1115.org

I have loved ones who went through journalism school, and they assure me that j-schools don’t teach Crystal Ball Journalism 101. But there are still an awful lot of people practicing it (that’s pretty much what they uniformly are: awful). And there’s obviously a high-end market for such pseudo-journalism, since proponents of this art manage to publish their tripe in plum outlets like the Washington Post. Which is where Charles Krauthammer published a column last week.

There’s a lot of garbage in Krauthammer’s piece, and it has been roundly debunked here and there. This is the part I liked best:

Two weeks ago, I predicted that by Election Day Obama will have erased all meaningful differences with McCain on withdrawal from Iraq. I underestimated Obama’s cynicism. He will make the move much sooner. He will use his upcoming Iraq trip to finally acknowledge the remarkable improvements on the ground and to formally abandon his primary season commitment to a fixed 16-month timetable for removal of all combat troops.

That’s as good an example as you’ll ever see of tomorrow’s news being reported today.

Someone should tell Krauthammer (maybe even the editors of the Post?) that, no matter how swollen your head, there are certain conventions journalists are pretty universally required to use when they pull out that old crystal ball. Strategically placed phrases like “I think” (or for those, like Krauthammer, who find thinking difficult if not impossible, “I believe”), and words like “perhaps” and “maybe” are deemed to be obligatory. They also give you something to wipe the egg off your face with when Obama returns from Iraq without formally abandoning his previously stated position on Iraq.

But using an absurdly assertive tone to retail absurd predictions is the least of Krauthammer’s journalistic sins in this column. He stumbles right at the starting gate, on the kind of stuff they do teach at j-school. Over and over again. Starting on the very first day. Namely, fact-checking.

Because the fact of the matter is that Obama has never committed to “a fixed 16-month timetable for removal of all combat troops”. Here’s a helpful compilation of previous Obama statements on withdrawing from Iraq that was put out by the Obama campaign:

New Hampshire DNC debate, 9/26/07: “I think it’s hard to project four years from now, and I think it would be irresponsible. We don’t know what contingency will be out there. What I can promise is that if there are still troops in Iraq when I take office — which it appears there may be, unless we can get of our Republican colleagues to change their mind and cut off funding without a timetable — if there’s no timetable — then I will drastically reduce our presence there to the mission of protecting our embassy, protecting our civilians, and making sure that we’re carrying out counterterrorism activities there. I believe that we should have all our troops out by 2013, but I don’t want to make promises, not knowing what the situation’s going to be three or four years out.”

The New York Times, 11/1/07: “I have not ascribed particular numbers to that and I won’t for precisely the reason I was just talking to Michael about. I want to talk to military folks on the ground, No. 1. No. 2, a lot of it depends on what’s happened on the political front and the diplomatic front. Even something as simple as protecting our embassy is going to be dependent on what is the security environment in Baghdad. If there is some sense of security, then that means one level of force. If you continue to have significant sectarian conflict, that means another…”

Fosters, 11/28/07:
“If we see a serious effort by the Iraqi leadership to arrive at an agreement and an accommodation and you’ve seen continued reductions of violence, then you need one level of troop protection for the embassy…If things have gone to hell in a hand basket then you need another..”

And here’s one more that they left out from their compilation:
USA Today, March 17, 2008: “Susan Rice, foreign policy adviser to Sen. Barack Obama, told reporters a short time ago during another conference call that it is “striking” if Clinton’s troop withdrawal plan would not be subject to some judgment about conditions at the time. Obama, Rice said, is committed to withdrawing “one to two brigades a month,” but also to going slower if that pace would threaten the safety of U.S. personnel.”

Looking at Obama’s past statements, it hardly seems fair to argue, let alone report as fact, that Obama committed to a fixed 16-month timetable for removal of all combat troops. But Krauthammer — along with most of the rest of the national media, to be fair — seems more than willing to so argue and report.

Someone should sit these guys down, and explain to them — over and over again, because they’re unlikely to get it the first fifteen or twenty times — that just because John McCain’s campaign says something, that doesn’t mean it’s true. Because John McCain’s campaign departed from both truth and reality a long time ago.

If you think I’m being unfair to St. John, try this on for size; it’s a press statement put out by the McCain campaign on July 3, explaining how Obama now has the same Iraq policy as McCain:

Today, Barack Obama reversed that position proving once again that his words do not matter. He has now adopted John McCain’s position that we cannot risk the progress we have made in Iraq by beginning to withdraw our troops immediately without concern for conditions on the ground. There is nothing wrong with changing your mind when the facts on the ground dictate it. Indeed, the facts have changed because of the success of the surge that John McCain advocated for years and Barack Obama opposed in a position that put politics ahead of country.

Now that Barack Obama has changed course and proven his past positions to be just empty words, we would like to congratulate him for accepting John McCain’s principled stand on this critical national security issue. If he had visited Iraq sooner or actually had a one-on-one meeting with General Petraeus, he would have changed his position long ago.