Watergate Revived For Hillary Hit Job

"Captain" Ed Morrisey "reported" yesterday, on the Hot Air blog, some shattering revelations about Senator Hillary Clinton's early career during Watergate, revelations that might topple the mighty...wait, I'll let him tell you:

Dan Calabrese's new column on Hillary Clinton's past may bring the curtain down on her political future. Calabrese interviewed Jerry Zeifman, the man who served as chief counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate hearings, has tried to tell the story of his former staffer's behavior during those proceedings for years. Zeifman claims he fired Hillary for unethical behavior and that she conspired to deny Richard Nixon counsel during the hearings:

OK, I know this is cheesy, but I'm gonna do a Seacrest and give you the rest of this after the jump, and I'll also explain why journalism is not only dead, but is currently staggering around chanting, "Brrraaains!"

Before I get to the decline and fall of all that is good in the world, let me give you the earth-shattering revelations of Jerry Zeifman:

Jerry Zeifman, a lifelong Democrat, supervised the work of 27-year-old Hillary Rodham on the committee. Hillary got a job working on the investigation at the behest of her former law professor, Burke Marshall, who was also Sen. Ted Kennedy's chief counsel in the Chappaquiddick affair. When the investigation was over, Zeifman fired Hillary from the committee staff and refused to give her a letter of recommendation – one of only three people who earned that dubious distinction in Zeifman's 17-year career.

Why?

"Because she was a liar," Zeifman said in an interview last week. "She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality."

Whoah! Somebody prop me up, the ground has just disappeared beneath my feet! If this is true, it's all over for that shrill, fish-wifey B-word! Zeifman is a lifelong Democrat, right? So it must be true! It must be! Let me copy and paste this "truth-pedo" into every internet forum that'll let me sign up for a free, anonymous password!!

I mean, it looks pretty open-and-shut. Zeifman has the iron-clad, rock-steady, You-Can't-Handle-the-Truth documentation to back it all up. He has (cue Geraldo Rivera sledge-hammering Zeifman's basement wall) his own personal diary!

Answer: Cocoa Puffs.

Question: What is Jerry Zeifman cuckoo for? More on that later.

My colleagues, Denise and Jay, and I started a series awhile ago called, "The Worst You Can Say About...," in which we tracked down the veracity of the sundry smear-jobs leveled against our assigned candidate. Mine was Hillary Clinton. I can't speak for Denise and Jay, but for my part, I was exhausted after the first one. This is why smears work so well, it's nigh impossible to prove a negative. It took me hours to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the smear was crap. What defense is there against this?

Unfortunately, the only protection is guys like Captain Ed, and me. Normally, I would be reticent to call out a fellow "Trekkie" (although as far as I know, he likes the lame "Next Generation" incarnations), but this appears to be Captain Ed's "Amok Time."

Coincidentally, I was just discussing this with a friend last night, explaining the sedimentary layers of journalism as I saw them. On the subject of bloggers, I explained that, for the most part, we don't do any original news reporting, but rather act as a fancy "highlighter pen" for other journalists, pointing out and commenting on stories that we think are important. It is a revolutionary concept, to be sure, turning ordinary citizens into news editors.

The pitfall that arises, though, is that there is a transference of journalistic ethics from the blogger to the writer of the source material. If someone writes something defamatory, and a blogger links to it, he is simply reporting that someone reported something. I'm not aware of any legal precedent, but I think there is a wide chasm between the blogger and liability here. The bar for what you can print is much lower.

Why, you might then ask, would anyone ever read a blog? That boils down to two factors, really. Number one, the ability of the reader to think critically and evaluate the credibility of the source material, and more compellingly, the trust that the reader puts in the blogger, their reputation.

The only way this differs from traditional journalists is that bloggers are largely self-policing. Unfortunately, a lot of people read blogs to have their own opinions validated, rather than to gain a fresh perspective on a news story, so journalistic ethics are left to the writer's own devices.

I've done at least one story before where I referenced a reputable political blog as the basis for the article, then pointed out how poorly sourced their story was. I even did a couple of articles on the New York Times' reed-thin journalistic lapse. My point is, there is a reason for journalistic ethics, and it isn't just to keep the "really good stuff" hidden from you. It is so you don't have to wonder how true something is when you read it, you will know that everything passes at least the test of normal journalistic verisimilitude.

The point of Ed's piece is to call Hillary Clinton a liar, but who's really sporting the immolated trousers? Ed claims that this "new column" could "bring down the curtain" on Hillary's political future. How new is this information, as Ed implies? That depends on what your definition of "is" is.

Zeifman himself flogged this story in early February on the ironically named "Accuracy in Media" website, but as Tbogg points out, the Washington Post beat this thing dead back in February of 1996! Must be a seasonal disorder.

Fine, that just makes Captain Ed guilty of hype. Who isn't? No, what gets my phaser set on "outrage" is that he knows better. He knows that Zeifman's only corroboration is his own personal diary. If there were any other sources, Zeifman, Calabrese, or Ed would have provided them.

I'm going to close this out with a snippet from Zeifman's own website that speaks to the aforementioned Cocoa Puffs issue, but before I do, I want to sum up my advice to all of you about these types of internet smears, stories on poorly designed web pages that link to other poorly designed web pages, that offer no corroboration from a legitimate source: Ignore this crap!

Eleanor Roosevelt

Decries Congressional Black Caucus

On January 22, 2008 I published an article describing a dream I had in which I "interviewed" Mrs. Roosevelt – who endorsed Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination for President. Last night the former First Lady came again to me in dream. Following is a sequel to our prior conversation.