The 99% Doctrine

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What is the 99% Doctrine? I’m confident, man, that anything Ron Suskind writes should be held suspect of being made up of about 99% Bull****. Yes, this includes his new book, Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President.

If he wrote bs during the Bush years, what makes anyone believe he’s written anything honest just because it’s now a Democrat he is crapping on?

As Jacob Weisberg reminds us:

If you wrote about the Bush Administration, as I did, you soon learned to avoid relying on Suskind’s reporting absent strong independent corroboration. What his three books had in common was the way they grabbed onto some interesting nugget and hyped it into something that, while bait for the news cycle and the bestseller lists, was fundamentally untrue. The first of these, The Price of Loyalty (2004), focused on Paul O’Neill’s unhappy experience as Bush’s first treasury secretary. Like all of Suskind’s work, the story is told in purple prose littered with passages of such blurriness that it’s hard to imagine a professional editor letting them past. But the real problem was the conceit at the heart of the book, that the inept, self-regarding O’Neill was a skilled and brilliant hero victimized at every turn by the political hacks across the street. Where Woodward favors his sources, Suskind flatters them histrionically. His version of the Bush White House was its own distorted reality.

Suskind’s next two books—The One Percent Doctrine (2006) and The Way of the World (2008)—were much worse. The first advanced a series of dubious theories about counterterrorism, including the claim that al-Qaida would have carried out a cyanide gas attack on the New York City subway in 2003 if Ayman al-Zawahiri, the al-Qaida leader, hadn’t called it off at the last minute because it wasn’t going to be as spectacular as Sept. 11. Suffice it to say that government officials and terrorism experts scoffed at the claim, regarding the intelligence as uncorroborated and the idea of such a plot being pulled off by al-Qaida sleeper agents as implausible. The second book leveled the charge that the Bush White House had asked the CIA to fabricate evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 attacks. Suskind’s major sources contradicted the book’s assertions, and the CIA itself was moved to issue a rare —and persuasive—official denial.

The most famous thing Suskind wrote about the Bush administration was a passage in an article he published in the New York Times Magazine, quoting an anonymous Bush “aide”:

“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’ “

This became one of the most quoted lines about the Bush years, repeated thousands of times as evidence of his administration’s willful dishonestly about everything from Iraq’s WMD to the budget. “Reality-based” turned into a liberal slogan of the era, printed on T-shirts and bumper stickers. How could it not, given the deliciousness of the quote? But did anyone in the Bush administration ever say these words to Ron Suskind? He has never given us any reason to believe that anyone did. And given the unacceptable liberties he takes with quotes from named sources—see below—I have my doubts.

Weisberg goes on to attack Suskind for his slipshod critique of the Obama White House.

If you’re like me, who believes Suskind spun much of his criticism about the Bush Administration, then it only stands to reason that his current work showing President Obama’s team in a less than favorable light should also be held suspect.

Don’t fall for the bait of buying his book just because he sings a siren song that appeals to your anti-Obama instincts. Just because it’s critical of the Obama Administration, doesn’t mean it’s based on honesty and truth. Suskind seems to take a lot of liberty with reality in order to spin a good, juicy story.

Does President Obama’s economic team suck? Yes. But don’t trust Suskind’s “insider’s scoop” on the matter.

Politico:

It’s not the first time that Suskind’s talent for narrative has raised questions among other reporters.

Over the weekend, Jesse Eisinger, a colleague of Suskind’s at the Wall Street Journal, now at Pro Publica, tweeted, “I’ve always thought the ‘reality-based’ line was piped. At the WSJ, Suskind was brilliant but his stuff was a little too perfect.”

He was referring to Suskind’s reporting that a Bush aide had told him that guys like him were “in what we call the reality-based community,” later adding, “That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” That quote has since been widely attributed to Karl Rove.

On Fox News on Saturday, Rove said, “I’m not certain how much of this book is true and accurate. My personal experience with him is that he tends to exaggerate” – a quote that was later tweeted, in a slightly surreal moment of bipartisan White House alumni solidarity, by Pfeiffer.

Karl Rove:

On Saturday, Rove said on “Fox and Friends” that he does not trust Suskind’s reporting in the new book on the Obama administration based on his “personal experience.”

“I’m not certain how much of this book is true and accurate,” Rove said on Saturday. “My personal experience with him is that he tends to exaggerate. I had an interview once in the West Wing with him where literally he was transcribing my comments and sort of repeating them back and he couldn’t get what I had just said accurate.”

Think 60 Minutes will have Suskind on again? After all, he has a new book to sell. Or have they not been featuring anti-Obama authors?

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Recalls to mind the sock puppetry of Glenn Greenwald (or was it Doug Thompson?) and his imaginary retired professor George Harleigh, who rubbed shoulders with those in Bush’s Oval Office to the extent that he heard Bush say God told him stuff.

Also there was sock puppet Terry Wilkinson who was used as a literary device by Doug T. to tell Leftist America what they KNEW must be true about Bush.

It didn’t take the blogosphere long to debunk that myth.
http://www.classicalvalues.com/archives/2006/07/wheres_george_1.html

Is Ron Suskind that bad?