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Subject: From Ann in Philly - Re: Kudos and Brickbats
Hey, Bart,
Your poster Keith (are you sure this isn't Olbermann lurking on your site?) wrote the following:
The Coming
Attacks
by Ann in
Philly
If everything in the posting is valid, then
this raises some very genuine concerns about Obama,
and I'd like to learn more about all this.
Having said that, if I, or any of your other designated
"Obama fans" had sent you something like that
about Hillary, you would have first advised us
to "put down the hatred for a minute", and
then proceeded to explain how none of this matters,
and that if we didn't hate Hillary so much,
we would realize that. Fair to say?"
<Sigh>
No, Keith, this is not fair to say, and here's
why. There are two types of sources used by law librarians
(that's my job description, incidentally) when
doing research. Primary sources, which are considered
prima facie (that's evidence legally sufficient
to establish a fact or a case unless disproved, according to
my dictionary) include mortgage, tax assessor
and deed transfer records, such as the records I found
concerning Senator Obama's mansion; court transcripts;
deposition testimony; bank records; telephone
records; simultaneous notes taken by qualified
observers such as police officers or FBI agents; legally
obtained transcripts of telephone conversations;
and so on and so on. Newspaper stories are generally
considered secondary sources, because they are
based on primary sources; for that reason they are generally
reliable, but not always. Some newspaper and
TV journalists have agendas; this leads to cherry-picking
of facts to fit those agendas and sometimes barely
concealed editorializing in so-called "news" stories.
A good example of this kind of reporting is the
Wen Ho Lee case, a travesty perpetrated by Jeff Gerth
of the New York Times against an innocent man.
(I could have mentioned the NYT journalistic malpractice
in the Whitewater case, but Gene Lyons and Joe
Conason have covered that far better than I ever could).
I happen to have a personal connection to the
Lee trial: the presiding judge, Judge Parker of the District
of New Mexico (his decision exonerating Lee and
excoriating of the government's misconduct in that case
is a classic of judicial writing) is the person
who presided at my niece's wedding in 1997.
All Bart said was, "Prove Ann wrong." Generally,
in a court of law, one set of prima facie evidence can
only be countered by other prima facie evidence
that either disproves or mitigates the facts presented by
the first set. Please believe me when I tell
you that I wish I had not found what I did. But I am a trained
researcher, and I go where the evidence takes
me. This has nothing to do with Obama hate, and everything
to do with the truth. I really hope, for all
our sakes, that the senator comes clean on this matter before the
Republicans force him to; by then, of course,
it will be too late. I take no comfort from his continuing pattern
of evasions and obfuscations of the facts of
his relationship with Rezko; if, for example, you made a timeline
of the differing versions coming from the senator
about how much Rezko actually has contributed to his
campaigns, from 2006 to date, the results would
be embarrassing to say the least.
Since one of Bart's rules is to keep the posts
short and to the point, I did not include the actual documentation;
however, if Bart agrees, I would be happy to
post my text again, with all sources included. But be warned: it's a lot
of pages.
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