The Excuses They Make

Just as predicted, the far left excuses themselves over Levi Johnston revelation

As predicted yesterday, the American far left lost little time in looking for a way to excuse themselves for gleefully reporting the lies that Levi Johnston admitted he told about Sarah Palin.

Writing in an op/ed in the New York Times, Gail Collins shows no interest whatsoever in honestly addressing the revelation, and sinks to an actually quite-comical low in order to do it:

"We have been dealing with a lot of imperfect apologies recently, but this one hits a new level of unsatisfactory.

At the very least, we need to know which of the gossip he was dishing was true, and which not completely. The part about how Sarah fights a lot with Todd? Or that she never cooks? Personally, all I want to know is whether Levi was being straight when he said that the former governor of Alaska doesn’t really know how to shoot a gun."

It's so utterly pathetic that one hardly knows where to begin.

Apparently, it's unthinkable to Collins that the vast majority of what Johnston said about Palin is untrue.

What Collins -- and other far-left figures such as Andrew Sullivan -- has entitled themselves to is a unique rhetorical trick.

The honest and rational individual examining the media coverage of Levi Johntson's comments about Sarah Palin would recognize that it was all merely gossip -- hate-driven gossip intended to influence impressions of Palin's politics, despite having little or no relevance whatsoever.

The honest and rational individual will quickly realize that, given that one is dealing with nothing more than gossip, if any unidentified portion of it is admitted to be untrue, then all of it is suspect.

Instead, Collins has entitled herself to a rather different take. Her self-serving take seems to be that if none of what is untrue is specificially identified, then none of it is suspect.

That's hardly a rational or honest approach to this revelation. Then again, the modus operandi of individuals such as Collins to Palin has been one that has been fundamentally dishonest and irrational. Nobody should have expected anything to change now.

In the case of Collins, she isn't done entitling herself to rhetorical tricks. In a particularly pitiful attempt to squirm free of the implications of the Johnston revelation, she even disputes the commonality of the phrase "youthful indiscretions", suggesting that its use is evidence of some kind of conspiracy:

"Johnston also told People that he hoped that the Palins would 'forgive my youthful indiscretion.' This does not really sound like something that would come from a high-school dropout who gave his son the middle name of Easton because that is his favorite hockey equipment company. In fact, the last time I heard anyone refer to a 'youthful indiscretion' was in 1998, when 74-year-old Henry Hyde, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, was confessing to an adulterous affair he had conducted when he was 41."

This would mean that Collins wasn't paying attention as recently as July 1, 2010 when USA Today refered to the "youthful indiscretions" of Ted Kennedy in the midst of an obituary piece on Senator Robert Byrd.

Google passes verdict on the commonality of the phrase quite decisively.

As an argument, this is beyond weak, and it actually sullies the pages of the New York Times that they would bother printing such tripe.

It's a sobering reminder for any of those who had hoped that the revelation that the far left yellow journalists who had posted so many of its hopes on the gossip offered by Levi Johnston would smarten up and offer a mea culpa. With Gail Collins and the NY Times leading the charge, an appropriate admission simply isn't in the cards.

They've simply let themselves off the hook -- at least in their minds.