Bush's call for more information is a weasel-ish cop-out. He is unwilling to criticize this murderous authoritarian regime because he has cut a deal with Karimov.
It's no surprise that Bush bobs, weaves and misleads. The real disappointment is that the hound dogs of the press corps do not challenge him when he does so.
If we had a free press we would have seen something like this weeks ago:
Top Secret British Memo Seen on May 1st Everywhere But in the U.S. Reveals:
AMERICA & CONSTITUTION RAPED!
BUSH "DETERMINED ON IRAQ WAR" BY JULY 2002!
"INTELLIGENCE & FACTS BEING FIXED AROUND POLICY"
"If true, these assertions indicate that not only had our nation secretly and perhaps illegally agreed to go to war by the summer of 2002, but that we had gone on to take specific and tangible military actions before asking Congress or the United Nations for authority," the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee pens.
Why Arar Was Tortured
by TChris
This attitude toward individual liberty has become typical in the Bush administration.
"We wanted more information," said the former official, who sat in on discussions of Mr. Arar's fate in 2002. "The one way we wouldn't get it is if we let him go."
The official is talking about Maher Arar, who was kidnapped by the United States government and whisked away to Syria for interrogation. (Talkleft background collected here.) The administration claims it had evidence that the Canadian was a member of Al Qaeda, but Arar was released when ten months of imprisonment and torture produced no evidence to support the claim.
Even a casual reader of the Constitution might think that a deprivation of liberty requires something more than an unspecified level of suspicion held by unnamed bureaucrats in the Justice Department on the basis of secret evidence. One might expect proof to be presented to a neutral magistrate before the government removes someone from American soil and tosses him into a foreign prison to be tortured. “We wanted more information and we couldn’t get it if we let him go” is a poor substitute for due process.
John Riggs spent 39 years in the Army, earning a Distinguished Flying Cross for bravery during the Vietnam War and working his way up to become a three-star general entrusted with creating a high-tech Army for the 21st century.
But on a spring day last year, Riggs was told by senior Army officials that he would be retired at a reduced rank, losing one of his stars because of infractions considered so minor that they were not placed in his official record.
...
His Pentagon superiors said he allowed outside contractors to perform work they were not supposed to do, creating "an adverse command climate."
But some of the general's supporters believe the motivation behind his demotion was politics. Riggs was blunt and outspoken on a number of issues and publicly contradicted Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld by arguing that the Army was overstretched in Iraq and Afghanistan and needed more troops.
"They all went bat s- - when that happened," recalled retired Army Lt. Gen. Jay M. Garner, a one-time Pentagon adviser who ran reconstruction efforts in Iraq in the spring of 2003. "The military part of [the defense secretary's office] has been politicized. If [officers] disagree, they are ostracized and their reputations are ruined."
...
Garner and 40 other Riggs supporters - including an unusually candid group of retired generals - are trying to help restore his rank.
But even his most ardent supporters concede that his appeal has little chance of succeeding and that an act of Congress might be required.
The Vatican has sought the intervention of the U.S. State Department to declare Pope Benedict XVI immune from a sexual abuse lawsuit filed here, according to court documents.
The rock band Nine Inch Nails said on Friday it canceled plans to appear on next week's MTV Movie Awards after the network questioned the band's plans to perform in front of an image of President Bush.
The band was slated to perform "The Hand That Feeds," the first single from its latest album.
A Los Angeles Times review called the song "a warning against blind acceptance of authority, including that of a president leading his nation to war."
"We were set to perform 'The Hand That Feeds' with an unmolested, straightforward image of George W. Bush as the backdrop. Apparently, the image of our president is as offensive to MTV as it is to me," Nine Inch Nails' leader Trent Reznor said in a statement posted on the band's Web site.
MTV said in a statement: "While we respect Nine Inch Nails' point of view, we were uncomfortable with their performance being built around a partisan political statement. When we discussed our discomfort with the band, their choice was to unfortunately pull out of the Movie Awards."
MTV is owned by Viacom Inc., the corporate parent of broadcast network CBS.
U.S. House of Representative Majority Leader Tom DeLay accused NBC on Thursday of slurring his name by including an unflattering reference to him on the NBC police drama "Law & Order: Criminal Intent."
