"Tellingly, he notes that the Cambodia story is buried at the end."
The _real_ story here is that Reynolds is acknowleding that the rest of SWVFTT stuff is garbage, and the only thing they _might_ be right on involves technicalities over the Cambodian border.
Bruno Latour's been blaming himself.
http://www.uchicago.edu/research/jnl-crit-inq/issues/v30/30n2.Latour.html
"it's minimized in favor of complex eye-glazing stuff". Sweet jebus, are Republicans all stupid or something? Did "complex" become anathema at the same time as "liberal"?
Dave, that's a good point. Matt Yglesias has pointed out Glenn's funny idea of truthfulness before, in regard to Bush's WMD claims: the speaker is vindicated if any part of his claims are true. Weird. Or convenient.
That said, I would like Kerry or Brinkley to deflate the Cambodia story once and for all. It is odd to say that he remembers the South Vietnamese celebrating Christmas if in fact it happened in January. I'm willing to buy a confused memory story, lord knows it's happened to me, but more needs to be said.
PZ, I think Glenn's response would be that the Times's readers are the stupid ones, and won't follow the complexity. Whatever.
Both Drum and Reynolds interpret the reporting as hostile to the Truth Swifties and their claims, so I guess I don't get the Derrida crack.
Xmas in Cambodia isn't the real bone of contention betwixt Kerry and the Truth Swifties, anyway; Kerry's subsequent antiwar activity is. So if a lit-crit analogy is desired, I propose, not one of the various schools of post-structuralism, but the dorky footnote-gleaning that Harold Bloom once ridiculed as "poking around Swiss graveyards trying to figure out who [Matthew Arnold's] Marguerite was"
It would help if Kerry would release his diary, but he's the type who might have lied to it.
sv,
I invoked Derrida because the facts of the matter have so little influence over the partisan rhetoric. (...the text authorizes nothing...) The Times' reporters have clearly done quite a bit of research (maybe that just means they read Salon, but whatever), but each side has the facts "in advance," as far as it's concerned--so, for Glenn, a story supporting Kerry is a whitewash, and, for Matt Yglesias, a less-than-complete vindication of Kerry is inadequate.
These aren't unusual reactions, especially in blogdom, but it was a stark instance, so it seemed worth posting.