White House Fisks* the New York Times
 

     Yesterday, TimesWatch made a run (with help from bloggers EU Rota and Cori Dauber) at a tendentious New York Times editorial claiming Bush "misled Americans" about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and terrorist connections. Now the White House itself has gotten in on the act, dissecting Tuesday's lead editorial, "Decoding Mr. Bush's Denials," piece by piece.

     To the paper's charge that foreign intelligence services did not support U.S. intelligence, the White House rebuts: "But Even Foreign Governments That Opposed The Removal Of Saddam Hussein Judged That Iraq Had Weapons Of Mass Destruction."

     The White House goes on to quote noted warmonger French Foreign Minister Dominique De Villepin on the evidence of Iraq's WMD.

     Responding to the Times' claim that Congress was given incomplete intelligence, the White House points out that: "But The Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) Was Judged Not To Have Different Intelligence Than The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) Provided To Congress, Which Represented The Collective Opinion Of The Intelligence Community."

     The White House backs up the assertion by quoting from the Robb-Silberman Commission. In all, the White House dissects six separate misleading assertions made by the Times about the Iraq war and pre-war intelligence. Perhaps they should make WhiteHouse.gov a blog?

* For those unfamiliar with bloggy terminology, the definition of "to fisk," according to the Samizdata glossary: "To deconstruct an article on a point by point basis in a highly critical manner. Derived from the name of journalist Robert Fisk, a frequent target of such critical articles in the blogosphere."

Rob Reiner's "Reason to Gloat" Over U.S. Death Toll in Iraq
 

     Contributing writer Matt Bai, last seen insisting Sen. Hillary Clinton had social conservative credentials, pens "Beverly Hills Coup? On Iraq, Hollywood liberals weren't so out of step with America after all," for this weeks Times Sunday magazine.

     Last year, Bai sat down with producer/director/liberal activist Rob Reiner in Beverly Hills, and after relaying some of Reiner's unattractive ranting about Bush, says that Reiner and other Hollywood lefties have "reason to gloat" about dead American soldiers:

     "As Reiner's monologue made clear, these last few months have given Hollywood's much-maligned activists some reason to gloat. The intractable violence in Baghdad and the surrounding countryside, along with an American death toll that has now passed 2,000, affords them, at long last, some measure of vindication. On Iraq, at least, Hollywood's self-righteous skepticism appears now not only to have been justified but also to have been precisely what Bush said it wasn't: a leading indicator of mainstream American opinion. According to a poll by The Washington Post and ABC News released earlier this month, nearly two-thirds of Americans disapprove of Bush's handling of the war, and 60 percent now think the United States was wrong to invade Iraq. Almost three-quarters of the respondents called the level of casualties in Iraq unacceptable."

     Bai pushes the convenient Democrats-were-fooled-by-Bush line: "From the moment the administration began making its case for invasion in the summer of 2002, most partisans and journalists in Washington found it almost inconceivable, even during the period before a fiercely contested midterm election, that the intelligence used to justify the war might simply be invented. This explains, in large part, why a lot of Congressional Democrats with years of foreign policy experience supported the invasion."

     Fortunately, those Hollywood geniuses saw through Bush's special effects: "[Hollywood activists] were willing to accept -- in fact, they recognized almost viscerally -- that the president's story about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction was too richly timed and too tightly wrapped, and they understood that once a storyteller began to tinker with facts, there was no end to the scenarios he might invent that he might dubiously claim to be 'based on a true story.'"

To read the rest of Bai with Reiner, click here.

Uncle Spam Go Home!
 

     On the eve of a summit in Tunisia on Internet governance, the Times runs a reprint from its international edition by Victoria Shannon, "Other Nations Hope to Loosen U.S. Grip on Internet."

     Shannon is talking mostly about ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the nonprofit government sponsored company that runs the Web's addressing system by "giving out blocks of unique identifiers to countries and private registries."

     In a slightly condescending tone, Shannon tries to get Americans to empathize with other countries, as if walking in their shoes would reveal how selfish America is being in retaining "centralized" control of the internet: "What if, by historical chance, France or Britain controlled country domain names on the Internet? Would the United States settle for asking another government to fix its own addresses?"

     But Shannon wants us to sympathize with Libya, which lost its domain name for five days in a payment dispute.

