Finally! Finally! Finally! As regular readers know, Talking Points’ usual MO is slashing or biting political criticism and satire, which is, needless to say, entirely inappropriate at the moment.
(Note: I will be getting back to some constructive criticism momentarily; but more of that in a moment.)
In any case, in such a moment of national crisis it’s hard to find people who are easily skewered and entirely appropriate to skewer. But I think I’ve found one.
As you may remember, during impeachment a law professor with a specialty in environmental law named Jonathan Turley became one of the most ubiquitous faces on chat shows high and low. He became the impeachment maven even though he had no clear expertise related to the questions at hand.
Well, now it turns out that there’s no end to Turley’s expertise! When I stopped by the website of The Hill — the Capitol Hill newspaper — today I noticed that today at 3 PM Hill editor Al “Eisele’s guest will be terrorism expert Jonathan Turley, professor of law at George Washington University Law School.”
Who woulda guessed?!?!?!
Now obviously when I saw this the first thing that came to my mind was, hey, I haven’t had a good post in days, and this could be it! But I didn’t want to let my cynicism get the better of me. So I did a Nexis search of how many times Turley’s name has shown up within 25 words of the word “terrorism.”
Answer? Ten Times. Ever. And seven of those came after last Tuesday. Turley’s website doesn’t seem to mention the terrorism expertise either.
Now the old cynical Talking Points would have accused Turley of being a self-promoting hack. But that was then. And this is now. What I am thinking now is that it’s possible this expertise may have been based on undercover work Turley has been doing since impeachment. Perhaps even work undercover amongst the mujahids of Afghanistan. This would after all explain his absence from the airwaves since not too long after Bill Clinton sicced the CIA on bin Laden back in late 1998. It’s either that or Turley is shamelessly repackaging himself as a “terrorism expert” to grab a bit more TV face time.
Say it ain’t so, Jonathan!
