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Times Watch for
September 23, 2004
The
Times and the "U" Word
Katharine Seelye writes on two new campaign commercials in Thursday's paper and makes an unprecedented use of "unsubstantiated" to refer to something other than anti-Kerry claims made by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.
Here's the moment: "Also, in two commercials to be released on Thursday, the Media Fund, an advocacy group working on behalf of Mr. Kerry, links Mr. Bush with the Saudi royal family. In film similar to that used in Michael Moore's incendiary and often unsubstantiated movie 'Fahrenheit 9/11,' the commercials tie the Bushes to the 'corrupt' royal family and suggest that President Bush suppressed a report to hide what his critics say was evidence that the Saudi government financed the terrorists who carried out the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001."
Seelye quickly returns to form in the next paragraph: "In another broadside against Mr. Kerry, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, whose past accusations have frequently been unsubstantiated, says in a new commercial that Mr. Kerry went to Paris in the 1970's and 'secretly met with the enemy.'"
For the rest of Seelye on campaign ads, click here.
• George W. Bush | Campaign 2004 | "Fahrenheit 9/11" | Katharine Seelye | Swift Boat Veterans | Vietnam
A Sympathetic Hearing for an Extreme Bush Hater
More anti-Bush activism is featured in Wednesday's edition of the Times' liberally (scroll to bottom)
tilted "Public Lives" feature, this one written by notorious
anti-war reporter Chris Hedges.
"Mourning the Warrior, and Questioning the War" looks at Sue Niederer, a New Jersey woman who lost her son in Iraq and was recently arrested for disrupting a Laura Bush speech: "But Mrs. Niederer, 55, had no intention of chanting praise for Mrs. Bush or her husband. Clutching an Army cap and a rolled-up T-shirt, she had come on another mission, one that has defined her life since her only son, Second Lt. Seth J. Dvorin, 24, was killed. He died in February when a roadside bomb exploded in an Iraqi town she says she cannot pronounce."
Hedges portrays her as an average suburban housewife: "Mrs. Niederer is an unlikely firebrand, a woman who grew up in a Conservative Jewish household in Brooklyn and has spent her adult life substitute teaching, working in real estate and raising two children in Hopewell, a suburb near Princeton. She said she had never been arrested before or even been politically active. Now she frequently joins protests against the war and is active in Military Families Speak Out, a nationwide antiwar group."
This "unlikely firebrand" threatened Bush in an interview last May with the far-left Counterpunch website: "I wanted to rip the president's head off. Curse him, yell at him, call him a self-righteous bastard and a lot of other words. I think if I had him in front of me I would shoot him in the groined area. Let him suffer. And just continue shooting him there. Put him through misery, like he's doing to everyone else. He doesn't deserve any better….We are allowing him to get away with anything he wants to do. He flat out lied to us, killing our troops. He doesn't face the fallen family. If this is what we reelect, we deserve everything we get."
On Thursday Hedges follows up on news the Secret Service is investigating Niederer's comments, and describes the far-left website (which has cited Hedges' reporting favorably in the past) as merely "a political newsletter."
Hedges has a knack for profiling controversial people in "Public Lives." In addition to Niederer, he has issued positive profiles of a pro-Palestinian professor who has defended the killing of Israeli soldiers as "resistance," and a college student who refuses to condemn Palestinian terror attacks against Israeli citizens.
For the rest of the story on "unlikely firebrand" Niederer, click here.
• George W. Bush | Chris Hedges | Iraq War | Sue Niederer | "Public Lives"
Playing Up Deficits, Not Tax Relief
Accentuating the negative. That's how Edmund Andrews begins his front-page story for Thursday (note the anti-tax cut headline, "Deal In Congress To Keep Tax Cuts, Widening Deficit."): "Putting aside efforts to control the federal deficit before the elections, Republican and Democratic leaders agreed Wednesday to extend $145 billion worth of tax cuts sought by President Bush without trying to pay for them."
The liberal Los Angeles Times lead story puts a rather sunnier spin on things: "Congressional negotiators late Wednesday approved extending popular tax cuts that benefit middle-income Americans, delivering to President Bush a victory on a centerpiece of his economic stimulus program that he can trumpet on the campaign trail in the final weeks before the election."
For the rest of Andrews on tax cuts and Congress, click here.
• Edmund Andrews | George W. Bush | Campaign 2004 | Headlines | Tax Cuts
Holden on to Left-Wing Dreams
Movie critic Stephen Holden
again praises a Marxist documentary: "'The Take,' a stirring, idealistic documentary that examines the grass-roots cooperative movement in financially devastated Argentina, raises basic questions about economics, government and human nature. Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein, the Toronto-based film makers who directed and wrote 'The Take,' describe themselves as 'activist filmmakers.' They believe in a Marxist-leaning society whose workers put aside personal ambition for the greater good. They see globalization as the newest way that strong countries bully and prey on the weak while purporting to do good. The film's examples of defunct Argentine enterprises that have been taken over by workers and revived offer an uplifting picture of people working from the ground up to stabilize and revitalize the country's ruined economy."
He notes, without really disapproving: "There is never a shred of doubt whose side the filmmakers take. The local organizers and their families come across as desperate, victimized working-class heroes from a Woody Guthrie ballad, determined to take back their livelihood against overwhelming odds. The owners come across as sleazy and the International Monetary Fund (and its fervent, smooth-talking lackey Mr. Menem) as the source of all evil."
After a one-sided look at Argentina's post-privatization woes, Holden concludes with a warning that Marxist gains may not last forever and that individualistic greed could always resurface. Yet Holden holds out hope about "humanity" (seemingly identified here as acceptance of neo-Marxist dogma): "Even given the rosiest financial scenario, at what point do the old ways resurface and brute self-interest and corruption kick in? After watching the film, your outlook will depend on the degree of your belief in humanity and your familiarity with history. Whatever happens, the movement still faces an uphill battle."
For the rest of Holden's review, click here.
• Arts | Stephen Holden | Marxism | Movies | "The Take"
E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org