Daily Archives: November 2, 2009

Dar­leen at Pro­tein Wis­dom got annoyed when some­body started mak­ing up things on the fly and then pre­sent­ing them as estab­lished his­tor­i­cal fact.  His­tor­i­cal revi­sion­ism is what she called it, although I think that seems like a pretty dry name for such a cre­ative effort.  Darleen’s post comes equipped with a pretty impres­sive video.  I hope you’ll watch it because it has some­thing you don’t see every day.

It starts with Rachel Mad­dow show­ing how she won her Eric Roberts Look-alike Con­test and refer­ring to a graph which shows three stocks tak­ing a “V” dip where they lose around 3% of their value and then get it back.  So far?  Bor­ing.  That was just to get the party started.  It gets better.

Rachel shows this graph, smirks (more about the smirk­ing later) and says that Joe Lieber­man made a state­ment at 2:00 pm and shows a Great Big Arrow on the chart she says rep­re­sents where the stocks were in time when Joe made his speech.

Then she says Joe’s speech caused all the stocks in the V-Dip to regain their value. But as any­body can see, the stocks had all regained their val­ues when they get to Rachel’s giant Lieberman-Arrow.  Before Joe opened his mouth. Then, hav­ing proved that either she or her chart were lying, she called in rein­force­ments in the form of Jane Ham­scher, who pro­ceeded to get equally cre­ative with the his­tory of the last hun­dred years.

Now Dar­leen comes around the cor­ner and gets worked up by the fact that Jane Ham­scher got her his­tor­i­cal facts from an alter­nate uni­verse, or maybe even one of Rachel’s charts, but the errata Jane is earnestly dri­v­el­ling can’t have come from this time-space continuüm.

His­tor­i­cal facts?  Dar­lene — Why should these two worry about his­tor­i­cal facts when Rachel has been mis­rep­re­sent­ing the fact right in front of her?

This is new ter­ri­tory. they’re way beyond mis­quot­ing, or tak­ing things out of con­text, or even mak­ing things up. They’ve achieved the apoth­e­o­sis of silly jour­nal­ism: they point to care­fully labelled charts and solemnly tell you the charts don’t mean what you can see they do.

And the sneer­ing! On this MSNBC video they use the sneer the way Harry Pot­ter and his chums use their wands.  If there is ever an Olympic 100 meter Sneer I hope Rachel and Jane are available.

Or they could do sneer-jousting. They’d furi­ously ride at each other on spe­cially trained, sneer-resistant steeds, and then they’d each unleash her best sneer, and one or both of them would be thrown out of the sad­dle by the force of the unbated sneer.

And Rachel didn’t just do visual sneer­ing. Oh, no. There was some audio sneer­ing as well.

Ms. Mad­dow pointed to a graphic and pro­ceeded to read what it said (in English):

Sen­a­tor Lieber­man informed reporters, quote IF THE BILL REMAINS WHAT IT IS NOW I WILL NOT BE ABLE TO SUPPORT A CLOTURE MOTION BEFORE FINAL PASSAGE THEREFORE I WILL TRY TO STOP PASSAGE OF THE BILL unquote.

Here’s where she joined the Gods of Sneering:

Trans­lated into Eng­lish that means Joe Lieber­man plans to join with Repub­li­cans to fil­i­buster health reform.

Trans­lated into Eng­lish? Does any­one need me to trans­late the “trans­lated into Eng­lish” part? I thought not.