Terrible Reporting From Politico....It Shouldn't Surprise You By Now

Stupid reporting from a usually bad reporter in Ben Smith

FBI agents visited the offices of the conservative Weekly Standard magazine yesterday after a shooting at the Holocaust Memorial Museum and told employees they'd found the magazine's address

The magazine is about a mile north of the Holocaust Museum, and there's no other indication that von Brunn had targeted it. Von Brunn's published rants included attacks on "neocons," and the Standard has been at the heart of the neoconservative movement.

The suggestion that the Standard may have been a target complicates any view of the racist shooter in contemporary left-right terms. Von Brunn's white supremacist roots put him under the rubric of a "right-wing extremist," but the substance of his views -- which included everything from believing that President Bush may have been in on the September 11 attacks to denying that President Obama is an American citizen -- are too far on the fringe to fit into conventional political classification

Yes, because he couldn't stand neoconservatives, that eliminates this anti-government, anti-tax, anti-Semitic, anti- Christian, anti-minority man from being a right wing shooter.

Maybe the fact that neocons unequivocally support Israel 100% (or Zionist dominance in the Middle East) may have, you know, played maybe a tiny ounce in von Bunn's possibly targeting the Weekly Standard, eh Mr. Smith?

But knowing that you one of the key figures in being a hack among hacks at Hackio, bad reporting is something you can't shake at all.

And even worse is the fact that Smith didn't have enough intelligence to report this:

But guess what? According to investigators, the address of the Washington Post was also found in von Brunn's car. And I'd bet anybody $10 that the Post received a follow-up visit from investigators to see if the paper had received any threats recently.

So shouldn't Politico launch the story that the Washington Post was "targeted" by von Brunn, since there's just as much evidence to support that claim as there was when Politico announced, categorically, that the alleged killer had "targeted" the Weekly Standard?

Yes is the obvious answer for any journalism, sane person, or seeker of the truth to Eric's hypothetical question.

Since Ben Smith still hasn't done that yet, I guess he isn't any one of those three times of people.