The generals and the media fantasy world

Jim Geraghty:

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(Maybe I'm a bit more irritable than usual, but I just feel like when a figure like Katrina Vanden Heuvel, the editor of The Nation, writes, "Is there a retired general left in the States who hasn't called on Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld to fall on his sword?" and the answer to her question is, "Yes, there are roughly 4,700," that the person who writes the spectacularly wrongheaded statement should be subjected to two or three days of being pelted with tomatoes everywhere they go. Not enough to cause bodily harm, just some public humiliation to rebuke their a) ignorance or b) extreme exaggeration to the point of a falsehood.

I think much of life comes down to incentives and deterrents, and right now there are no deterrents to just blurting out statements like that, or my other recent irritants, "The 9/11 Commission Report said there was no passenger revolt on Flight 93" and "Kofi Annan was Time's Man of the Year in 2001." Clearly, being fact-checked by the blogosphere isn't enough.

It's wrong to drive without a license, and I submit it's wrong to opine without a clue. I wonder if, in the interest of factually accurate public discourse, maybe we need some sort of stiffer penalty to those who blather first and get the facts later.)

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