"Dogged Clinton Haters" Making Trouble For Hillary
 

     Tucked away on the front of the Wednesday Metro Section is a story from reporters Raymond Hernandez and Ian Urbina on a complicated fundraising scandal involving Sen. Hillary Clinton, "Clinton Benefit Has a Lesson: Double-Check That Donor List." The headline suggests the skew of the story -- disperse the blame away from Hillary Clinton. As a result, it comes off more as a cautionary tale for politicians than an actual political scandal involving a liberal Democrat.

     A cursory summary of the complicated tale: The fundraiser in question, Peter Paul, in an apparent attempt to cut a deal with prosecutors on unrelated fraud charges, filed a complaint with the FEC claiming Sen. Clinton's campaign underreported the value of the "in-kind" contribution that Paul had made at a campaign fundraiser held in Los Angeles. David Rosen, Clinton's finance director, was named in a federal indictment last month on charges of underreporting the cost of the August 2000 event.

     The story's cut-out line suggests the usual suspects are to blame, those nasty Clinton haters: "A tangled tale of a slick operator, the first couple and dogged Clinton haters." There's also a prominent photo of Bill kissing Hillary.

     Hernandez and Urbina write: "Mr. Paul said he spent nearly $2 million of his own on the fund-raiser as a way to curry favor with Mr. Clinton, and photographs show him chatting with Mr. Clinton at a dinner table, having a discussion with Mrs. Clinton and striking poses for the camera with both of them. Associates of the Clintons say the couple did not know of Mr. Paul's troubled past at the time, and in the months after the event, Mr. Paul turned on the Clintons, later urging investigators to look into the fund-raiser. Last month, the federal investigation produced an indictment charging that the cost of the affair had been underreported. The case offers a bizarre and tangled tale of how Mr. Paul, a smooth operator with myriad connections and a troubled past, got so close to America's first couple in a political culture dominated by money. It also shows the continuing effort of a longtime nemesis of the Clintons, Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group, to make legal trouble for the couple."

     They finger Judicial Watch for blame later as well: "He got involved in Democratic politics afterward, donating money at the suggestion of Aaron Tonken, also a fund-raiser, who told him that that would be a good way to raise the profile of his company, according to Mr. Paul and his legal representatives at Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group that has dogged the Clintons for years and has been representing Mr. Paul."

     Author Bob Kohn detects a pro-Hillary tone in the article "The overall message to readers of the Times is clear: don't blame the Clintons for the campaign finance violations; blame a conservative legal group who has been making 'legal trouble for the couple.'"

For the rest of Hernandez and Urbina on Hillary, click here:

Poor Sen. Harry Reid
 

     Wednesday's story from congressional reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg, "Called an Obstructionist, A Senator Is Fighting Back," is a predictably flattering profile of new Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, shown as a happy warrior fighting off harsh Republican "attacks."

     Taking on Republicans who distributed "broadsides" on Reid painting him as an obstructionist, Stolberg argues: "The documents suggest that Republicans may be trying to define Mr. Reid before Americans make their own judgment. Mr. Reid is hugely popular in his home state, Nevada, and is appearing more often on national television, where strategists in both parties say he comes off as reasonable and even-handed. For his part, Mr. Reid seems determined to respond to Republicans tit for tat. One of his first acts as minority leader was to create a Democratic 'war room' to communicate the party's message on Capitol Hill. On Monday, when Republicans sent the document around the country via e-mail, Mr. Reid promptly went to the Senate floor to denounce it as a 'hit piece' and called on Mr. Bush to repudiate it. On Tuesday, he stepped up his complaints, again reminding reporters of Mr. Bush's campaign promise to be a 'uniter, not a divider' and of the president's pledge after his re-election to reach out to Democrats.'"

     Stolberg later talks to Republican strategist Charlie Black and apparently asks whether or not the party should apologize to Reid: "Mr. Black said there was no reason for Republicans to apologize to Mr. Reid, and they did not."

