Reporter Wonders How U.S. Can Abandon Iraq Without "Embarrassment"
 

     A Sunday Week in Review piece by reporter James Glanz, "Saving Face And How To Say Farewell," is enormously defeatist, even by the standards of the New York Times.

     Keep in mind that Glanz files news reports from Iraq as you read: "In the old popular song about the rout by Americans at New Orleans during the War of 1812, the British 'ran so fast the hounds couldn't catch 'em.' Even allowing for patriotic hyperbole, it can hardly be argued that the British extricated themselves with a great deal of dignity, particularly given that another battle in the same war inspired the American national anthem. The impact of that defeat on the British national psyche is now obscure, but nearly two centuries later, as the Americans and their British allies seek to extricate themselves from Iraq, the story of how a superpower looks for a dignified way out of a messy and often unpopular foreign conflict has become a historical genre of sorts. As the pressure to leave Iraq increases, that genre is receiving new and urgent attention.

     "And in the shadow of the bleak and often horrific news emerging from Iraq nearly every day, historians and political experts are finding at least a wan hope in those imperfect historical analogies. Even in the absence of a sudden and dramatic shift on the battlefield toward a definitive victory, there may still be a slight opening, as narrow as the eye of a needle, for the United States to slip through and leave Iraq in the near future in a way that will not be remembered as a national embarrassment."

     Upon reading Glanz, professor Cori Dauber suggests the Times sees the U.S. goal in Iraq not as victory but "extrication."

     It wouldn't be a mainstream media piece without "interesting" parallels with Vietnam, and Glanz delivers: "Maybe not surprisingly, Vietnam is the focus of some of the most interesting revisionism, including some of it immediately relevant to Iraq, where the intensive effort to train Iraqi security forces to defend their own country closely mirrors the 'Vietnamization' program in South Vietnam."

     Then Glanz compares the fight to the travails of the French in Algeria and foresees a similar fate: "Another intriguing if imperfect lesson can be found in Algeria, said Matthew Connelly, a Columbia University historian. There, by March 1962, the French had pulled out after 130 years of occupation….Like President Bush in Iraq, President Charles de Gaulle probably thought he could settle Algeria in his favor by military means, Dr. Connelly said. In the short run, that turned out to be a grave miscalculation, as the occupation crumbled under the insurgency's viciousness."

     Glanz ends on this note, which actually passes for optimism in his ultra-gloomy piece: "Today, even as expectations for Iraq keep slipping, some measure of victory can still be declared even in a less-than-perfect outcome, said Richard Betts, director of the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia. For example, he said, an Iraqi government that is authoritarian but not totalitarian might have to do."

For more Glanz, click here

"Still Another Conservative Putsch" Against PBS
 

     A Monday editorial, "Public Broadcasting's Enemy Within," goes way over the top  in a rhetorical assault on Kenneth Tomlinson, the former Corporation for Public Broadcasting chairman who had the audacity to attempt to bring some political balance to PBS, which has long used tax money to fund liberal programming: "As chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Kenneth Tomlinson proved to be a disastrous zealot. Internal investigators found he repeatedly broke federal law and ethics rules in overreaching his authority and packing the payroll with Republican ideologues."

     Most galling, the Times employs the historically freighted term word "putsch" (as in Hitler's 1923 Munich Beer Hall Putsch)  to describe conservatives who would dare to consider cutting taxpayer funding of "public broadcasting": "Defenders of public broadcasting now must guard against still another conservative putsch -- a Congressional move to cut financing for the corporation's $400 million budget of vital aid for local stations. This time, the 'balance' zealots may resort to irony by citing the very chaos wrought by Mr. Tomlinson."

     The editorial page used the same frenzied tone (and word) back in June, warning "the public's faith and donations could be threatened if audiences sense the Republicans are succeeding with an ideological putsch."

To read the rest of the editorial on PBS, click here

Now, Stolberg Loves Trent Lott
 

     Congressional reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg has a Sunday profile of her favorite kind of Republican -- one critical of other Republicans -- in "Look Who's Talking About Making a Comeback in the Senate."

