Surprise! RW blogger Patterico swings and misses
February 09, 2010 12:42 pm ET by Eric Boehlert
Patterico attacks me today and clams I got the facts wrong with regards to the sad tale of conservative blogger Jim Treacher getting hit by a car last week. I've been writing about it to highlight how conservative bloggers made false accusations against the Secret Service without having the facts about the alleged "hit-and-run." And how Greg Pollowitz at National Review now refuses to admit his mistake.
Anyway, Patterico now claims that in my "screed," I falsely reported that Treacher claimed he'd been hit by a Secret Service SUV. "No, Eric Boehlert, that’s actually not true. It’s actually quite false," scolds Patterico, who then quotes Treacher rebutting me: "I did not claim Secret Service hit me. I said I was I was told Secret Service hit me by people who would know."
So according to Patterico, I owe Treacher a correction because he never, ever claimed he'd been hit by the Secret Service.
Except that, of course, he did.
Here are some of Treacher's tweets from the night of the accident; tweets that conservative bloggers used as the basis of their erroneous 'reporting' [emphasis added]:
Guess what? I just got hit by a car while crossing the street. At a crosswalk. With the right of way. By the Secret Service. Not joking
And:
My knee's broken. I'm staying at my boss Neil's house. I want to know why the Secret Service hit me, crossing w/ the Walk sign, & drove off.
And:
I know the Secret Service hit me because the cops said so. Oh, and so did the Secret Service. No apology, though. Yet.
So yeah, I feel pretty comfortable suggesting that on the night of the accident Treacher claimed he'd been hit by the Secret Service.
UPDATED: BTW, my original critique was not of Treacher and what he wrote about his accident. (I'm not in the habit of going after people who've just been hit by a car.) Instead, I criticized the National Review for its sloppy work. So it's worth noting that Patterico makes no effort to defend's NR's plainly false report about the so-called "hit-and-run."
UPDATED: Here are the actual tweets
UPDATED: In his attack on my reporting, Patterico claims he "will cheerfully issue a correction when shown I’m wrong." Well, prove it. You just insisted Treacher never claimed he'd been hit by the Secret Service. But I just showed, using Treacher's own writings, that he did.
Now, please issue a correction. Cheerfully.
UPDATED: Patterico responds, kinda. (It's a mess.)
To recap, Patterico claimed Treacher never accused the Secret Service of hitting him. But Treacher did exactly that. Note to Patterico: stop digging!
It will indicate that it's a gov't owned vehicle and there IS NO ONE ALIVE THAT WILL ADMIT THE AUTO WAS OWNED OR DRIVEN BY A MEMBER OF THE SECRET SERVICE!!! The police department won't even know the vehicle is utilized by the secret service . .
I call B.S.!!
"Look at me, look at me. I got hit by the Secret Service!!"
All in all this seems like two petulant kids sniping each other. It is entertaining though!
Weak Eric. Weak.
I can't believe how inundated we all are about hit and run accidents, that arn't, by some important, or other, government agency.
Boehlert is still in the wrong. Plus, he's mocking (as a liar) a guy who got hit by a car and got his knee broken -- all because Treacher was told the wrong information by some people. Where is Boehlert's basic compassion?
Answer: out in the trash with his honesty.
He NEVER mocked Treacher. He pointed out that he was LYING when he said that he didn't ever say that he was hit by the Secret Service.
He DID say that. And he passed ON that misinformation to Tucker Carlson and others.
You're the one who's not being honest. Liar.
How is it weak again?
"And how about the Daily Caller itself, which allowed its blogger to publish the allegation on its site that he’d been hit by the Secret Service, which was not true. The Daily Caller then posted a long, detailed account of the accident, suggesting a government conspiracy to cover up the crime. Yet in that accusatory article, the Daily Caller left out the fact that its employee originally, and eroneously, accused the Secret Service of running him over, and did it on the Daily Caller site. That fact was conveniently flushed down the memory hole."
That's a reference, not to Tweets, but to the Daily Caller site.
Boehlert can't support that false set of statements. So he pretends he never said it, and tries to distract everyone's attention with tweets.
