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Times Watch for 05/05/03
For Once We Agree
“We have good reason to believe we've published flawed journalism."—Times executive editor Howell Raines regarding the plagiarism controversy surrounding former reporter Jayson Blair, in the New York Daily News.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republican Kid-Killer
Ralph Waldo Emerson: Transcendentalist, poet, and Republican kid-killer. That’s the rather unconventional view put forward by Times editorial board member Adam Cohen.
Cohen’s Sunday opinion piece takes on the high-flown Transcendentalist philosopher’s apparent indifference to actual humanity: “Most striking of all…was [Emerson’s] dismissal of human grieving in general, and the death of his beloved son Waldo, at age 5, in particular. He compares the loss of his son to the loss of property, which would be a ‘great inconvenience,’ but would ultimately leave him ‘as it found me, neither better nor worse.’” Guess who that reminds Cohen of?
“Individualism run amok, transformed into a cruel self-absorption, is a good description of much of American life right now,” Cohen writes. “Republicans, using the rallying cry ‘It's your money,’ are promoting a $550 billion tax cut that would take health care from sick children—a modern echo of Emerson's ‘wicked dollars.’ In foreign policy, the rhetoric is equally self-regarding: ‘You're with us,’ we tell the world, ‘or against us.’”
Bush, Saddam Scorn International Justice
In his op-ed “Digging Up The Dead,” Times columnist Bill Keller, writing from Moscow, usefully notes the similarities between Stalin and Saddam: “Saddam was, you recall, an avid pupil of Stalin. (What were the Baathists, after all, but Bolsheviks with an Arab accent?)” Keller also meets with Aleksandr Yakovlev, once in the Politburo but now devoted to digging up Communist crimes.
But Keller can’t resist getting his digs into President Bush’s Iraq attack: “Since the administration's failed attempt to get U.N. backing for the Iraq war, it seems, the hawks' impatience with plodding multilateralism has been not only vindicated, but also infused with childish vengefulness.…In a different world, this might be a case for the new International Criminal Court, but the United States does not recognize its authority. (Neither does Iraq. In their scorn for international justice, Mr. Bush and Saddam Hussein were in full agreement.)”
Before carelessly equating Bush and Saddam, Keller might have pondered the principled case against suborning the U.S. Constitution to the whims of an international legal body. Gary Dempsey of the
Cato Institute notes: “It appears that many of the legal safeguards American citizens enjoy under the U.S. Constitution would be suspended if they were brought before the court. Endangered constitutional protections include the prohibition against double jeopardy, the right to trial by an impartial jury, and the right of the accused to confront the witnesses against him.”
The Times eagerly cites the alleged shredding of the Constitution when it comes to Attorney General John Ashcroft or the detention of Afghanistan war prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. So why would the Times favor the actual denigration of the Constitution that U.S. recognition of the ICC would entail?
Bush’s “Radical Right” Agenda?
Columnist Thomas Friedman thinks Bush and the U.S. did the right thing in Iraq, but accuses conservatives of using the war’s success as an excuse to drive “its radical right agenda at home.”
“The feelings of Iraqis right now are a jumble of liberation, hope and gratitude, mixed with anxiety, humiliation, fear of lawlessness, fear of one another, grief for sons killed in the war and suspicion of America. Conservatives, though, are so intent on proving George Bush right and liberals wrong — so the Bush team can drive its radical right agenda at home — they have rushed to impose a single liberation story line on this much more complex reality.”
The Times again tackles Sen. Rick Santorum’s now month-old remarks on gays in an editorial, “Rally Round Intolerance.”
“Far from plummeting, Senator Rick Santorum's stock with the nation's Republican leaders seems to be rising in the wake of his outrageous equating of homosexuality with bigamy, polygamy, incest and adultery,” says the Times. “He set off a furor, once more raising suspicions that the G.O.P. extends a strategic welcome to homophobes.”
This is the Times second editorial bashing Santorum (on top of several news stories and mentions on the Times opinion page). Regular Times readers could be led to believe Democrats never say anything controversial.
The Times public relations drive for Republican moderates opposing Bush’s tax cut continues, with Robin Toner’s front-page cheerleading profile for Sen. Olympia Snowe.
In “Bucking Bush, Senator Takes A Thorny Path,” Toner likens Sen. Snowe to a deficit hawk and fiscal conservative: “Ms. Snowe, who came to the House in 1978 and was elected to the Senate in 1994, has come to symbolize the strains in her party between moderates and conservatives, deficit hawks and tax cutters.” Yet Snowe’s voting record is hardly frugal: In 2002 she voted for tax funded abortions for women in the military and $2 billion in federal subsidies to milk producers last year.
There’s a pattern here: On three separate occasions, the Times has praised Sen. Charles Grassley, Republican of Ohio, as a man of his word for promising not to permit a law that would reduce taxes by more than $350 billion. Expect a praiseworthy profile any day now of Ohio Sen. George Voinovich, another moderate Republican resisting Bush’s larger tax cut proposal.
E-mail Times Watch Director, Clay Waters, with Times Watch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org