King of the False Syllogism

I'm going to go sit on the limb of the nearest tree and declare that Matthew Cooper (of The Atlantic fame) is an idiot.

I also am heaving sighs of relief after a period of being stressed, in a writerly way, about my tangential tendencies in composition. But then, maybe you haven't noticed the overwhelming weirdness of my attempts to manage The Segue.

It can be cause for cheer when a Greater Boob decides to sashay around all the verbiage. One might just get the chance to slip out the back.

Really, although he Took the Cake today, Matthew Cooper was wallowing in weirdness yesterday. I guess it was a warm-up exercise.

The title of yesterday's spasm?

"Clarence Thomas, Outcast? or President?"

No, I am not kidding. He notes that Thomas has recently recorded two lone dissensions on The Court. I know, I know, it makes me have cold shivers all up and down my spine. It also makes me "throw up a little bit in my mouth."

It's just a stone's throw from that priceless observation to this:

For what it's worth, I sometimes wonder what would have happened to Thomas
without the Anita Hill scandal. He surely would have been approved by the Senate
by a wider margin, but more importantly, would there have been an effort to
enlist him in electoral politics? It seems far fetched now, given what a recluse
Thomas has become and how no one has left the bench in more than a generation to pursue another political office.

Spellbinding, isn't it, how he... does that? I mean, wow, it wouldn't have - spasmodic coughing fit - even *occurred* to me back in 1991 to think that a political ambition aimed at winning the Presidency of the United States was in peril, especially since that dream was deferred due to the misfortune of becoming a Supreme Court Justice.

I mean, I remember there being a heightened sense of awareness about sexual harassment in the workplace. I believe that the degree of women's involvement in political life markedly increased after the hearings.

Oh yeah. And I know that most of the women of my acquaintance were devastated by his appointment.

Ah, well. This is what Matthew Cooper did today, in terms of a public writing, in a public forum. False Syllogism, at the very least.

Hey? Am I being Punk'd? That's it, isn't it! Matthew is punkin' us!

Jun 26 2009, 9:25 am by Matthew Cooper

What Barack Obama Owes Michael Jackson
They were born three years and 24 days apart. And a more than an ocean separated the only child of a Kenyan father and a Kansan mother and the Gary, Indiana kid who was the seventh of nine children. It would be wrong to read too much political meaning into the career of Michael Jackson and that of Barack Obama. (No one is thinking tonite that Hillary Clinton owes a debt of gratitude to Farrah Fawcett.) But it would be myopic to say that Jackson had a huge cultural impact and no political impact, either.


After all, as much as the oft mentioned Huxtables of "The Cosby Show" fame or any number of crossover African-American politicians, Jackson broke down walls between races with music that sent suburban whites and inner-city blacks to say, "I want my MTV!", the fledgling cry of the music cable network when it was still trying to get pickup.

In his androgyny and overall weirdness, Jackson was never really a role model in the sense that you could try and be like him. His talents were too otherworldly and so were his oddities. But he was entertaining and by bringing people together, especially in the 80s when race relations seemed more strained--remember Howard Beach or "Do the Right Thing?" or the Giuliani-Dinkins race--that meant something.

I don't have my copy of "Dreams From My Father" at hand to know if the 44th president mentions Jackson but it's hard to imagine that he didn't have a disc to take with him to Occidental or Columbia. And if he didn't own one, he surely knew the words which made him like everyone else. Barack Obama lived a life of accomplishment, an upward trajectory from Punahou to Harvard, Springfield to the White House that seems incredibly void of demons whereas Jackson was all demons. They're no more alike personally than...

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If you cannot quite place "Matthew Cooper" within the annals of journalism, here are some of the highpoints, courtesy of Wikipedia:

Matthew Cooper (born 1963) is a former reporter for Time who, along with New York Times reporter Judith Miller was held in contempt of court and threatened with imprisonment for refusing to testify before the Grand Jury regarding the Valerie Plame CIA leak investigation...
On June 29, 2005, U.S. Federal judge Thomas F. Hogan gave Miller and Cooper one week to comply with the Grand Jury order to testify or face the maximum penalty of 18 months in prison

The United States Supreme Court declined the reporters' appeal of the contempt of court finding.

On July 6, 2005, Cooper agreed to testify, thus avoiding being held in contempt of court and sent to jail. Cooper said "I went to bed ready to accept the sanctions for not testifying," but told the judge that not long before his early afternoon appearance at court he had received "in somewhat dramatic fashion" an indication from his source freeing him from his commitment to keep his source's identity secret.

Cooper stated in court that he did not previously accept a general waiver to journalists signed by his source (whom he did not identify by name), because he had made a personal pledge of confidentiality to his source. The 'dramatic change' which allowed Cooper to testify was later revealed to be a phone conversation between lawyers for Cooper and his source confirming that the waiver signed two years earlier applied to conversations with Cooper. Citing a "person who has been officially briefed on the case," The New York Times identified Karl Rove as the individual in question. Rove's own lawyer later confirmed this information. According to one of Cooper's lawyers, Cooper had previously testified before the grand jury regarding conversations with Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Jr., chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, after having received Libby's specific permission to testify. Rove's own lawyer later confirmed this information.

On July 25, 2005, Cooper wrote an account of his grand jury testimony for Time. The article, entitled "What I Told The Grand Jury," concludes:

So did Rove leak Plame's name to me, or tell me she was covert? No. Was it through my conversation with Rove that I learned for the first time that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA and may have been responsible for sending him? Yes. Did Rove say that she worked at the "agency" on "WMD"? Yes. When he said things would be declassified soon, was that itself impermissible? I don't know. Is any of this a crime? Beats me. At this point, I'm as curious as anyone else to see what Patrick Fitzgerald has.

. . . In that testimony, I recounted an on-the-record conversation with Libby that moved to background. On the record, he denied that Cheney knew about or played any role in the Wilson trip to Niger. On background, I asked Libby if he had heard anything about Wilson's wife sending her husband to Niger. Libby replied, 'Yeah, I've heard that too,' or words to that effect. Like Rove, Libby never used Valerie Plame's name or indicated that her status was covert, and he never told me that he had heard about Plame from other reporters, as some press accounts have indicated.

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So he took a job at Talking Points Memo... and in early June of this year:

June 09, 2009
Cooper joins the Atlantic

Matt Cooper, who recently lost his job at Portfolio when the magazine closed and took a reduced role at Talking Points Memo, now has a new gig: he's writing for The Atlantic's politics page.

UPDATE: Cooper points out in a tweet that he's still at TPM.

By Michael Calderone 03:03 PM