I acknowledge that if you take Treacher's tweets out of context, one of my statements can be contested. That has nothing to do with the above passage, which Boehlert cannot support and therefore ignores as if he never said it.
Everyone has to learn info from some place. The fact that people TOLD him it was the Secret Service doesn't change that it was an accusation! This is not rocket science.
But you IGNORE the comment that came before that, which doesn't specify the SOURCE of the IMMEDIATE comments that Treacher made. The comments that are 100% right. The comments YOU are trying to debunk by virtually ignoring them since they defeat your argument.
The tweets were the initial things that Treacher created to let people know about this event.
Boehlert said "It's true that a conservative blogger, who writes under name Jim Treacher, immediately claimed he'd been hit by a Secret Service SUV."
What were his "immediate" posts? His tweets, you fool.
He didn't "only refer" to Treacher's job. He ALSO referred to the IMMEDIATE claims of Treacher that he'd been hit by a Secret Service SUV.
And that's what his tweets said happened. Not that he'd been TOLD BY OTHERS that he was hit by the Secret Service - just that he WAS hit by a Secret Service SUV.
And he DID use his position to accuse the Secret Service. Tucker Carlson posted that he'd been it by them on the Daily Caller site. Other bloggers followed suit, failing to vet his accusation!
And that was Boehlert's issue - that the follow-up reporters didn't vet the accusation before passing it on.
Read Boehlert's piece. This is what he writes:
UPDATE: And how about the Daily Caller itself, which allowed its blogger to publish the allegation on its site that he'd been hit by the Secret Service, which was not true.
He does it AGAIN two sentences later:
Yet in that accusatory article, the Daily Caller left out the fact that its employee originally, and eroneously, accused the Secret Service of running him over, and did it on the Daily Caller site. That fact was conveniently flushed down the memory hole.
When Treacher posted to the Daily Caller, he specifically wrote he had BEEN TOLD he was hit by Secret Service vehicle. He did not "accuse" anybody of anything. Boehlert doesn't mention Twitter AT ALL. He only did that to cover his arse after his shoddy "reporting" was exposed.
The dude is a HACK, plain and simple. But by all means, go ahead and continue to read his rubbish.
He said
"One last thing: I’m told by multiple people that the SUV that hit me was Secret Service. If this is true, I want to know why that happened. I was crossing legally, and they just left me there. At the very least, I want an apology. What happened to me was wrong."
That post DOES, undeniably, accuse the Secret Service of running him over. The fact that he says that he was TOLD that it was the Secret Service doesn't change that it's his accusation!
And I KNOW that Boehlert doesn't mention that the FIRST things that this guy said were tweets. That DOESN'T CHANGE THE FACT THAT THE FIRST COMMENTS WERE TWEETS! What a blind fool you are.
Boehlert said that in Treacher's first comments, he said that he was hit by the Secret Service, and Boehlert complained that the rightwing media WENT with that inaccurate info, failing to vet it!!! It doesn't MATTER, not one iota, that Boehlert didn't say what manner of communication Treacher used! It was what Treacher immediately reported, which is EXACTLY what Boehlert said it was.
There was no shoddy reporting by Boehlert. Now, there WAS shoddy reporting by the rightwing media who acted like transcriptionists instead of journalists. Had they done ANY research, rather than simply taking the report from this guy's TWEETS, they would have learned that it wasn't the Secret Service that hit him.
That's why a few hours later, the Daily Caller had to post this update....
The Daily Caller has been told by federal law enforcement sources that the Secret Service was not involved, and is working to confirm that driver of the vehicle which struck Jim Treacher was a State Department security employee.
They should have vetted the accusation before publishing it. They didn't. They let Treacher smear the Secret Service. I doubt he did it on purpose. I believe he was misled by others.
The fault lies with the media that used stenography by repeating the false story.
Just who in the world paying this firm money would think reporting insignificant stuff like this is worth it?
Both he and you really do need to get a life.
Boehlert's statement that Treacher accused the Secret Service is 100%, undeniably, forever accurate and true.
