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Times Watch for
February 26, 2004
Mad Over Max
Defeated in 2002 by Republican Saxby Chambliss, Democratic Sen. Max Cleland is currently just campaigning for fellow Vietnam Veteran Sen. John Kerry, but he gets front-page (and front-runner) treatment in Thursday's Times.
Sheryl Gay Stolberg writes Cleland's life story up as a potentially wonderful feel-good story (Cleland, who lost both legs and an arm in an accident in Vietnam, ends up growing old and respected in the Senate) ruined by George Bush and unfair Republican tactics during the 2002 election. Stolberg writes: "In 1996, after four terms as Georgia's secretary of state, Mr. Cleland won election to the Senate. He envisioned himself growing old in the Capitol. He called it his 'dream job,' but the dream ended abruptly in November 2002, after a race that turned on Mr. Cleland's vote against the Republican-backed bill to create a Department of Homeland Security. President Bush traveled to Georgia five times to campaign against him. But the low point, Mr. Cleland said, came when Republicans ran an advertisement juxtaposing his face with those of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. The commercial infuriated the Senate's Vietnam veterans, including Mr. Kerry and two Republicans, John McCain and Chuck Hagel, who rushed to Mr. Cleland's defense."
(There's doubt as to whether or not the ad actually juxtaposed--"To place side by side, especially for comparison or contrast"--Cleland's face with those of bin Laden and Hussein. Reporter David Halbfinger in the Times of October 28, 2002, describes the ad this way: "One of Mr. Chambliss's more provocative advertisements, which he revised after a storm of criticism, even flashed pictures of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein before snapshots of Mr. Cleland, to make sure no one missed the point." Described that way, it sounds to Times Watch as if the photos of Hussein, bin Laden and Cleland didn't actually share the same frame. National Review editor Rich Lowry notes in a February 20 column on Cleland that "the screen was briefly divided into four squares, with bin Laden and Saddam in two of them and the other two filled with images of the American military.")
Stolberg concludes her profile with this heart-warming Cleland anecdote on the Kerry campaign trail: "People sat, slack-jawed, as the young Persian Gulf veteran, Jason Borden, poured his heart out, demanding to know if Mr. Kerry would raise spending on mental health services for veterans. 'The answer is not only yes,' Mr. Cleland replied, 'but hell, yes.' Afterward, the former senator from Georgia pulled out a copy of the Kerry biography, and, in his scratchy left-handed scrawl, signed it for Mr. Borden. He did not ask for the young man's vote. He did not have to."
For the rest of Stolberg's article on Cleland, click here.
• Campaign 2004 | Sen. Max Cleland | Saddam Hussein | Sheryl Gay Stolberg
Movie critic A.O. Scott's doesn't like Mel Gibson's new movie. The nut graph of his review reads: "The Passion of the Christ is so relentlessly focused on the savagery of Jesus' final hours that this film seems to arise less from love than from wrath, and to succeed more in assaulting the spirit than in uplifting it. Mr. Gibson has constructed an unnerving and painful spectacle that is also, in the end, a depressing one. It is disheartening to see a film made with evident and abundant religious conviction that is at the same time so utterly lacking in grace."
Comparing Gibson's work to "virtuosos of shock cinema like Quentin Tarantino," Scott notes: "Mr. Gibson is temperamentally a more stolid, less formally adventurous filmmaker, but he is no less a connoisseur of violence, and it will be amusing to see some of the same scolds who condemned Mr. Tarantino's 'Kill Bill: Vol. 1' sing the praises of 'The Passion of the Christ.'"
Hmm. Scolds like…A.O. Scott, perhaps?
Scott's October 10 review of "Kill Bill: Vol. 1" shows that Scott himself wasn't all that enamored of Tarantino's violence either. In a tone that could be termed "scolding," Scott wrote: "With its relentless bloodshed and scrambled, inconclusive narrative, Quentin Tarantino's long-awaited fourth feature, "Kill Bill: Vol. 1," is certain to provoke both awe and revulsion….It will inevitably be said, in Mr. Tarantino's defense, that his violence is fundamentally cartoonish….But he undermines this argument with sequences that cross the line between jolting and sickening."
For the rest of A.O. Scott's thumbs-down on "The Passion of Christ, click here.
• Mel Gibson | Movies | "The Passion" | Religion | A.O. Scott | Quentin Tarantino
Religion reporter Laurie Goodstein delivers a passel of negative reviews from an interfaith panel who'd gathered to watch "The Passion of the Christ." In her Wednesday story from Chicago, "'Passion' Disturbs a Panel of Religious Leaders," Goodstein writes: "But after the showing, in a late-night discussion around a table at the First United Methodist Church at the Chicago Temple, the panel members were in full agreement: they were disturbed by what they had seen. They said the movie--which was produced, directed and largely financed by the actor Mel Gibson--deviated in bizarre ways from the Gospel accounts, fell flat emotionally and was numbingly violent. The Christians said they had been dismayed to see the inspiring prophet Jesus reduced to a mere victim. The Jews said they were horrified to see the Jewish high priests rendered as bloodthirsty schemers demanding Jesus' death over the protests of a sympathetic Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor."
Although the Times found several religious Chicagoans who hated "The Passion," with, well, a passion, Roger Ebert, the one Chicagoan people actually listen to for movie criticism, gave it a full four stars.
For the rest of Goodstein's report, click here.
• Roger Ebert | Mel Gibson | Laurie Goodstein | Movies | "The Passion" | Religion
Patrick Tyler portrays the ironically named Katharine Gun, accused of leaking war intelligence, as an anti-war idealist: "In a sudden reversal, Britain said Wednesday that it would not prosecute a 29-year-old government linguist who admitted leaking a top secret American request for assistance in bugging United Nations diplomats," Tyler writes in a dispatch for Thursday's edition.
But Tyler seems less interested in Gun's offense than in her left-wing anti-war "idealism," writing: "Moreover, though Ms. Gun's alleged offense was a serious breach of discipline in the intelligence agencies, prosecuting her idealism risked a backlash against the government. Mr. Blair's spokesmen were conspicuously silent on Wednesday, apparently hopeful that the case would disappear from the public agenda."
But as far as Times Watch can tell, Gun wasn't being prosecuted for her "idealism," but for allegedly leaking intelligence information.
Rather than focusing on the alleged law-breaking, Tyler returns to the theme: "Freed from threat of prosecution, Ms. Gun exhibited a strong idealism, saying that 'we all were pretty appalled' to hear that the British government was thinking about invading Iraq after the campaign in Afghanistan to topple the Taliban."
The appearance of the following unpalatable left-wing trio should tip readers off as to just what sort of "idealist" Gun is: "[Gun] received offers of support for her defense from Sean Penn and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, as well as Daniel Ellsberg, who in 1971 handed over to the press a secret Defense Department history of the Vietnam War in what became known as the Pentagon Papers case."
Note: Gregory Djerejian, who's been following the allegation of U.S. spying, suspects the spy story itself is fishy, noting "there has been no conclusive evidence that the U.S. did lead a spying campaign over at Turtle Bay during the advent to the Iraq war. If anything, significant doubts about the verisimilitude of the original Guardian story have been raised…"
For the rest of Tyler's story, click here.
E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org