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Times Watch for
February 16, 2004
What Do They Want From Bush?
After Bush's Friday "document dump" of his National Guard records, the PBS discussion show Washington Week in Review featured Times White House reporter Elisabeth Bumiller commenting from the Times newsroom, saying Bush had again failed to address "critical" accusations from Democrats: "I think that the bottom line is that there is nothing beyond the president's dental examination that he had in Alabama in January of 1973 that puts him in Alabama. That's critical because the contention of some of the Democrats is that the president never turned up for his military National Guard duty in Alabama for a six-month period in '72 and '73." [Ed. Note: The dental exam actually took place at Dannelly Air National Guard base in Alabama.]
Bumiller summarized: "The White House finally released some documents this week. They were very blurry, 30-year-old microfiche files from a personnel center in Colorado. They were very hard to read. The White House asserted that these proved--these were payroll records that the president had been paid for certain days of service in the Guard in '72 and '73. However, you couldn't tell where he was paid."
Then Bumiller, without evidence, suggested: "And there's also the issue that some people in the Guard in those years were paid when they didn't show up. The White House then on Wednesday--Tuesday or Wednesday--released a very strange document, which was a diagram of teeth. And with it, was the president's dental exam from the base in Alabama in 1973. And this, to this point, even after this big document drop tonight, that remains the only document that definitively shows that the president was in Alabama."
Bumiller's summing-up story in Monday's Times continues pecking at Bush's inability to prove a negative--that he didn't shirk his National Guard duties: "The records of an exam performed at the Dannelly Air National Guard base in Montgomery, dated Jan. 6, 1973, were the first unearthed documents that placed Mr. Bush at an Alabama Guard base. White House officials had clearly decided that, however much of a stretch, they were the best they had….Friday night brought a final tidal wave of paper, much of it highly repetitive and already released in previous years, that once again offered no new proof that Mr. Bush had turned up for duty in Alabama."
One wonders exactly what Bush more could do to satisfy Bush's most fervent opponents--or Bumiller.
For the rest of Bumiller's story on Bush's dental exam, click here.
• Elisabeth Bumiller | George W. Bush | National Guard
Don't Let Your Kids Watch the Super Bowl
Sunday's edition of CNN's Reliable Sources featured a
debate
over the infamous "wardrobe malfunction" during the Super Bowl halftime show. Times editor turned arts columnist Frank Rich managed to get to the left of the socially liberal Andrew Sullivan on the issue. Hitting at the "violence of football," Rich argued its the fault of parents for letting their kids watch the Super Bowl in the first place: "But what happened--what happened to individual responsibility in this country? Before the halftime show, there had been commercials with a kid using a four-letter word that was barely bleeped out, a flatulent horse, a dog biting somebody's crotch, not to mention the violence of football itself. If parents really cared, why wouldn't they just pull their kids away from the set?"
Fellow guest Andrew Sullivan, of all people, stepped up to argue the culturally conservative side: "Well, if you're telling parents that they have to pull their kids away from their set during the Super Bowl, a lot of parents think, I mean, what are the standards left? I mean, if you can't let your kid watch the Super Bowl in peace and security, what can you do?"
• Janet Jackson | Frank Rich | Andrew Sullivan | Super Bowl
"Stalinist Ideals of…Social Equality"
Stalinist ideals of social equality? Seth Mydans' Saturday profile of Irina Khakamada, a striking personality running for president of Russia against Vladimir Putin, includes this line: "All this from the proud daughter of a Japanese Communist who fled to Russia during World War II and died disappointed in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed, still embracing his Stalinist ideals of strong government and social equality."
On February 5, Mydans wrote of an elderly Russian man who grew up under the dictator Stalin, who was responsible for the deaths of some 20 million Russians: "In his younger years, Mr. Bykov was a soldier, a janitor and a plumber, and the world wasn't such a bad place."
For more on this piece, click here.
• Seth Mydans | Vladimir Putin | Russia | Josef Stalin
Did Sanctions Ruin Iraqi Hospitals?
"Chaos and War Leave Iraq's Hospitals in Ruins," Jeffrey Gettleman's gloomy dispatch on the front page of Saturday's Times, partially blames sanctions for suffering children and the ruinous state of Iraq's hospitals--an argument from the days of Saddam-era propaganda.
Gettleman writes: "To be sure, Iraq's hospitals were in bleak shape before the American-led invasion last year. International isolation and the sanctions imposed after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 had already shattered a public health care system that was once the jewel of the Middle East. Crucial machines stopped working. Drugs were in short supply. Conditions eased a bit once the United Nations oil-for-food program started in 1996, but the country still suffered, especially the children. But Iraqi doctors say the war has pushed them closer to disaster. Fighting and sabotage have destroyed crucial infrastructure and the fall of Saddam Hussein precipitated a breakdown in social order."
But a story originally reported by Matthew McAllester of Newsday last May noted how much of that argument is simply discredited Saddam-era propaganda: "Throughout the 13 years of United Nations sanctions on Iraq that were ended on Thursday, Iraqi doctors told the world that the sanctions were the sole cause for the rocketing mortality rate among Iraqi children….Now free to speak, the doctors at two Baghdad hospitals, including Ibn al-Baladi, tell a very different story….Under the sanctions regime, 'we had the ability to get all the drugs we needed,' said Ibn al-Baladi's chief resident, Dr Hussein Shihab. 'Instead of that, Saddam Hussein spent all the money on his military force and put all the fault on the USA. Yes, of course the sanctions hurt--but not too much, because we are a rich country and we have the ability to get everything we can by money. But instead, he spent it on his palaces.'"
For the rest of Gettleman's story from Baghdad, click here.
• Jeffrey Gettleman | Health Care | Iraq War | Sanctions
Randal Archibold in Sunday's paper outlines Sen. John Edward's uphill climb to dethrone Democratic frontrunner, Sen. John Kerry: "Mr. Edwards and Mr. Kerry are moderates who have voted the same way on many hot button issues--for the war in Iraq, against an $87 billion appropriation for it last year, for the No Child Left Behind legislation."
Back on January 25, Archibold also insisted that both the liberal-leaning Edwards and the quite liberal Kerry were moderates, calling Kerry "a fellow centrist also on a surge" along with Edwards. Yet Kerry has a lifetime voting rating of 5 from the American Conservative Union (for comparison's sake, ultraliberal Sen. Ted Kennedy carries a rating of 3). Edwards has a rating of 15.
For the rest of Archibold's story on "moderates" Edwards and Kerry, click here.
• Randal Archibold | Campaign 2004 | Sen. John Edwards | Sen. John Kerry | Labeling Bias
E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org