That's what Treacher did.
But originally Boehlert didn't CARE that Treacher was wrong about who hit him. It doesn't MATTER for the point that Boehlert originally made, which was that the members of the media who acted like stenographers instead of journalists should have vetted the accusation but didn't.
Treacher's accusation was wrong. But the problem was that it was reported without the necessary fact-checking.
And he didn't "mention what Treacher said in his tweets well after the fact". He mentioned what Treacher said in his tweets in his very first post, when he said that Treacher's immediate comments accused the Secret Service.
And, just as a reminder, since YOUR SIDE seems so incapable of understanding what MMFA does - it was the media falling down on their job that Boehlert was highlighting. That's what he's supposed to do. That's what he's paid to do.
And so you should refrain from trying to tell Boehlert or anyone else what they're supposed to be doing, or how they're NOT doing what they're being paid to do until you can get it through your thick skull WHAT IT WAS THAT HE WAS DOING!
Liars DENY that they are liars - that's what THEY do.
Thanks for allowing me to point out, once again, that you're a liar, and thanks for PROVING that you're a liar by lying once again.
The fact is that it was not a Secret Service SUV, but a State Dept. Diplomatic Security Service SUV. If you put one from each agency up against each other, I suspect you wouldn't be able to tell them apart.
Treacher did not pass along a "Lie" -- that is an untruthful statement intentionally told to mislead another. Instead, Treacher passed along misinformation - exactly what he had been told -- which turned out to be MISTAKEN.
Media Matters has a lot of trouble distinguishing between "lies" and "mistaken" information.
Boehlert only beclowns himself here by refusing to acknowledge that Treacher made not INTENTIONALLY untruthful statement.
I suspect he would have wanted the same answer from the State Dept. as he demanded from the Secret Service had he been given the correct information in the first place.
To them, Mistaken information from the left = mistaken information. Mistaken information from the right = lies.
Even when this is not a right vs. left issue and neither Treacher nor Daily Caller was trying to politicize it or make it a right vs. left issue, if it's mistaken information by a guy that writes for anything other than a far left website, then by MMFA definition it is a "lie" and it becomes left vs. right.
Really bizarre stuff that gets analyzed in ridiculous depth here.
They use falsehood. Something can be a falsehood and NOT be a lie.
It's YOUR side that's made this into a left vs right thing.
Treacher was WRONG. He wasn't initially lying - I put it that way, because he is NOW lying about a few things on his blog, including saying that he never SAID that the Secret Service hit him, when he clearly DID say exactly that, multiple times.
But yeah, initially, all he was doing was passing along a falsehood.
And Eric Boehlert's objection was NOT that Treacher innocently (again, initially innocently) passed along inaccurate information. It was that the people who then covered the story failed to do the fact-checking that they should have done which was his point!!!
MMFA has NO problem figuring out the difference between a falsehood and a lie. None at all.
Treacher is NOW saying that it was a hit-and-run, which it was not. He now KNOWS that it isn't a hit-and-run, but he keeps saying that it was. That makes what Treacher is doing right now a LIE.
Treacher is STILL saying that he didn't claim that he ever typed what he clearly typed! That makes what he's saying NOW a LIE.
And the fact that you folks can't understand this, after all this time, means that you're ignorant. At first, we shouldn't conclude that you're ignorant, just misinformed. But now, after multiple explanations? You're ignorant.
And I am demolishing Treacher's posts which claim that he never said that he was hit by the Secret Service (which of course he did, repeatedly), and that it wasn't a hit-and-run. Treacher is claiming that since HE didn't know who hit him, it HAS to be a hit-and-run. Except that since he was busy being treated for his injuries, the driver gave the cops his info, instead of burdening an injured man with that info. I mean, really, if a pedestrian was hit and became unconscious, what is the driver supposed to do, pin his contact info to the pedestrian's shirt and hope it doesn't get lost in the ER? There are times when you exchange info with a person, but there are times when it's more appropriate to give that info to the cops, which is what the driver did!
That's a lie. No posts by anyone named "DellDolly" have been deleted at my site.