In the episode, police are frustrated by a lack of clues, leading one officer to quip, "Maybe we should put out an APB (all-points-bulletin) for somebody in a Tom DeLay T-shirt."
Producer Dick Wolf, creator of the "Law & Order" franchise, took a swipe at DeLay in his own statement on Thursday, saying, "I ... congratulate Congressman DeLay for switching the spotlight from his own problems to an episode of a TV show."
The state of Ohio has announced it is immediately pursuing additional civil and criminal measures against Tom Noe after his legal counsel informed the state that a substantial amount of assets from the Capital Coin Funds are missing.
Mr. Noe's legal counsel advised that $10 to $12 million of Capital Coin's assets are unaccounted for.
Tens of thousands of Iraqi security personnel are to form a tight cordon around Baghdad involving hundreds of checkpoints in a bid to stem a spate of deadly car bombings, Defence Minister Saadun al-Dulaimi told reporters.
"We're going to set up a security cordon around Baghdad ... and it will be impossible for terrorists to cross," he said Thursday, adding that the plan would come into operation next week before being extended to the provinces.
Documents released by the FBI state that Defense Department personnel impersonated State Department officials in interrogations at Guantánamo Bay ...
"Defense Department interrogators, possibly on instructions from high-level officials, went to great lengths to avoid being held accountable for the use of unlawful interrogation methods," said Jameel Jaffer, a staff attorney with the ACLU. "Apparently Defense Department personnel were willing to use torture but they wanted others to be held responsible for it."
An Indianapolis father is appealing a Marion County judge's unusual order that prohibits him and his ex-wife from exposing their child to "non-mainstream religious beliefs and rituals."
The parents practice Wicca, a contemporary pagan religion that emphasizes a balance in nature and reverence for the earth.
The parents' Wiccan beliefs came to Bradford's attention in a confidential report prepared by the Domestic Relations Counseling Bureau, which provides recommendations to the court on child custody and visitation rights. Jones' son attends a local Catholic school.
"There is a discrepancy between Ms. Jones and Mr. Jones' lifestyle and the belief system adhered to by the parochial school. . . . Ms. Jones and Mr. Jones display little insight into the confusion these divergent belief systems will have upon (the boy) as he ages," the bureau said in its report.
"This was done without either of us requesting it and at the judge's whim," said Jones.
Voyager One, launched 28 years ago, is 8.7 billion miles from the sun in a region called the heliosheath, located just beyond the termination shock, or precursor of the boundary that marks the beginning of interstellar space. 
Helen Thomas-Gets Scotty
Q The other day -- in fact, this week, you said that we, the United States, is in Afghanistan and Iraq by invitation. Would you like to correct that incredible distortion of American history --
MR. McCLELLAN: No, we are -- that's where we currently --
Q -- in view of your credibility is already mired? How can you say that?
MR. McCLELLAN: Helen, I think everyone in this room knows that you're taking that comment out of context. There are two democratically-elected governments in Iraq and --
Q We're we invited into Iraq?
MR. McCLELLAN: There are two democratically-elected governments now in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we are there at their invitation. They are sovereign governments, and we are there today --
Q You mean if they had asked us out, that we would have left?
MR. McCLELLAN: No, Helen, I'm talking about today. We are there at their invitation. They are sovereign governments --
Q I'm talking about today, too.
MR. McCLELLAN: -- and we are doing all we can to train and equip their security forces so that they can provide for their own security as they move forward on a free and democratic future.
Q Did we invade those countries?
MR. McCLELLAN: Go ahead, Steve.
City boy, Kenny, moved to the country and bought a donkey from an old farmer for $100.00. The farmer agreed to deliver the donkey the next day.
The next day the farmer drove up and said, "Sorry son, but I have some bad news, the donkey died."
Kenny replied, "Well then, just give me my money back."
The farmer said, "Can't do that. I went and spent it already."
Kenny said, "OK then, just unload the donkey."
The farmer asked, "What ya gonna do with him?"
Kenny, "I'm going to raffle him off."
Farmer, "You can't raffle off a dead donkey!"
Kenny, "Sure I can. Watch me. I just won't tell anybody he is dead."
A month later the farmer met up with Kenny and asked, "What happened with that dead donkey?"
Kenny, "I raffled him off. I sold 500 tickets at two dollars a piece and made a profit of $898.00."
Farmer, "Didn't anyone complain?"
