Cole Comfort, Cont.

Juan Cole, who came in for a beating by bloggers yesterday after he questioned the authenticity of the Fadhil brothers of Iraq the Model fame, today mounts a lame defense of his efforts to slander and discredit pro-democracy Iraqis.

(Oddly enough, none of Cole's postings today have links, so you'll have to go to his blog's main page and scroll down.)

In today's post, Cole fails to even mention this central element of his argument -- that a conspiracy exists to put forward a pro-American front, and that the Fadhil brothers are agents of some nefarious American scheme. He doesn't respond to any of Jeff Jarvis's or Michael Totten's criticisms. Today, James Taranto weighs in with an entry titled "Cole Cash."

Rather, Cole tries to obfuscate his ludicrous assertions by claiming that he wasn't taking a stance on the claims of the conspiracy site Martinirepublic:

I drew attention to Martini Republic's questions about the independence of IraqTheModel without actually expressing any opinion myself one way or another, except to say that they are out of the Iraqi mainstream.

Cole lacks the courage of his slanders. Read these paragraphs, from his post of December 12, and see if you believe that he wasn't "actually expressing an opinion myself one way or the other."

From the post titled "Manipulation of the Blogging World on Iraq?"

The phenomenon of blog trolling, and frankly of blog agents provocateurs secretly working for a particular group or goal and deliberately attempting to spread disinformation, is likely to grow in importance. It is a technique made for the well-funded Neoconservatives, for instance, and I have my suspicions about one or two sites out there already.

The manipulation of public information by rightwing think tanks in collusion with corporate media is already well advanced. Kevin Drum points out that supposedly "liberal" CBS News interviewed a think tank author on the need to "privatize" (in other words, get rid of) Social Security, portraying him as an ordinary 28 year old citizen who "doesn't expect the program to be there" when he retires. I guess not, since he is working so hard to destroy it. Journalistic ethics should have required CBS to identify the interviewee as a principal with an axe to grind.

Will the blogging world go the same way? So far, if you look at the top hundred sites at technorati.com with regard to incoming links, what is striking is how above-board they are. Is the collective wisdom of the blogging world such as to reduce the dangers here? Is the blogging world actually less open to manipulation than corporate media? Stay tuned.

From the title of the post to these concluding paragraphs, including his link to Martini Republic, which he calls an "extremely important posting," Cole was not simply raising a neutral point that his readers might then debate. His use of rhetorical questions rather than declarative statements is nothing more than an unsuccessful attempt undermine the character and authenticity of pro-American Iraqis while maintaining a facade of skepticism. It's a juvenile rhetorical trick unworthy of a high school debate team, much less a full professor at a top university.

So now Cole has been caught substituting damaging innuendo for straightforward argument. In addition to denying the undeniable, he writes this:

My allegation that the IraqTheModel website is far outside the norm of Iraqi public opinion as measured by polling has caused a stir in the weblogging world among, apparently, dittoheads who can't read polls.

Again, the quarrel with Cole, which Michael Totten addressed, isn't over poll numbers; it's over the integrity of Iraq the Model and other pro-American Iraqi blogs. Cole tries to hide behind statistics, but he succeeds only at further revealing his lack of interest in honest debate.

Given that he's lost his argument and failed in his attempt to destroy the reputations of men whose bravery he couldn't comprehend, his decision to leave town is understandable.