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Times Watch for
November 22, 2004
Poor, "Poignant" Tom Daschle
Pity poor Tom. Saturday's front-page story from Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Carl Hulse, features yet another of Stolberg's encomiums to defeated Democratic Sen. Tom Daschle.
Deep into a story on an abortion clause inserted into a spending bill, they note: "In the Senate, the Democratic leader, Tom Daschle of South Dakota, who lost his re-election bid, delivered a poignant farewell speech that brought him a standing ovation. 'It's had its challenges, its triumphs, its disappointments,' Mr. Daschle said of his 26-year career in Congress, which included a decade as the Democratic leader. 'But everything was worth doing.' Mr. Daschle is the first Senate party leader in more than half a century to lose a re-election campaign. His emotional talk, in which he also urged his colleagues to find 'common ground,' was attended by nearly all of the Senate's Democrats, who gathered him in their arms and hugged him afterward. But only a few Republicans showed up, and Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, who broke with Senate tradition to campaign against Mr. Daschle in his home state, South Dakota, did not appear until after Mr. Daschle finished speaking."
The Times lets Democrats portray this (and, apparently, liberal congressional struggles in general) as evidence of lack of collegiality by Republicans: "The scant Republican showing provoked Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey, to speak out. 'I don't know why, why in the closing days, some element of comity, some element of grace, some element of respect for a human being, could not have gotten some of our friends out of their offices,' Mr. Lautenberg said. Outside the Senate chamber, the common ground Mr. Daschle spoke of seemed hard to find. House and Senate negotiators were still trying to salvage a reorganization of the nation's intelligence agencies. And Ms. Boxer was trying to negotiate changes to the abortion language, she said, with little success."
For more from Stolberg and Hulse, click here.
• Campaign 2004 | Sen. Tom Daschle | Carl Hulse | Sheryl Gay Stolberg
U.S. Still "Going It Alone In Iraq"
Monday's story by Neil MacFarquhar from a resort town in Egypt, "International Conference Seeks Consensus on Iraq," opens with a reductive anti-Bush administration cliché worthy of the paper's editorial page: "For the first time since the Bush administration began its now-troubled enterprise to reshape Iraq, an international conference of foreign ministers and other senior officials will gather Monday to try to reach a rudimentary consensus on how to stabilize the violence-soaked nation. Washington's past determination to go it alone in Iraq and staunch opposition from many quarters to the American-led occupation have long stymied any international effort on Iraq."
To refute that analysis, look no further than the paper's Sunday's news section story by Steven Weisman, which carries a graphic whose caption reads: "In addition to the United States, 36 countries have committed troops to support the operation in Iraq at some point."
For the rest of MacFarquhar from the conference in Egypt, click here.
• Gaffes | Iraq War | Neil MacFarquhar | Middle East
Rumsfeld: Better Than Those Neo-Cons
Sunday's story by Thom Shanker and Richard W. Stevenson, "Rumsfeld Isn't Showing Signs That He Is Leaving," actually comes up with some half-hearted praise for Bush's defense secretary, at least compared to those nameless benighted "neocons," a label the Times is loathe to use in a positive light: "Mr. Rumsfeld is considered a more traditional, more pragmatic conservative, not completely in the camp of the neoconservatives salted throughout the administration who predicted an easy path to democracy in Iraq. So he will have to balance his views against those of the neoconservatives as they seek to hang on to their influence."
For more speculation on Rumsfeld's future, click here.
• Iraq War | Neoconservatives | Donald Rumsfeld | Thom Shanker | Richard Stevenson
U.S. Has "Devastated" Falluja, Threatens "Social Fabric"
A Sunday filing from Baghdad by Edward Wong, "Rebels Keep Up Attacks In Sunni-Dominated Cities Of Central and North Iraq," features more "devastation" wrought by the U.S. in Iraq from Wong, the paper's most
doom-saying Iraq-based reporter: "Violence surged through central and northern Iraq on Saturday as a tenacious insurgency led by Sunni Arabs kept up relentless assaults in several major cities, including Baghdad, Ramadi and Falluja, which the Americans devastated during an intense weeklong offensive aimed at routing the insurgency….The weeklong offensive, which began Nov. 8, smashed a haven for the insurgents, but guerrillas still roam the devastated streets, sniping at American troops and deterring military engineers brought in to try to rebuild the city. American commanders in Falluja say they are seeing an increasing number of guerrillas using white flags to pose as unarmed civilians. In a bit of positive news, a Polish woman abducted in October by insurgents announced her release to reporters in Warsaw in a brief news conference with the Polish prime minister, Marek Belka, broadcast by the BBC and CNN."
