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Times Watch for 04/24/03
Today’s Times keeps a wary eye on the emotional state of conservatives, describing them in two “news stories” as savage, ferocious, frustrated, wrathful and bitter.
Bitter Conservatives Attack…Colin Powell
The Times takes the Bush administration’s side (for once), mounting the barricades in defense of Secretary of State Colin Powell, whose moderate reputation has made him the Times favorite administration Republican.
Reporter Steven Weisman writes: “In the face of conservative criticism, Mr. Powell has won approval from President Bush for negotiating with Syria on its support of terrorism, negotiating with North Korea on its nuclear weapons program, and promoting talks between Israel and a newly emerging Palestinian leadership to create a Palestinian state. All those policies have drawn fire in recent weeks, most recently from the former speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, who spoke at the American Enterprise Institute on Tuesday and issued a blistering attack on Mr. Powell's stewardship of the State Department. Mr. Powell has been the object of conservative criticism in several past policy battles, but the barrage was renewed with particular bitterness in recent days.”
Weisman darkly notes former House Speaker Gingrich’s reputation for “savagery”: “The president is said by Republican politicians to have little love for Mr. Gingrich, going back to Mr. Gingrich's savage attack against Mr. Bush's father for raising taxes, a step that ignited the wrath of conservatives generally.”
Bitter Conservatives Attack…Senate Moderates
In “Republicans Have Tax-Cutting Ax to Grind With One Another,” David Firestone paints conservatives as sore losers: “Bitter about the success of Republican moderates in whittling down President Bush's tax cuts, Republican conservatives are planning to exact a political price for what they consider to be economic heresy.”
Firestone describes the “acrimonious rift” between the “centrist” Republican Main Street Partnership and “the Club for Growth, a conservative political action committee supporting the administration that has taken on moderates with increasing ferocity.” (Strange, how only conservatives are ever “ferocious.”) And they’re frustrated, too: “Republican conservatives…cannot contain their frustration at being unable to pass the president's full economic plan despite having won control of both houses of Congress last fall.” Someone should tell the Times that mood rings (like confiscatory tax rates) went out in the 1970s.
National Review’s Stanley Kurtz details the Times “shameful treatment” of recent remarks by Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Rick Santorum, noting Wednesday’s Times contained three mentions of Santorum’s controversial remarks on gays (there’s another Santorum story in Thursday’s paper).
Times Watch would also note the New York Times never editorialized on the recent verbal gaffes of prominent Democrats. In March, when Democratic Rep. Jim Moran of Virginia implied the war in Iraq was being undertaken at the behest of American Jews, the Times editorial page kept silent, although the paper ran news stories on the controversy.
Worse was the Times treatment of comments in December by Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, when she said Osama bin Laden had "been out in these countries for decades, building schools, building roads, building infrastructure, building day-care facilities, building health care facilities, and the people are extremely grateful." The Times ignored Murray’s comments completely.
The same standard of ignoring Democratic outrages held when Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio compared Al Qaeda to American revolutionaries on March 1: “If you think back to our founding as a country, we are a country of revolution. One could say that Osama bin Laden and these non-nation-state fighters with religious purpose are very similar to those kind of atypical revolutionaries that helped to cast off the British crown." Kaptur’s deluded comparison was also completely ignored by the Times.
And when powerful Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd used a racial slur twice on a Fox News program in March 2001, the Times first mention of it was in a book review--nine months later.
Gov. Pataki Taxes
Times Patience
The Times advice to New York’s governor: Win the public’s approval by raising their taxes, and do it quick. Al Baker’s Metro story, “Pataki Takes Firmest Stand Against Higher Tax on Rich,” paints a bleak picture for the governor: “Gov. George E. Pataki, facing a huge budget shortfall, questions about his leadership and a new poll that showed his approval rating dropping fast, stood firm today in his opposition to increasing income taxes on New York's wealthiest residents.”
The Times again pushes a specific liberal tax hike favored by unions: “One proposal, by union leaders, would add a surcharge of seven-tenths of 1 percent on the tax rate for people earning more than $100,000 a year.”
A study by the liberal Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, which favors higher taxes on higher incomes, notes that the average income in the group in the income group 80%-95% is $102,000. As Times Watch has noted before, ITEP’s figures show that a tax hike on those earning $100,000 a year would hit one out of six state taxpayers. That’s a lot of “rich” people in New York! Perhaps New York isn’t doing as badly as we think.
Today’s edition of “Boldface Names” (the Times gossip column that dare not speak its name) features this tasteless headline regarding an appearance by author Salman Rushdie: “There's Something About a Man With a Fatwa.” That’s a reference to the bounty put on Rushdie’s head by the Ayatollah Khomeini (lifted in 1999) following the publication of his novel “The Satanic Verses.” Well, at least someone sees the funny side.
E-mail Times Watch Director, Clay Waters, with Times Watch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org