     Stolberg tried a similar line with Reid's defeated predecessor Tom Daschle, with Stolberg saying Republicans "looked ...like bullies" for daring to campaign against Daschle in South Dakota.

Read the rest of Stolberg's profile of Sen. Reid here:

Bush-Haters Moving to Canada: "A Significant Event"
 

     Rick Lyman files "Some Bush Foes Vote Yet Again With Their Feet: Canada or Bust" for Tuesday, a sympathetic look at those Bush-haters who actually are making good on their promises to move to Canada if Bush won.

     "In the Niagara of liberal angst just after Bush's victory on Nov. 2, the Canadian government's immigration Web site reported a surge in inquiries from the United States, to about 115,000 a day from 20,000.After three months, memories of the election have begun to recede. There has been an inauguration, even a State of the Union address. Yet immigration lawyers say that Americans are not just making inquiries and that more are pursuing a move above the 49th parallel, fed up with a country they see drifting persistently to the right and abandoning the principles of tolerance, compassion and peaceful idealism they felt once defined the nation. America is in no danger of emptying out. But even a small loss of population, many from a deep sense of political despair, is a significant event in the life of a nation that thinks of itself as a place to escape to."

     But just how "significant" is it? The story itself quotes an immigration lawyer who states about 6,000 U.S. citizens received permanent resident status in Canada in 2003. For some perspective, in that same year 11,000 Canadians immigrated to the United States, according to government statistics. (Thanks to reader R.B. for the suggestion.)

For the rest of Rick Lyman on American émigrés to Canada, click here:

Bush Administration to Blame for Abu Ghraib?
 

     On Tuesday, in-house book critic Michiko Kakutani reviews a compendium of government memos titled "The Torture Papers -- The Road to Abu Ghraib," which includes an introduction from former liberal Times columnist Anthony Lewis.

     Kakutani hits out at Abu Ghraib (hardly an original idea at the Times): "As soon as the repugnant photos of torture at Abu Ghraib prison -- the pyramid of naked prisoners, the groveling man on a dog leash, the hooded man with outstretched arms -- hit the airwaves and newspaper stands, they became iconic images: gruesome symbols of what went wrong with the war and postwar occupation of Iraq, and for many in the Muslim world, the very embodiment of their worst fears about American hegemony."

     Kakutani argues that the blame goes high up in the Bush administration: "They have become a potent propaganda tool for terrorists, and at the same time, they remain so repellant and perverse that they have served to bolster the 'few bad apples' argument -- the suggestion not only that the photographed abuses were perpetrated by 'a kind of 'Animal House' on the night shift,' in one investigator's words, but also that the larger problem was confined, as the Bush administration has asserted, to a few soldiers acting on their own. 'The Torture Papers,' the new compendium of government memos and reports chronicling the road to Abu Ghraib and its aftermath, definitively blows such arguments to pieces. In fact, the book provides a damning paper trail that reveals, in uninflected bureaucratic prose, the roots that those terrible images had in decisions made at the highest levels of the Bush administration -- decisions that started the torture snowball rolling down the slippery slope of precedent by asserting that the United States need not abide by the Geneva Conventions in its war on terror."

     But as National Review editor Rich Lowry points out, that's not what a panel found: "An independent panel lead by James Schlesinger concluded that 'the pictured abuses were not part of authorized interrogations nor were they even directed at intelligence targets.' Abu Ghraib ringleader Spc. Charles Graner abused prisoners as a guard here in the United States. Are we really to believe that his misconduct in Iraq was guided by what the Office of Legal Counsel might or might not have concluded in a heavily footnoted 50-page advisory legal memo? At Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay there have been unauthorized abuses and acts of torture, but these aren't the same as the sanctioned interrogation methods (e.g., making prisoners assume 'stress positions'), which are tough, but appropriate. The former should be punished; the latter are necessary to fighting a war in which intelligence is paramount."

For the rest of Kakutani's review of the Abu Ghraib book, click here: