Nice to see. Popcorn!
Dan Drezner:
An open letter to Mitt Romney flacks leaking to Jennifer Rubin: Hey there -- how's the campaign going? Oh, sorry, touchy topic…. I can see why you're all pissed off and everything that Robert Zoellick has agreed to act as the foreign policy "transition chief" for the Romney campaign…. I can see why you'd leak your complaints about this to Jennifer Rubin… a reliable stenographer for the Mitt Romney campaign. Here's the thing, though -- if you're gonna leak to Rubin, I think you're also gonna have to do her homework for her….
With the Zoellick post she just cut and pasted wrote up, however, I think she's gone from trivial mistakes to out-and-out incompetency and/or lying…. [T]here's a lot of tendentious crap… but the doozy is the embedded link. Cause if you click on it, you get to a story…. Here's the opening….
China is a vital but "reluctant stakeholder" in the current wave of Western financial woes, said Robert B. Zoellick, President of the World Bank. Zoellick told listeners that China benefits from the international system and needs to "share the responsibilities" of that engagement, for the sake of both sides of the Pacific.
Hey, did you notice a key word difference between what Rubin claims Zoellick said and what Zoellick actually said?… [E]ither Rubin didn't bother reading the embedded link you provided her, or she didn't read the embedded link at Zoellick's Wikipedia entry… or she didn't care. Whichever way it went down, it doesn't look good for either you or Rubin…. Zoellick wasn't saying that China was already responsible, as Rubin suggests in her Wikipedia dump column. He was offering a aspirational goal for the Chinese government.
You want to hit Zoellick? I think you're wrong, but fine, I get that. You want to use Rubin to do it? Then I suggest you write out exactly what she should print, and then double-check your f$&king footnotes. Cause otherwise, the errors and distortions she prints will rebound back onto you.
