The year's best takedowns, journalistic or otherwise. Put yours in the comments.
10. Glenn
Greenwald on Jeffrey Rosen's profile
of Supreme Court Justice Sonia
Sotomayor in The New Republic: "[Rosen's]
smear of Sonia Sotomayor's intellect and character -- based almost
exclusively on anonymous, gossiping ‘sources' -- is such a model of shoddy,
irresponsible, and (ironically enough) intellectually shallow ‘journalism'
that it ought to be studied carefully."
9. Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic on airport security
(from 2008, but timely): "I was wearing under my shirt a spectacular,
only-in-America device called a 'Beerbelly'.... which fit comfortably over my
beer belly [and] contained two cans' worth of Bud Light at the time of the
inspection. It went undetected. The eight-ounce bottle of water in my carry-on
bag, however, was seized by the federal government."
8. Stephen Holmes on Chris
Caldwell for The American
Prospect: "If
Caldwell and his fellow doomsayers are to be believed, Muslims have now done
what they failed to do at the gates of Vienna in 1683. They have breached
Europe's defenses and created 'beachheads' behind enemy lines....Some may object
that this way of seeing Europe's immigration problem is inflammatory, but the
more serious problem is that it makes no sense."
7. David Rieff on Daniel Jonah
Goldhagen for the National Interest:
"It is hard to believe that the erstwhile-Harvard political scientist turned
full-time moralist, pro-Israel polemicist and amateur historian Daniel Jonah
Goldhagen could have a more devoted admirer than, well, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen."
6. Barney Frank at a town
hall meeting, responding to a protester who said he supported a "Nazi
policy": "On what planet do you spend most of your time?...Trying to have a
conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table. I
have no interest in doing it."
5. Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone on Goldman
Sachs: "The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's
everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid
wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into
anything that smells like money."
4. Jacob Heilbrunn on Ban
Ki-moon in Foreign Policy: "As
secretary-general, Ban's soporific effect has never left him. One U.N. watcher
told me that Ban is like the proverbial tree falling in the forest with no one
around to witness its crash-if you don't hear him, does he really exist?"
3. Rory Stewart in the London Review of Books on Afghanistan
counterinsurgency jargon: "After seven years of refinement, the policy
seems so buoyed by illusions, caulked in ambiguous language and encrusted with
moral claims, analogies and political theories that it can seem futile to
present an alternative."
2. Betsy Kolbert in The New Yorker on Superfreakonomics:
"To be skeptical of climate models and credulous about things like
carbon-eating trees and cloudmaking machinery and hoses that shoot sulfur into
the sky is to replace a faith in science with a belief in science fiction. This
is the turn that SuperFreakonomics takes,
even as its authors repeatedly extol their hard-headedness."
1. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the failure
to capture Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora: "Removing the al Qaeda leader from
the battlefield eight years ago would not have eliminated the worldwide
extremist threat. But the failure to finish the job represents a lost
opportunity that forever altered the course of the conflict in Afghanistan."
0. A bonus, for this noughty, horrible, wretched, bloody decade: The Awl and Paul
Krugman on this noughty, horrible, wretched, bloody decade.
Honorable mentions:
Chris Hayes in the Barnes and Noble Review on Ralph
Nader's novel
Conor Clarke on Sarah Palin on cap
and trade for the Daily Dish
Jon Stewart with Betsy
McCaughey
Jon Stewart with Jim
Cramer
Ezra Klein on the Republican budget
proposal
Matt Yglesias on Greg
Mankiw
U.S. President Barack Obama to CNN's Ed Henry
The New York Times
editorial board on Lou
Dobbs
Stephen Walt on the myth
of al Qaeda safe havens for Foreign
Policy
Weston Kosova and Pat Wingert on Oprah Winfrey for Newsweek
Maureen Tkacik on CNBC for
the Columbia Journalism Review
David Rothkopf on the Commerce
Department for Foreign Policy
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