Eleven Days to Stop Hagel

Ted Cruz has asked Defense nominee Chuck Hagel to prove he has not accepted foreign campaign contributions.

Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images.

The Daily Caller, Tucker Carlson?s full-service politics magazine, just celebrated three years in business. The Washington Free Beacon, founded by comrades and scions from The Weekly Standard, just turned one. Thanks to them, two powerful Democrats?Sen. Bob Menendez and former Sen. Chuck Hagel?have added that terrifying Washington word, embattled, to their business cards.

Matthew Continetti, the editor of the Free Beacon, said so in his weekly column for the site. Politico?s media reporter, Dylan Byers, had heaped scorn on the Free Beacon for dogging the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee for 990 tax forms and a 2008 tape of a Chuck Hagel speech. The tape, once discovered, was a snoozer. But the Free Beacon?s reporting had pulled it loose, along with the 990s. And the Free Beacon and the Daily Caller had been asking questions about Menendez?s Bill-and-Ted relationship with Salomon Melgen, a wealthy eye doctor who traded trips to the Dominican Republic for a little senatorial clout in his negotiations over a lucrative port deal.

?When Chuck Hagel withdraws his nomination,? wrote Continetti, ?and Bob Menendez resigns his Senate seat, the usual suspects will bemoan the state of affairs that have allowed horrible conservatives to besmirch the reputations of such honorable and decent men. The usual suspects, of course, will have missed the real lesson: reporting works.?

The national Republican Party is splintered, angry, and captivated by infighting. Fox News is putting up surprisingly weak ratings. But the conservative new media is having a great second term. Three sources?the Weekly Standard?s blog, the Free Beacon, and Jennifer Rubin?s Right Turn blog at the Washington Post?have outpaced the media in leaks and memos from Senate Republicans and revelations from old Hagel speeches.

I discovered that firsthand when I couldn?t find a long Hagel quote cited in a Republican memo but absent in the book it was sourced to. In no time at all, the Free Beacon?s industrious Adam Kredo produced the evidence?a long tape that the book?s author hadn?t used. The anti-Hagel universe is small, and despite what Continetti writes, it?s not likely to get a withdrawal from a nominee with 60-odd commitments for a cloture vote.

But we?re talking about a cloture vote, aren?t we? It?s also become public knowledge, from New Jersey Democratic dinners all the way up to Jay Leno, that Sen. Bob Menendez is being investigated ?for allegedly soliciting Dominican prostitutes.? In November, when the Daily Caller published that story, the rest of the media ignored it, and New Jersey politicos knew that a rumor that hadn?t been confirmed by other news outlets had found purchase somewhere less reputable. ?When it was that weird Daily Caller video,? said Buzzfeed?s Ruby Cramer, ?it was whatever.?

And no other outlet has confirmed it. The FBI raided Melgen?s office, which kicked off a series of investigative stories on his financial ties to Menendez. Almost immediately, the prostitution allegation was conflated with the financial investigation. Other media, chasing the prostitution story, have totally failed to find the sources. The Washington Post, most hilariously, sent a reporter down to the alleged sex scene and got back a (well-crafted!) travel piece.

Menendez and Hagel tried to ignore this stuff, until they couldn?t. Why couldn?t they? Former Slatester Mickey Kaus coined and honed the term ?undernews? to describe ?stories bubbling up from the blogs and the tabs that don't meet MSM standards.? Every time a gif is born, it becomes harder for the ?mainstream media? to sift out what its readers know?and what its reporters know. In October 2012, when the Daily Caller ran its first Menendez story, political reporters stayed up and tweeted in anticipation of a damaging-looking story previewed on the Drudge Report. No matter how much Drudge gets wrong, whatever runs there surfaces in the ?undernews.? Only after they get an excuse, like the FBI cracking into Melgen?s office, do reporters admit that they knew about this, and start lobbing questions.

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=706236603604a20f3ab426a95f3fef41

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