     "That kind of power to hinder or foster freedom of the Internet, centralized in a single government, is the crucial issue for many of the 12,000 people expected in Tunis this week for a United Nations summit meeting on the information age. Four years of high-level talks on Internet governance will conclude with the meeting. On its eve, a figurative ocean separates the American position -- that the Internet works fine as it is -- from most of the rest of the world. That includes the European Union, which says the Internet is an international resource whose center of gravity must move away from Washington."

     (A compromise was reached later that night which the American side seems happy with.)

     Claudia Rosett has a more cynical view of U.N. control of the web in the Wall Street Journal: "A U.N. unable even to audit its own accounts or police its own peacekeepers has no business making even a twitch toward control of the Internet….the U.N. has embraced the same tyrants who in the name of helping the downtrodden are now seeking via Internet control to tread them down some more."

For more of Shannon on U.S. "control" of the Internet, click here.

"Disarray Among Republicans"
 

     Republicans on defense, this time on "soaring energy prices," according to a Wednesday Business Day story by economics reporter Edmund Andrews, "Senate Panel Approves Special Tax On Oil Profits." The text box fuels the fire: "An energy proposal adds to the disarray among Republicans."

     Andrews explains: "In a telling sign of the political impact of soaring energy prices, the Republican-controlled Senate Finance Committee voted on Tuesday to impose a $5 billion tax next year on the nation's biggest oil companies."

     "Conservative Senate Republicans who support the oil industry bitterly protested the measure, noting that Congress had just approved billions in new tax breaks to encourage oil and gas exploration. But every Republican voted for the overall package, which passed the committee 14 to 8 and which the full Senate is expected to take up on Wednesday."

     Andrews frames the Senate debate in a way cheering for Republican moderates (as well as Democratic liberals): "The Senate bill was a setback for President Bush because it omits one of his most cherished tax priorities: an extension of his 2001 tax cuts on stock dividends and capital gains. Those tax cuts expire at the end of 2008, and Republican leaders badly wanted to pass at least a one-year extension this year at a cost of about $11 billion. But Republican moderates rebelled at the idea of cutting taxes for investors at the same time they were voting on spending cuts for food stamps, Medicaid and programs to enforce payment of child support."

     And then there's the usual labeling disparity: After stating that "Conservative Republicans on the Senate tax-writing committee complained bitterly about the measure," he names Sen. Craig Thomas of Wyoming and Sen. Jim Bunning of Kentucky as examples. Meanwhile, liberals Democratic senators Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York were simply "Democratic lawmakers."

For the rest of Andrews on the "windfall tax" on oil profits, click here.

Did Alito Group Really "Criticize Princeton's Minority Admissions"?
 

     David Kirkpatrick makes Tuesday's front page with "1985 Document Opens a Window To Alito's Views," in which Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito opined, among other things, that abortion is not guaranteed in the constitution.

     Kirkpatrick writes: "The statement says that he was also a member of Concerned Alumni of Princeton, a conservative group that published a magazine criticizing Princeton's minority admissions, permissive social norms and secular atmosphere."

     Kirkpatrick should really be more specific here: Did CAP actually criticize the admission of minorities to Princeton, or was it in fact criticizing preferential treatment for racial minorities, which Princeton has practiced since 1963?

     He and congressional reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg returned to Alito on Wednesday in "Nominee Plays Down Remarks on Quotas and Abortion."

     "Seeking to tamp down a political uproar over a 1985 document in which he denounced racial quotas and said the Constitution did not protect the right to abortion, Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. told senators on Tuesday that the sentiments were simply the views of 'an advocate seeking a job.'"

     The Times doesn't quibble with the liberal "litmus test" of using abortion as the primary factor in voting to confirm a Supreme Court candidate: "The only woman on the judiciary panel, Mrs. Feinstein has said that she feels a special obligation to protect the right to abortion, and that she would not vote to confirm a Supreme Court candidate if she believed the nominee would overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 abortion rights decision."

     At least they clarify Kirkpatrick's previous story, noting that the Princeton University group, Concerned Alumni of Princeton, criticized the college for "supporting affirmative action policies," not "Princeton's minority admissions."

For Stolberg and Kirkpatrick Wednesday, click here.

You can read more of Kirkpatrick on Alito from Tuesday here.