Kenny, "Just the guy who won. So I gave him his two dollars back."
Kenny grew up and eventually became the chairman of Enron.
There’s plenty of time for the Republicans to change course and regain their footing, but at this point, the party has no direction and its leaders are either corrupt (DeLay) or hapless (Bush, Frist)..
More
.Blogs are hot. Two Pew surveys conducted in early 2005 show that 16% of U.S. adults (32 million) are blog readers. After a 58% jump in readership in 2004, this number marks a leveling off within the survey’s margin of error. But the blogger audience now commands respect: it stands at 20% of the newspaper audience and 40% of the talk radio audience. Meanwhile, 6% of the entire U.S. adult population has created a blog. That’s 11 million people, or one out of every 17 American. Technorati recorded theten millionth blog in its worldwide tracking system this month.
The bloggers are fast to spot items of interest; they link to sources so that items may be verified and inspected at length; and they embroider items with witty captions and frequently passionate commentaries. One possibility is that bloggers have a distinct set of priorities and proclivities, that they have emerged as a sort of Fifth Estate.
The strength of the correspondences between the blogs and the media, on one hand, and the blogs and the online chat groups, on the other, lends credence to the contention that blogs are positioned between the two other channels as a sort of guide for the media to the rest of the internet.
Perhaps it’s not that they have a separate agenda, but that they have a distinct role to play on a topic of common interest. Different methods of processing information are, after all, a large part of what distinguishes the traditional four estates.
Exxon Mobil Corp. acted in bad faith to delay paying $1-billion owed to gas station owners who sued the company and faces almost 24 per cent interest on that amount if it continues to "misuse the judicial process," a U.S. judge has ruled.
Exxon Mobil, the world's largest publicly traded oil company, "knowingly and recklessly" filed "frivolous and bad-faith" defences to about 9,000 claims in the class-action suit to stall payment, U.S. District Judge Alan Gold ruled in Miami this week. A 201 jury award of $500-million in damages to the station owners has doubled with interest.
"Exxon has in bad faith attempted to make a 'judicial train wreck' of the claims administration process," Judge Gold said in his ruling. "Sanctions are warranted because of Exxon's scheme to deliberately misuse the judicial process to chill the class dealers' legitimate claims."
The logic is simple. There are three rules:
1. To change Senate rules requires 67 votes.
2. To end a filibuter takes 60 votes.
3. Motions to change the Senate rules can be filibustered.
The state of play:
The Republicans, if they obey the rules, certainly don't have 67 votes to change the Senate rules.
The Republicans, if they obey the rules, may not even have the 60 votes to end a filibuter.
Checkmate? No! There's hope for the Republicans still, since they have Dick "Dick" Cheney's pasty white ass firmly planted in the presiding officer's chair:
1. The Republicans make a motion to end the filibuster with 51 votes (perhaps with Cheney himself providing the 51st). That breaks rule 2 (60 votes versus 51)
2. The Democrats will filibuster the rule change.
3. Cheney will allow the rule change. That breaks rule 1. (67 votes versus 51)
Break the rules to change the rules.
Now, with 51 votes, the Republicans can do whatever they want, whenever they want, however they want. They have absolute power.
And we, with our 49 votes—who represent a majority of the country— have no voice at all. We're completely disenfranchised.
Honolulu, two a.m. Music producer Jon de Mello is sleeping when the phone rings. It's Israel, one of the artists he represents for his Mountain Apple record label. And Israel is wide awake. He often has problems at night because his weight upwards of 700 pounds forces him to sleep while hooked up to an oxygen tank. He tells de Mello he wants to record, right now.
"You got transportation?" asks de Mello. It's difficult for Israel to move around, he needs a few people to help him get dressed, get in and out of places. The studio is about 15 minutes away.
"Yeah," says Israel. "My guys are here." "Get in the car," says de Mello. "I'll meet you over there." In the car, de Mello wonders what he wants to record. They've been discussing a bunch of possibles from a songbook. But it's Israel, you never really know for sure what he's going to do. A traditional Hawai'ian hula. A John Denver song. A theme from a TV show. Could be anything.
