Making Jonathan Chait sound like Gary Cooper
Power Line
Maybe it's because I've taken so many depositions, but reading the transcripts of Hugh Hewitt's interrogation of liberal media sophists and scoundrels is becoming addictive.
Hugh's latest victim, Lawrence O'Donnell, almost made Jonathan Chait sound like Gary Cooper. O'Donnell had written, "Every lawyer I've talked to assumes Cheney was too drunk to talk to the cops after the shooting." In response to Hugh's questions about these alleged conversations, O'Donnell first asserted that he "must have talked to a dozen lawyers."
A little later, the number was down to five or six, none of whom O'Donnell was willing to identify. Hugh thinks that O'Donnell is lying, but who knows -- it's possible that O'Donnell knows five or six lawyers who hate Cheney enough to have made that assumption. The real question is why anyone would consider their assumptions illuminating.
Other portions of the transcript provide additional fuel for Hugh's suspicion that O'Donnell is less than honest. For example, he claims he did not suggest that Cheney was drunk. But he also says that the likelihood is that Cheney was drunk. I wouldn't want my credibility to depend on the difference (if any) between suggesting that Cheney was drunk and saying it's likely he was drunk.
O'Donnell also denied that Howard Kurtz had criticized him for what he wrote about the Vice President. He even accused Hugh of lying when he said that Kurtz had criticized him, and gloated when, at first, Hugh couldn't retrieve Kurtz's piece. But eventually it was revealed that Kurtz called O'Donnell's writing "tipsy" and asked, rhetorically, about O'Donnell's standards in relying on what unidentified lawyers "assumed." That sounds like criticism to me.
The Chaits and the O'Donnells (and, come to think of it, the Bill Clintons) of the world became convinced at an early age that they are clever enough to talk their way out of any situation. Lawyers like Hugh know that this is the easiest kind of witness to take down.
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