Jonah Goldberg on the sham of Joe Wilson and his zealous accomplice - mainstream media:Now is the time to ask: What do John Mark Karr and Joseph Wilson have in common? Wilson is no more a would-be pedophile than Karr is a former diplomat. But they are both attention-seeking liars who deliberately helped launch criminal investigations that should never have gone as far as they did. Moreover, they launched media feeding frenzies that wasted everybody's time.
It's this second point that interests me more than the first. Ever since it was reported that Karr wasn't the right guy, the media - cable news networks in particular - have been taking a beating by the professional fingerwaggers......But when it comes to the Joseph Wilson story, the wagging fingers shudder to a full stop. Wilson's allegations were all outright lies or, at best, deceitful insinuations. At least when Karr lied, he put the blame on himself. In Wilson's telling, he could do no wrong even as he was a one-man sprinkler system of false accusations - accusations that launched an absurd investigation, cost the vice president's chief of staff his job, put a journalist in jail and threatened to do likewise to many more, and hurt America's image around the globe...
...I don't know if the Wilson fraud will instantly go down with the greatest media embarrassments in modern history. However, the press doesn't seem to mind beating itself up when it overindulges the public's passions. But when its own self-indulgence is the issue, there's never any need to feel embarrassed. Indeed, there's no need to say anything at all.
