Jeepers, the bile and asininity keep flying. Over night my email has overflowed with hate mail — presumably driven by Glenn Greenwald’s stuff (see here and here ). Here’s one that just came in:

Subject: Geraldo Rivera he’ll find The Truth!!!
You’re so brain dead that when you have a stroke from being a fatty
no one will notice the difference.

Let me just explain what I was up to for the more fair-minded readers who’ve misunderstood or allowed Greenwald to distort the issue. I don’t trust Dana Priest. I think she has an agenda. I wanted to be honest about my biases and anticipate criticisms from readers who agree with me that she’s got an agenda. I think the New York Times has an agenda too, by the way. That doesn’t mean I reject its reporting out of hand, it just means I don’t take it as gospel either. Man, this seems like an anachronistic point to be making on a blog in 2007.

But here’s the point, Dana Priest isn’t the issue. The condition of Walter Reed is. And however much I think Priest put a bad news slant on the story (confirmed by subsequent feedback from a number of sources close to the story), my intent was to call attention to a problem. Indeed, that was my point about Geraldo Rivera in the first place. Anybody whose read what I’ve written about Rivera over the years knows that I’m not a fan of his schtick in the slightest. Here’s how I began a column in 2001:

WHEN Geraldo Rivera wanted to be the thinking man’s Jerry Springer, he had fat from his own duff injected into his forehead. It clearly took. Indeed, his entire career has been dedicated to exhausting all of the different ways a talented professional can make a public ass of himself.

And then I got mean.

But it cannot be disputed that Rivera is an excellent gadfly, capable of mustering great feats of moral outrage. And by suggesting that Fox News put Rivera on this beat, I was criticizing Fox News for paying too much attention to Anna Nicole Smith and not enough to the plight of wounded soldiers. I believe a fair-minded and plain reading of what I wrote makes that abundantly clear.

Do I think Dana Priest is a better reporter than Geraldo? Yeah sure. Though it’s an apples and oranges comparison. But all of the pseudo-intellectual psychobabble I’m getting from Greenwald’s corner of the blogosphere about how I’m representative of some deep existential problem with American political discourse because I don’t bow and scrape to a Pulitzer Prize winner is just too stupid for words. I come from a family where Walter Duranty and Herbert Matthews were household names — but not good ones.