accusal that the WH was covering up because it did not inform Congress about the investigation. Now that it is known that Issa asked for the IG investigation, that accusation has stopped, but you still see people making that claim.
Steve
Who is it that is making or did make that claim, steve? What I’ve seen is speculation about what (and when) the WH knew about the actual details of the investigation, and questions about whether the IRS officials’ communications with Congress have been accurately portraying what they knew at the time, and what the IG investigation was uncovering. Keep in mind, there are two different investigation processes that have gone on…the IG one and the one requested by Congress.
Hmmm…scratch that last statement in my previous comment….as I read it back I’m not even sure what I was trying to say. Time for me to get some sleep, I think.