A young engineer named Milan Bertosa sits in his recording studio, waiting. He was planning to go home, until some Hawai'ian guy with a lot of letters in his name called up and wanted to record something right away. It's late, Bertosa is tired, but the voice was insistent, saying he only needed half an hour. A knock at the door, and there stands an unimaginable sight. De Mello, whom Bertosa recognizes, stands about five foot two and 100 pounds. Next to him, the largest man he's ever seen, a gargantuan six-foot-six Hawai'ian carrying a ukulele. De Mello introduces the two, they get Israel situated in a chair, and Bertosa starts rolling tape.
Israel leans into the microphone, says: "Kay, this one's for Gabby," and begins gently strumming the uke. His beautiful voice comes in, a lilting "Oooooo," then slips into the opening words of "Over the Rainbow," from "The Wizard of Oz." Bertosa listens behind the glass, and within the first few bars knows it's something very special. He spends most of his timer recording lousy dance music. This is otherworldly. An incredibly fat man, elegantly caressing a Hollywood show tune, breaking it down to its roots, so sad and poignant, yet full of hope and possibility. Halfway through the tune, Israel spirals off into "What a Wonderful World," the George David Weiss/Bob Thiele hit made famous by Louis Armstrong, then melts back into "Over the Rainbow." He flubs a lyric, and tosses in a new chord change, but it doesn't matter. It feels seamless, chilling. Israel plays five songs in a row, then turns to de Mello and says, "I'm tired and I'm going home." "Gets up and walks out," says de Mello. "Ukulele and a vocal, one take. Over." Israel never played the song again.
Roosevelt was a genius. Bush is an idiot. Truman was an honest man. Bush is a crook. Roosevelt's face is on the dime. Bush's face should be on a mug shot.
Recently, I encountered the term "WPN" (for "what passes for news"). I'd like to propose a related term, "Nuzak." It's a functional description of how WPN fits into the life of the average Joe, who never reads a newspaper except for the sports section.
Nuzak is like Muzak. It runs in the background. It's a New York Times headline on the way out of the house. It's CNN at the airport. It's Fox News at home while Joe is really doing something else. The purpose of Nuzak is to be mildly interesting and possibly entertaining without telling Joe anything that would disturb him personally. Real news has immediacy. It is "actionable intelligence," the last thing Joe is interested in. The average person basically wants to be left alone and to be told, town-crier fashion, that "All is well." Elevator news.
"It's that the story (which may still prove to have taken place) was in fact all-too-believable — in Newsweek's offices and around the world — precisely because of the oft-crude manner in which the administration in Washington has been waging its 'war against terror.'
"This war has been at times conducted as if Muslims and Arabs weren't people, as if when 'they' are imprisoned 'they' definitely aren't 'real people,' and as if 9/11 — admittedly a terrible tragedy — has been the only serious tragedy the world has lately experienced."
DUMMERSTON, Vt. - It wasn't that long ago that the American workplace operated under a simple compact - in exchange for offering your employer 20 or 30 years of your labor, your employer would pay you a living wage and give you a pension when you retired.
Combined with Social Security and Medicare, this meant that old age was no longer a time to be feared. You could live out your final decades in a certain amount of dignity, knowing that you had a enough money to live on and health insurance to cover you when you got sick.
This system, sadly, doesn't exist anymore for most Americans. The new model of retirement looks a lot like what recently happened at Polaroid.
Unable to adapt to digital imaging and the decline of its instant photography business, Polaroid filed for bankruptcy in 2001. Just before it went bankrupt, the company canceled lifetime health care and insurance benefits for its retirees.
A group of retirees sued Polaroid to force the company to honor its commitments. They were, for the most part, unsuccessful.
In April, the remains of Polaroid were sold for $426 million. Polaroid chairman Jacques Nasser (if the name sounds familiar, he was at the helm of Ford during the spate of fatal accidents involving the Explorer SUV in 2000 that ended up costing the carmaker millions in lawsuits and lost sales) will receive $12.8 million for his shares in the company. CEO J. Michael Pocock will get $8.5 million.
And 6,000 Polaroid retirees will get $47 each.
"When Newsweek's source admitted that he had misidentified the government document in which he had seen an account of Quran desecration at Guantánamo prison, Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita exploded, "People are dead because of what this son of a bitch said. How could he be credible now?"
Di Rita could have said the same things about his bosses in the Bush administration.