     "Trent Lott is talking again -- and again and again and again. It has been three years since White House officials and some Senate Republicans orchestrated Mr. Lott's ouster as Senate majority leader amid an uproar over racially insensitive remarks. Now, as he contemplates his future, Mr. Lott is tweaking the Republican elite at every turn and jangling the nerves of official Washington as never before. As he considers whether to run for re-election next year, Mr. Lott, Republican of Mississippi, is also dropping hints about a possible bid for a return to the Senate leadership. Democrats are enjoying the show. Some Republicans are cringing, but others are eyeing Mr. Lott with some appreciation."

     She reveals why Lott is popular among reporters: "Some thought Mr. Lott would quietly slink away, but instead he rebuilt his career as sort of a Republican Greek chorus. On any given Tuesday in the Capitol, when Republicans meet for their policy luncheons, Mr. Lott can be found afterward lingering in the corridors, surrounded by reporters eager for sharp sound bites from the former leader."

     Lott is also popular among Democrats: "Democrats, for their part, are delighted with Mr. Lott; they say they cannot wait to pick up the morning newspaper to read his latest remarks. Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, the No. 3 Democrat in the Senate, laughed aloud at the mere mention of the former Republican leader's name."

     Stolberg finds him entertaining as well. Her story includes a text box with four Lott quotes under the heading "Speaking His Mind -- Some recent jabs by Senator Trent Lott toward his fellow Republicans," including some pretty un-newsworthy comments critical of FEMA director Michael Brown and Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers.

For the rest of Stolberg on Sen. Trent Lott, click here

An 80's Flashback with Judge Alito
 

     An 80's flashback involving Bush's supreme court nominee Judge Samuel Alito makes Sunday's front page ("From Alito's Past, a Window On Conservatives in Princeton").

     Culling issues of the Princeton Prospect, the magazine of the defunct campus conservative group Concerned Alumni of Princeton (of which Judge Alito was an apparently inactive member), reporter David Kirkpatrick finds much controversy in some of the group's "provocative" stands (provocative from the perspective of the Times' mostly liberal readership, anyway).

     It's actually pretty mainstream conservative stuff from the ideological decade of the 1980s:

     "As Princeton admitted a growing number of minority students, Concerned Alumni charged repeatedly that the administration was lowering admission standards, undermining the university's distinctive traditions and admitting too few children of alumni. 'Currently alumni children comprise 14 percent of each entering class, compared with an 11 percent quota for blacks and Hispanics,' the group wrote in a 1985 fund-raising letter sent to all Princeton graduates. By the mid-1980's, however, Princeton students and recent alumni were increasingly finding such statements anachronistic or worse."

     Kirkpatrick tries to drag Sen. Bill Frist into the ginned-up controversy: "In 1975, an alumni panel that included Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the current Republican leader and a 1974 Princeton graduate, concluded that Concerned Alumni had 'presented a distorted, narrow and hostile view of the university that cannot help but have misinformed and even alarmed many alumni' and 'undoubtedly generated adverse national publicity.' (Mr. Frist could not be reached for comment.) In 1977, The New Yorker devoted 20 pages to a gently derisive history of the group's squabbles with the university."

     Kirkpatrick plays more blasts from the past, as if hoping liberal groups will start dancing to one of the tunes: "The magazine's content also grew increasingly provocative under the editorship of conservative rising stars, including Dinesh D'Souza and later Laura Ingraham. A March 1984 article by Mr. D'Souza told the story of a Puerto Rican first-year student whose mother sought to remove her from the school after learning that she was having sex with a male student and was receiving sex-education from the school. The magazine said the administration had increased the female student's financial aide to enable her to stay, and it accused Princeton of giving new meaning to the phrase 'in loco parentis.' Hundreds of students signed a petition protesting the article as an invasion of privacy, and the campus debate received national attention."

For more Kirkpatrick, click here