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Times Watch for
December 1, 2003
The "Reasonably Accurate" and
"Respectful" Reagan Movie
In "Hatchet Job? Reagan Movie Is Run of the Mill," Alessandra Stanley reviews the once-CBS-now-Showtime docudrama "The Reagans" Sunday, and finds herself an outlier on the critical spectrum.
As MRC's Brent Baker notes, while even liberal critics like the Washington Post's Tom Shales find the movie "unseemly and hugely inappropriate," Stanley doesn't see what all the fuss is about: "There is no reason Showtime's version of 'The Reagans' could not have been broadcast on CBS earlier this month....Anyone eagerly anticipating or dreading a hatchet job on the 40th President is bound to feel confounded. James Brolin's portrayal of Ronald Reagan is uncannily convincing and respectful." Though not exactly gung-ho about the movie, she's relatively kind, even vouching for its historical accuracy: "'The Reagans' is reasonably accurate, at times engrossing, at other times silly and sometimes even dull."
In a Monday story on the turmoil Bush's surprise trip to Baghdad visited upon the media, Stanley maintains: "Boycotted by conservatives, canceled by CBS and finally broadcast last night on Showtime, the film, 'The Reagans,' turned out to be milder and more balanced than both its critics and its supporters had suggested."
MRC's Baker, who watched the movie, would disagree: "[It] was every bit as awful as conservatives feared with a belittling portrayal of Ronald Reagan."
For Stanley's full review of 'The Reagans,' click here.
• "The Reagans" | Alessandra Stanley | Television
Uchitelle's Hard-to-Tell Take on Consumer Spending
A Sunday column by Times economics reporter Louis Uchitelle, "As Stimulus, Tax Cuts May Soon Go Awry," leaves little doubt as to what he thinks of Bush's tax cuts (bad news). But Times Watch is still trying to figure out Uchitelle's take on consumer spending: Are they or aren't they?
Uchitelle opens by blaming the deficit on the tax cuts (ignoring huge recent increases in domestic and military spending): "They have turned a comfortable budget surplus into a constraining deficit, and they are enriching the wealthy far more than families with only five-figure incomes. The one mitigating factor is stimulus. The tax cuts are helping to revive the economy by putting more spending money into people's pockets. But even that will soon backfire."
Uchitelle later claims the tax cut is inefficient because not all the money is being spent: "The Bush tax cuts encourage this customer demand, though not efficiently. They work best if every dollar of forgiven taxes is spent. Unfortunately, only a third is being spent, according to Joel Slemrod and his colleagues at the Office of Tax Policy Research at the University of Michigan. The rest has been saved or used to pay down debt, the office found in recent surveys. By this reckoning, the Bush tax cuts will not do much to lift the economy."
But on Monday he seems to suggest Americans are spending like a house afire. In his Monday feature (note title) "Why Americans Must Keep Spending," Uchitelle insists: "But do not worry, various experts say. Consumers will keep spending anyway, going deeper into debt to do so if they must. They have too many needs, some that were luxuries only yesterday. A second car and child care, for example, are now necessities for millions of households with two earners commuting to jobs. Mall-crawling, for all its popularity, is increasingly the anomaly, not the norm, in the vast realm of personal consumption. So as the typical household keeps spending, and as other sectors of the economy revive, the country will prosper. There is considerable optimism on this point among the nation's forecasters."
So are consumers spending or not?
For Uchitelle on Bush's tax cuts, click here.
For Uchitelle on consumer spending, click here.
• Consumer Spending | Deficit | Gaffes | Tax Cuts | Louis Uchitelle
Bush in Baghdad: OK, But What About Those Funerals?
It was hard, but Adam Nagourney manages to throw cold water on Bush's surprising Thanksgiving appearance in Baghdad. While acknowledging the political potency of Bush's surprise trip, Nagourney also uses the stroke as an opportunity to invoke a newly hatched liberal canard involving Bush's non-attendance at soldiers funerals: "The trip came at a time of rising criticism of the president for not attending the funerals of the returning war dead," Nagourney writes Friday, the day after Bush's shocking appearance before the troops. " It also came in the same week that Mr. Bush met with families of 26 soldiers killed in Iraq, and thus appeared to be a concerted effort by the White House to deal with a political problem."
Nagourney is too modest to point out that if this in fact a "political problem," it's one at least partly inspired by the Times misleading coverage, which has been critical of Bush for not attending soldiers' funerals, as if it was a common practice. But as an article from the History News Network demonstrates, it's in fact exceedingly rare for sitting presidents to attend soldiers' funerals during wartime.
For the rest of Nagourney on Bush's venture into Baghdad, click here.
• Baghdad | George W. Bush | Funerals | Iraq War | Adam Nagourney
"Rising Incivility" in Congress: Blame Gingrich
Sunday's piece by Sheryl Gay Stolberg laments "The High Costs of Rising Incivility on Capitol Hill." Who's to blame? Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
Stolberg writes: "Partisanship is a fact of political life, and every generation on Capitol Hill complains that it's worse than it used to be. But as recently as the 1980's, partisanship and civility seemed able to coexist. Today, in the House, Democrats and Republicans barely talk to each other, and some say the Senate, which Jefferson famously described as the 'saucer' that would cool the passions of the House, is not far behind. Republican leaders in both chambers shut their Democratic counterparts out of talks on the two biggest legislative initiatives, the Medicare prescription drug measure and the energy bill. And scholars who study Congress say Americans are the worse for such behavior."
For the Times, everything was better when old-style weak-kneed Republicans like Bob Michel represented the Republican side instead of the more combative (and politically successful) conservatism of Gingrich: "History shows, however, that partisanship need not breed incivility. Stories are legendary about the close personal ties between Thomas P. O'Neill Jr., the Democratic speaker of the House from 1977 to 1986, and Representative Robert H. Michel of Illinois, the Republican leader from 1981 to 1994. The two men would fight bitterly on the House floor during the week, then play golf together on the weekends. Today, such cross-party friendships are increasingly rare. Most lawmakers don't stay in Washington over weekends; they head home to their districts, which gives them little time to socialize. More important, according to people on both sides of the political aisle, is that the old social order of the House was overturned in 1994, when Republicans, led by Representative Newt Gingrich of Georgia, wrested control of the chamber from Democrats after 40 years."
After quoting Grover Norquist, who approves of the Gingrich style of "incivility," Stolberg notes: "House Democrats have been chafing under Republican control ever since, and the tensions spread to the Senate as House members trained in Mr. Gingrich's bare-knuckles style won election there. Things got so bad that in 1997 House members held the first of a series of bipartisan civility retreats outside Washington."
She quotes Democrats and "moderate" Republicans to fortify that view: "'I think what is distinct about this period is the failure to really listen to the other side,' said John Podesta, who served as President Clinton's chief of staff and is now president of the Center for American Progress, a research organization. 'There is no attempt to work in the center and find a kind of bipartisan middle.' That makes life on Capitol Hill especially difficult for centrists. In a recent interview, Senator Olympia Snowe, a moderate Republican from Maine, lamented the change."
As demonstrated, the Times' timeline on the loss of Congressional civility tracks suspiciously with the Republican takeover in 1994--as if there was nothing "uncivil" about the Democratic steamrolling of the Republican minority during that party's 40-year reign over Congress.
For the rest of Stolberg on "rising incivility" in Congress, click here.
• Congress | Newt Gingrich | Republicans | Sheryl Gay Stolberg
E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org