Tens of thousands of people are dead in Iraq, including more than 1,600 U.S. soldiers and Marines, because of false allegations made by President George W. Bush and Di Rita's more immediate boss, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, about Saddam Hussein's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and equally imaginary active nuclear weapons program. Bush, Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice repeatedly made unfounded allegations that led to the continuing disaster in Iraq, much of which is now an economic and military no man's land beset by bombings, assassinations, kidnappings and political gridlock."
With startling unanimity, they agreed that without some combination of big tax increases and major cuts in Medicare, Social Security and most other spending, the country will fall victim to the huge debt and soaring interest rates that collapsed Argentina’s economy and caused riots in its streets a few years ago.
Meanwhile, the Coalition Provisional Authority, which we ran, has lost 8.8 billion dollars. By lost, I mean it’s totally unaccounted for. Not only has Congress not "looked into" this $8.8 billion and who might have it now, but it seems that some members are completely unaware that this staggering sum, which was supposed to go toward rebuilding Iraq, is missing. The Sunday morning after the White House Correspondents dinner, I ran into Senator George Allen at a brunch thrown by John McLaughlin and his wife. Allen had never heard of the missing $8.8 billion, or at least that's what he told me. And he's on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Stunned, I went up to Susan Page of USA Today and her husband Carl Lubsdorf of the Dallas Morning News, two veteran Washington political reporters, and told them about Allen’s ignorance of this huge scandal, which has no doubt contributed to hatred for America and the deaths of our troops. There’s less electricity in Iraq now than there was before we invaded Iraq.
Turns out that Page and Lubsdorf had also never heard of the unaccounted-for $8.8 billion. For a moment I thought that maybe I had been imagining things.
Then I spotted my friend Norm Ornstein, scholar from the American Enterprise Institute. "Would you believe it if Norm Ornstein told you about the $8.8 billion?" I asked Susan and Carl.
"Sure."
I brought Norm over, and indeed I had not been imagining things. "It was a huge story," Norm told them.
"Was it in the New York Times?" Carl asked Norm.
"Yes," Norm assured him.
What in God’s name is going on?
Taking the lead of the White House---as all patriotic American boys and girls should do---C&J officially blames Newsweek for the following:
Droughts, floods and hailstorms. Fleas. The Cs, Ds and Fs I got in school. Computer freeze-up. Peeling paint. Graffiti. Potholes. My handwriting. Trolls. Clogged pipes and leaky basements. Zits, blackheads and Eczema. Base closures. Gas prices. Global warming and gout. Dust mites. Powerline, Instapundit, Little Green Footballs and anal leakage (sorry for the redundancy). The decline of western civilization. Tone deafness.
Infomercials. Exploding donkey carts. Yappy dogs. Root rot. Dead batteries. Anakin turning to the dark side of The Force. Bloating. Idi Amin, Clay Aiken and Ann Coulter. Dirty dishes. The nuclear option. Moonies. Pages that are stuck together. The time my brother shot me with a BB gun. Supermarket checkout lines. Accordions and bagpipes. Shampoos that force you to rinse AND repeat. Watergate. Buttock lint. HMOs. Dirty diapers. Tardiness. Whatever it is they're hiding at Area 51. And Time magazine.
By David Podvin
Chimpanzees do not select the least intelligent and most hapless of the group to be their leader. They do not passively tolerate his ruining their standard of living and their environment. They do not mindlessly follow him off on a bloody crusade just because he spins fanciful yarns about bananas of mass destruction. Chimps are too smart to fall for such transparent nonsense.
When a gorilla goes around ignorantly grabbing the breasts of the lady gorillas, he does not subsequently win a special election to become Top Regional Ape, especially when none of the rest can understand what the hell he is trying to say. A gorilla who treats females with contempt incurs the wrath of the community and gets bitten and hit prior to being launched headfirst into a pile of hippo poop, which is exactly as it should be.
Consider the reaction of orangutans when one of them does not notice for several weeks that her mother is dead yet shamelessly condemns the family values of all the orangutans who are single moms. Why, they hoot derisively while displaying naked photographs of her that they have downloaded from the Internet.
And every time an insufferably pompous baboon acts holier-than-thou only to have it discovered that he pays $1200 an hour to be spanked by a whore, the other aboons take his poorly written “Book of Virtues” and ram it up his ass.
