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Times Watch for June 20, 2003

David Firestone’s Religious Devotion to the Left

One day after noting that Democrats call Bush’s tax plan “immoral,” reporter David Firestone gives us another taste of old-time left-wing religion in his Friday story, “Religious Leaders Ask White House to Push Child Tax Credit.”

Firestone’s entire report is based on a letter sent to President Bush by the far-left National Council of Churches: “Several of the nation's most prominent Protestant leaders implored President Bush today to seek increased child tax credits for minimum-wage families, urging him to press the Republican leadership of the House for a quick agreement on the issue. In a letter organized by the National Council of Churches, 11 religious leaders reminded the president of his promises of compassion toward children.”

Firestone at least labels the NCC as “generally liberal;” yet the group would be better categorized as far-left, given its support of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, no fan of religious freedom. (NCC was also in the forefront of groups lobbying for refugee child Elian Gonzalez to be sent back to Cuba.)

As he did Thursday, Firestone  lends out space for moral arguments from the left, quoting NCC general secretary Rev. Edgar: “The administration has talked about compassion and conservatism, and I think what they mean is that we all ought to be taking care of one another, particularly the least of us on the earth. Perhaps by lifting religious voices, particularly from the mainline tradition, it might help to move the administration and the House members a bit, and also remind them that you cannot live on the minimum wage.”

For all the Times’ fulminating fear of the “religious right,” the paper is always eager to broadcast broadsides from the religious left.

For the rest of Firestone’s piece on the National Council of Churches, click here.

Times Editor Lelyveld Pummels NY Post as “Sleaze”

Times interim executive editor Joseph Lelyveld reviews Clinton advisor Sidney Blumenthal’s book, “The Clinton Wars,” and in the process expresses a contemptuous attitude toward one of his paper’s largest local competitors, the right-leaning New York Post.

In a piece for the May 29 edition of the New York Review of Books titled “In Clinton’s Court,” Lelyveld gives a thumbs-down to Sidney Blumenthal’s book on the Clintons. Lelyveld writes “[Blumenthal] would see himself maligned as ‘Sid Vicious’ and a ‘sleazemeister’ in the New York Post, a paper that ought to know when it sees one.”

At first it may seem Lelyveld calling Blumenthal sleazy, but Lelyveld explains in a later missive that he was actually trying to bash the Post: “I can only apologize if my statement about the New York Post was misunderstood by Blumenthal. Maybe I was overindulging in irony, but I was actually trying to express sympathy for him. In a paragraph that listed a number of indignities to which he had been subjected on account of his loyalty to the Clintons, I mentioned having the word ‘sleaze’ hurled at him by a tabloid that regularly traffics in that commodity.”

Pentagon, Saddam --What’s the Diff?

On the controversy over exactly what happened to POW Jessica Lynch, columnist Nicholas Kristof thinks the Pentagon acted as badly as Saddam: “My guess is that ‘Saving Private Lynch’ was a complex tale vastly oversimplified by officials, partly because of genuine ambiguities and partly because they wanted a good story to build political support for the war -- a repetition of the exaggerations over W.M.D. We weren't quite lied to, but facts were subordinated to politics, and truth was treated as an endlessly stretchable fabric. The Iraqis misused our prisoners for their propaganda purposes, and it hurts to find out that some American officials were misusing Private Lynch the same way.”

But Kristof himself notes the Iraqis did far more than “misuse” our prisoners -- “[Iraqi sources] told of an execution of a handcuffed American male.”

For the rest of Kristof’s column on POW Jessica Lynch, click here.