(Is that "bit of positive news" an indirect recognition by Wong that the tone of his reports are in fact mostly negative?)
Judging by Wong's astringent take, the U.S. presence is threatening no less than the "very social fabric" of Iraq: "Mr. Hussein, himself a Sunni, heightened ethnic and religious differences by installing Sunnis in the most senior positions and persecuting Shiite Arabs and Kurds. Now, with a power and security vacuum throughout Iraq, those tensions are reviving and threatening to unravel the very social fabric of the country…. American and Iraqi forces are trying to root out resilient insurgent bands in Mosul that pushed the city to the brink of chaos last week. On Nov. 11, groups of guerrillas stormed a half-dozen police stations and made off with weapons and uniforms after setting fire to the buildings and squad cars. Only 800 of the city's 4,000 police officers stayed on the job."
For more of Wong from Iraq, click here.
• Falluja | Iraq War | Edward Wong
A Double Standard on Anti-Terror Cheap Shots?
Labeling bias and double standards on political "cheap shots" are on display in Sunday's front-page story from Philip Shenon and Carl Hulse, "House Leadership Blocks Vote on Intelligence Bill."
Here's the opening: "House Republican leaders blocked and appeared to kill a bill Saturday that would have enacted the major recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission, refusing to allow a vote on the legislation despite last-minute pleas from both President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to Republican lawmakers for a compromise before Congress adjourned for the year. The decision to block a vote on the landmark bill, which would have created the job of a cabinet-level national intelligence director to oversee the C.I.A. and the government's other spy agencies, came after what lawmakers from both parties described as a near-rebellion by a core of highly conservative House Republicans aligned with the Pentagon who were emboldened to stand up to their leadership and to the White House."
After noting that the "surprising embarrassment to the president" may mean a political opening for Democrats, the Times passes along a warning from liberal Democrat Rep. Jane Harman that the Republican "failure" may result in a terrorist attack.
They write: "Less than three weeks after Democrats suffered a stinging defeat at the polls, the bill's failure could provide Democratic leaders with a political opening to argue -- along with members of the Sept. 11 commission and the families of victims of the terrorist attacks -- that House Republicans killed a bill that had widespread, bipartisan support and that would have allowed the government to protect the public better against terrorist threats. 'Today, the House Republicans missed an opportunity to make the American people safer,' said Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader. 'Their inability to overhaul our intelligence system is a staggering failure.' Representative Jane Harman of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee and one of the authors of the compromise bill, said, 'This is a tragedy for America.' Ms. Harman added, 'If there is another major terrorist attack on our soil -- and sadly, there will likely be one -- we will have only ourselves to blame. Congress had a chance to protect America, and Congress failed.'"
Two months ago, Vice President Dick Cheney was (misleadingly) accused by the Times of playing politics with terror when he said of a possible Kerry victory: "Because if we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we'll get hit again, that we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States, and that we'll fall back into the pre-9/11 mindset if you will, that in fact these terrorist attacks are just criminal acts, and that we're not really at war. I think that would be a terrible mistake."
Yet the Times doesn't get worked up about Harman doing precisely what the paper accused Cheney of doing -- suggesting a wrong vote would result in a terror attack.
For more from Shenon and Hulse on the fate of the intelligence bill, click here.
• Dick Cheney | Congress | Rep. Jane Harman | Carl Hulse | Labeling Bias | Philip Shenon | Terrorism
"The Worsening Situation in Iraq"
Saturday's front-page story from Latin American correspondent Larry Rohter, "China Widens Economic Role in Latin America" includes, apropos of nothing, this anti-war cliché, unbacked with even anecdotal evidence: "The United States, preoccupied with the worsening situation in Iraq, seems to have attached little importance to China's rising profile in the region. If anything, increased trade between Latin America and China has been welcomed as a means to reduce pressure on the United States to underwrite economic reforms, with geopolitical considerations pushed to the background."
Given that Falluja, the guerilla's major home base, has fallen to U.S. forces, perhaps things aren't really "worsening" in Iraq at the moment.
For the rest of Rohter on China (and Iraq), click here.
• China | Iraq War | Latin America | Larry Rohter
E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org