Contrast the wise reactions of these primates with the ehavior of the Texas Republican Party, which (at least theoretically) is populated by human beings. Lone Star conservatives have called for abolishing the separation between church and state in favor of having a Christian society. They have taken this position because as every person of faith is aware only bible-based parenting can provide the peace of mind that comes with knowing one’s drunken daughter is groveling on all fours while doing “Da Butt Dance”.
The Texas Republicans want to criminalize gay sex, a prohibition that if strictly enforced will make the next National Rifle Association Convention look like a ghost town. They also insist that the law must preclude any child from being left alone with a homosexual. This demand has been interpreted by knowledgeable observers as being a gratuitous slap at Ralph Reed.
The Texas Republicans want to outlaw abortion, and that goes double when the life of the mother is at risk.
The Texas Republicans want to repeal the income tax and replace it with… no federal tax. This change in the code could cause the budget deficit to rise ever so slightly, although the Laffer Curve indicates exactly the opposite.
The Texas Republicans want to eliminate the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; the position of Surgeon General; the Environmental Protection Agency; and the Departments of Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human Services, Energy, Education, Commerce, and Labor, among others. In their places, the right wing Texans propose totally unrestricted access to alcohol and tobacco, automatic weapons for everybody (finally!), the honor system for pharmaceutical and energy conglomerates, low cost housing in the form of discarded refrigerator containers, universal access to faith healers, increased social acceptance of illiteracy, and laissez faire corporate plunder. In other words, the Bush agenda.
The Texas Republicans want to eliminate Social Security. Senior citizens who lack sufficient resources to survive would be provided with a warm hug and a discount coupon from the mortuary of their choice. The Texas Republicans want to abolish minimum wage laws that inhibit prosperity as they strive to copy the much-ballyhooed “Bangladeshi Economic Miracle”.
The Texas Republicans want to confiscate the Panama Canal and rename it the American Canal. If all goes according to plan, this policy of eminent domain will ultimately expand to include the scenic American Channel and the picturesque American Riviera, not to mention the ancient Great Wall of America.
The Texas Republicans want the United States out of the United Nations and the United Nations out of the United States. How? Well, we got this problem with foreigners, see, and we got sixty-five thousand nuclear warheads just sittin’ around gatherin’ dust…
The Texas Republicans want public schools to teach Creation Science, which for the uninitiated is the academically verified theory that mindlessly parroting superstitious bullshit is the highest form of human intellectual endeavor.
It is hard for liberals to admit mistakes, and never more so than when the admission involves apologizing to religious conservatives. Yet honesty dictates that such an acknowledgement must be made, however belatedly.
Charles Darwin was wrong.
Any theory that contends Texas Republicans evolved from monkeys is implausible, blasphemous, and just plain stupid.
Clearly, it was the other way around.
America has serious and severe problems - and the more you ignore them, the more people will continue to correctly believe that Washington, D.C. is nothing more than a bunch of self-important blowhards who are more concerned with their reputation on the cocktail party circuit than they are in their country.
No, going to war based on a lie is criminal.
-If you are going to state your opinion on the Internet or any written public forum, know some grammar and use your fucking Spell Check. (I say this after my second edit.)
Yet even as the evidence of our failure continues to mount—and even as more and more people die every single day and the carnage continues without end—the Bush administration and the warhawks continue to insist that we are “winning,” that “freedom is on the march,” and that we are spreading democracy.
People can certainly choose to live in a world built on their own delusions if they wish—but they ought to recognize that facts will inevitably reassert themselves at some point. Fantasies cannot go on forever. Bush’s foreign policy is built on many delusions, including “The Fatal Utopian Delusion.” But this dream world cannot go on much longer. Facts and reality again reasserted themselves for a moment with the Newsweek story—and the hawks have convinced themselves that a retraction will make the undeniable reality vanish, still another time.
And so it might, at least in their own minds. They will be able to return to the fables with which they comfort themselves. But in the meantime, in the real world, people continue to die, people continue to suffer horrible injury, our own troops continue to be brutalized by what they are asked to do, and more and more people throughout the world grow to resent and hate the United States.
Refusing to face and deal with facts carries a tragically high price. That price is exacted from all of those who are the victims of our actions abroad. Victims know what has happened to them, and they know why, and they know who did it.
