A “partial apology” from Truthout. A FULL apology from Brazenly Liberal

Last week, we posted a blog linking to this article at Truthout. Karl Rove had been indicted, they said, and had 24 hours to get his affairs in order before an announcement was made.

Since then, there has been a lot of debate around the blogosphere as to the veracity of this story. As more questions were raised and more time passed, the article on the Truthout site was changed several times – first “24 hours” was morphed to “24 business hours”, and now to the vague “imminent.” Other details have changed or disappeared from the story.

When we posted the link to the original TO article, we said

The big question on our mind is will he do the New Style GOP mugshot? The kind Delay and Rush did? The GOP equivalent of a glamor shot? The kind with a big ol’ shit-eating grin that says “I would like to thank all the little people……”?

But that was wrong, of course. The big question really was whether the story was true at all, true in part, true then but something changed since, or just several paragraphs of wishful thinking gone out on a limb.

We still don’t know the answer to that question and we apologize fully for having presented it as a done deal when, in fact, it wasn’t.

Anyone who expressed doubt in the beginning was roasted to a turn by the TO faithful. Even asking for time to see what happened before endorsing the article was subject to similar scathing attacks. (See any of the many threads on this at Democratic Underground.)

Now it’s obvious it didn’t happen and TO has issued this “partial apology” (whatever the hell that actually is) which – depending on what they’re actually saying and if anyone can figure that out, please let us know – may or may not be acknowledging that some or all of the story was wrong.

The discussion at Truthout about the “partial apology” is particularly disturbing. Anyone who questions the original information – even now when you’d have to be a Kool Aid mainliner to still be buying it – is labelled a “troll.” Suggest that Jason Leopold or Will Pitt or anyone else at TO has some explaining to do and in response, you get distracting non sequiturs (“Have you questioned George W. Bush about his sources that fed the WMD lies or 911 sources who warned this administration before 3,000 innocent people were killed?”). Ask what happened to change the very specific information in the original article and you are subject to ad hominem attacks (“OMG They’re SWARMING!” “Blowflies”) and bizarre demands that readers be faithful and true in spite of the facts.

These are responses typical and worthy of the Bush administration, not of those devoted to investigative reportage. Yes, these comments are posted by guests, not by TO, but that half-assed non-apology and these kiss-my-ass responses to anyone who isn’t signing a virtual loyalty oath are all we’re hearing out of TO and we deserve better. They were only too thrilled to post their own article on blogs and message boards all over the internet when it came out. Only too happy to present themselves as Great Truth Tellers Shedding Light on Dark Times. Now they need to be just humble and honest enough to say “We were wrong. This is what happened. We apologize fully and sincerely.”

We at Brazenly Liberal were wrong to promote the original article unquestioned. We apologize fully and sincerely.