Change For A Quarter?

It's interesting to me that the MSM chooses to keep using a lot of the same experts to comment on certain subjects. It seems like you see the same people being quoted quite often in the media these days. I suppose that happens to some extent in the blogosphere, too. I link to a lot of familiar sites. But I also tend to become very wary of sites I link that turn out to be wrong about certain subjects. Hence, I have not linked to say, the Drudge site in a long time now after having been burned twice.

So it's amazing to me that Larry Johnson is considered at all credible by the MSM right about now. Here's Larry:

Apparently not content to let the U.S. do a self-immolation act in the Middle East by itself, Israel decided to set itself on fire by invading Lebanon.   Burn baby  burn?  Like George Bush, Israel's Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, never served in a combat unit and launched military operations without thinking the matter through.  In fact, Olmert reportedly never even served in the military.  I raise this because there is one simple question Israel cannot answer about the current operations–what is their strategic military objective.  Olmert has somehow persuaded the Israeli military to ignore strategy, think tactically, and in the process become really stupid.   The events in the next several weeks will expose as myth the canard that you can secure a nation by killing terrorists.  No you can't.

And here is the first entry that came up on the Google search, "Ehud Olmert biography":

Ehud Olmert was born in Binyamina in 1945.

He served in the IDF as combat infantry unit officer and was a military correspondent for the IDF journal Bamachane. A lawyer by profession, he holds B.A. and LL.B. degrees in Psychology, Philosophy and Law from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

That would be a glaring falsehood from Mr. Johnson. There are a lot more entries in the Google results (10,600), by all means try them yourselves. Now, Mr. Johnson is a former spook, and the MSM treats him as a font of wisdom on intelligence matters.

Why?

A few keystrokes shows him to be, being charitable here, less than accurate. How accurate was the work he did as a member of the intelligence community? His blog is titled No Quarter. I suspect that's accurate. He's shy a quarter and quite a bit more. Anyone got change?

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  By FormerRighty, Sunday, 16 July , 2006 @ 11:03 am

  It seems as though Larry Johnson is not such a big MSM source. I did a Google News search on “‘larry johnson’ israel” and got all of one hit. Interestingly, the one hit described Johnson as “current MSM ‘go to’ expert on all things intelligence-related”, yet it seems that nobody is going to him all that much.

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  By Gaius, Sunday, 16 July , 2006 @ 12:12 pm

  Gee, nice try, FR. Are you working the same way as Johnson? Try Larry Johnson and intelligence or Larry Johnson and VIP.

  Let me know how you make out. Google pulled too many references to list.

  Then do what Larry didn’t and search Ehud Olmert.

Other Links to this Post

1. Liberty and Justice — Sunday, 16 July , 2006 @ 4:57 am

2. A Blog For All — Sunday, 16 July , 2006 @ 7:37 am