And they talk. Word gets out. One story in Newsweek doesn’t matter. The truth, indeed, is out there—but Bush and his associates will continue to deny it, their enablers will continue to deny it, and our media will continue to deny it.
As a media watchdog, we believe self-examination by news organizations is always useful, so we welcomed the arrival of The New York Times' recent report, "Preserving Our Readers' Trust." Because a democracy cannot operate without an independent, critical, and responsible press, it is incumbent on news organizations to continually assess their own performance to see if they are fulfilling their obligations to the public. Nonetheless, we are concerned about some of the ideas expressed in the report, and we take issue with some aspects of the Times' reporting that the report does not address.
Because of its importance to the functioning of our political and social life, the press will always be subject to criticism and critique. It is the press' obligation to take such critiques seriously; doing so requires not only responding to legitimate criticism, but having the fortitude and integrity to reject baseless attacks designed only to serve a partisan agenda.
If tomorrow the Times ran an article on its front page headlined "Bush is Second Coming of Christ," conservative activists would charge that it proved the paper's liberal bias because it didn't compliment the color of the president's tie. While we do not doubt that many conservatives genuinely believe that the Times, and the press in general, is biased against them, the "liberal bias" charge is above all a political tool they use to obtain coverage more favorable to their goals. All too often, news organizations have reacted to this pressure from the right by attempting to prove them wrong -- not with more objective reporting, but by giving them what they want. "The press responds to critics on the right by bending over backward not to look liberal," noted former Washington Post ombudsman Geneva Overholser. "The cumulative effect is the opposite: They're tougher on Democrats" [Eric Boehlert, "The Press v. Al Gore," Rolling Stone, 12/6-13/01]. Though this tendency is not acknowledged in the report, it has been evident in the Times' reporting on numerous occasions.
While there is not space here to list every misstep the Times has committed recently, we would like to point out a number of problems, particularly as they relate to the concerns raised in the report. The first is Elisabeth Bumiller's "White House Letter," about which you have apparently heard from numerous dissatisfied readers but about which the report says nothing. In a recent interview at Salon.com, departing public editor Daniel Okrent said of Bumiller's reporting: "It just drives people who don't like [President Bush] crazy. It would have been the same if there had been a 'White House Letter' about Clinton 10 years ago." But of course, there was no "White House Letter" offering tender, soft-focus portraits of Bill Clinton. Had there been, conservatives would have been outraged -- and rightly so.
If the White House wants the American people to know what's on the president's iPod or how sweet his communications director is to reporters, it can turn to dozens of less serious news organizations that will happily pass that bit of fluff on to the public. But to waste a Times reporter's time and precious space in the paper on an endless series of People magazine-worthy portraits that read as though they were penned by the White House press office is, frankly, beneath you. This is not to say that every last article about politics in the Times must be serious and high-minded. But the "White House Letter" has been a steady stream of starry-eyed palaver, each installment more sycophantic than the last.
The report mentions the Times' desire to avoid "tendentious" language. This concern is long overdue, but we conclude from the specific examples listed throughout the report that the Times has in mind redressing only the concerns of the right-wing in this regard (for instance, on page 14, the term "religious fundamentalists" is called a "loaded term." Is it really?)Recently progressives, too, have begun to pay attention to the political effects of language, yet nowhere are these concerns reflected in the report. To take one well-known example, at some point conservatives decided to call tax cuts "tax relief," a moniker directly implying that all taxes are oppressive and burdensome. Barely a week goes by in which this phrase does not appear in the pages of The New York Times -- used not by a conservative activist or Republican politician, but by a reporter who undoubtedly repeats it without considering its political implications.
We do not believe that you should be intimidated into changing your own language simply because conservative partisans decide to alter the lexicon. In many cases -- such as the administration's farcical renaming of "suicide bombings" to "homicide bombings" -- the Times has wisely resisted this pressure. But the Times has performed less well in soft-pedaling the administration's plans for Social Security as "personal accounts" rather than privatization, and in misattributing the phrase "nuclear option" to Democrats, when in fact the term was originated by Republicans before they thought better of it.
We were interested to see that when you defined the "perceived newsroom consensus" you were trying to break out of, you cited "liberal/conservative, religious/secular, urban/suburban/rural,
elitist/white collar/blue collar." The last category in particular suggests that there are three types of Americans: blue collar, white collar, and elitists. If some at the Times believe this, then they have internalized a conservative criticism based not in fact but in a long-term political strategy. Knowing that the key to winning electoral victories lies in expanding their support beyond their base of the wealthy, conservatives have worked to brand progressives and the policies they advocate as "elitist," often in the most Orwellian ways. This strategy is also directed at the news media, and it has become critical to the conservative project to pretend to be oppressed underdogs at a time when their power is nearly absolute. We hope you will contemplate the reasons for and the consequences of your accepting this sort of self-caricature.
This is not to say that the Times' stated intention of "diversifying our vantage point" is not an excellent one, but the Times should do so not out of fear but out of a genuine desire to report on the full scope of American social and political life. In making its case, the Times report perpetuates some of the crudest stereotypes of liberals that the right wing has advanced. For example, on page 14, you appear to suggest that liberals have some unspecified trouble writing about the military, religion, and "the middle of the country."
Your desire to expand coverage of religion is certainly a worthy endeavor, but we hope you won't fall back on the mistaken dichotomy propagated by the right, evident in too much of religion coverage today, that conservatives are religious and liberals are not. This misconception ignores the tens of millions of religious moderates and progressives, glosses over the substantial divisions within religious denominations, and allows people like James Dobson, Tim LaHaye, and Lou Sheldon -- extremist radicals, both politically and theologically -- to pose as mainstream religious figures.
As the Times' editors must understand, your paper occupies a unique place in American journalism, with an ability to set the news agenda and the larger political agenda that is unparalleled among news organizations, even those with vastly larger audiences. This power confers upon you a particular obligation to act responsibly and uphold the highest standards of your profession. We applaud you for looking to "find ways to present more contrarian and unexpected viewpoints in our news pages." We hope that your concern that the paper's perceived liberal viewpoint on its editorial pages not undermine the credibility of its news coverage will not translate into hiring conservative ideologues to report the news, which would serve neither the organization nor Times readers. Your call for diverse viewpoints is laudable, but, as you know, not all debates have two equally valid "sides," and readers should be able to rely on the Times to make those critical distinctions.
This is especially important now, at a time when the current administration has, for all intents and purposes, declared open war on the very idea of an independent press. The administration's conservative allies have simultaneously endeavored to impose a post-modern ideology of doctrinaire relativism on the media, so that all news is seen as ideological and there is no common set of facts on which we can all agree. In this context, the "he said-she said" trap into which the Times and other news organizations so regularly fall becomes particularly pernicious.
On page 13, we learn that the Times apparently takes "great care" in the editing of stories on subjects characterized as "emotional." Among those listed are abortion, gun control, the death penalty and gay marriage -- all so-called social issues on which you appear to conclude that the paper lapses at times into liberal advocacy. May we suggest that subjects like "war" and "national elections" are "emotional" also?And that "great care" ought to be taken when handling them as well?
When the Jayson Blair scandal broke, the Times reacted in extraordinary fashion: the paper's two top editors lost their jobs, and the paper published a 7,100-word, front-page self-flagellation detailing the events leading up to the scandal. This was all well and good, but it led many to wonder why some of the paper's other notable failings in recent years led neither to a similarly tortured apology nor any attempt to hold those responsible accountable. We refer specifically to the run-up to the Iraq war, in which a litany of false claims made by the administration was accepted and passed on without question; the savaging of Al Gore in the Times' news pages during the 2000 election; and the paper's misreporting of Bill and Hillary Clinton's involvement in the Whitewater land deal. In the Iraq case, the Times did publish an article admitting mistakes (buried on the inside pages), but there is little evidence that much has changed as a result -- nor, while you find time to scold yourselves for "cheerleading" on gay marriage, is there even a mention of it in this 15-page report.
There are many more issues, both specific and general, that we could raise about the Times' recent coverage. But as you seek to improve your coverage, we strongly urge you not to make responses to conservative attacks the guideposts of the changes you hope to make. Rest
assured that no matter how unimpeachable the Times' coverage becomes, conservatives will continue to allege that you have a sinister liberal agenda you are foisting on an unsuspecting public. They will always make this charge, regardless of whether they have any evidence to support it, because doing so serves their political purposes. The measure of your success as a newspaper will not be found in kowtowing to their complaints, but in serving the truth and the public that so desperately needs it.
