Americans Tuning Out Bush’s Ineffectual “Cheerleading” on Iraq

     The Times leads Wednesday with Elisabeth Bumiller’s take on Bush’s lively White House press conference, which the Times headlines “Bush Concedes Iraq War Erodes Political Status.”

     “President Bush said Tuesday that the war in Iraq was eroding his political capital, his starkest admission yet about the costs of the conflict to his presidency, and suggested that American forces would remain in the country until at least 2009. In a quick remark at a White House news conference about the reserves of political strength he earned in his 2004 re-election victory -- ‘I'd say I'm spending that capital on the war’ -- Mr. Bush in effect acknowledged that until he could convince increasingly skeptical Americans that the United States was winning the war, Iraq would overshadow everything he did.”

     After quoting Bush’s optimism on Iraq, Bumiller boils Bush’s optimistic speech down to just another political “tactic” while suggesting America is tuning him out.

      “The speech tactic worked in late 2005 when another series of Iraq addresses helped to stabilize the president's poll numbers temporarily. But analysts said that with his message now familiar to the nation, it was not clear whether people were listening.”

     As usual, the generally Bush-hostile Bumiller finds unflattering things to say about the president’s comportment.

     “Mr. Bush's mood at the news conference alternated between relaxed and testy, although he appeared to be trying hard not to show his irritation at some reporters. In one exchange, Helen Thomas, the longtime White House correspondent and Hearst newspaper columnist, asked Mr. Bush why he really wanted to go to war with Iraq. He curtly replied that ‘to assume I wanted war is just flat wrong, Helen, in all due respect.’”

     (Media reporter Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post didn’t see the exchange that way: “Bush did find a useful foil at the presser in calling on liberal columnist Helen Thomas for the first time in three years. She attacked the war and essentially accused him of lying about why he took the country to war, allowing Bush not only to punch back but to show the country that he's up against a left-wing press corps.”)

     More Bumiller: “At another point, he took on a peevish tone when asked about Democratic measures in Congress to censure him for his secret surveillance program. A recent New York Times/CBS News poll shows that a majority of Americans support the program as long as they believe it is intended to protect them from terrorism.”

     Bumiller elaborates on video on the Times website about Bush’s many “problems,” basically dismissing Bush’s speech as ineffectual “cheerleading” and implying Iraq is in fact in civil war, whether Bush admits it or not.

      “The problem that the president has is that what Americans see on their television screens every night is a lot different than what he’s telling us is actually happening there….The problem is he hasn’t announced any new initiatives, any new policies, in these speeches, a lot of it is simply what some military analysts say is cheerleading. The other problem he has is that people like former Prime Minister Allawi, one of our strongest allies in Iraq, said just this week that the country is basically in civil war. The president on Tuesday said no, the country is not in civil war, but we’re down to semantics here.”

     And it’s an open question if what Americans are seeing ‘on their television screens every night” is in fact the complete story from Iraq.

For more Bumiller, click here.

Prejudice and Bigotry in the Conservative Dartmouth Review

     Karen Arenson’s Wednesday obituary for James Freedman, former president of Dartmouth College, took TimesWatch back to the campus PC wars of the early 1990s.

     Political warhorses of a certain age will recall the ideological controversy over The Dartmouth Review, which dared to be a conservative newspaper on a politically correct Ivy league campus and was persecuted by radical professors and an intolerant campus administration.

     Arenson lauds Freedman and casts the conservative-intolerant administrator Freedman as a freedom-fighter:: “James O. Freedman, a former president of Dartmouth College and the University of Iowa and a forceful voice against anti-Semitism and other forms of intolerance on college campuses, died yesterday at his home in Cambridge, Mass….Mr. Freedman was a strong advocate for a liberal education in an increasingly career-oriented world, but he gained his widest attention for speaking out against strains of prejudice and bigotry in the academic world.”

     She assumes Freedman’s paranoid take on The Dartmouth Review to be factually accurate: “In one widely publicized episode, in 1988, he condemned The Dartmouth Review, a conservative student newspaper, for ridiculing blacks, gay men and lesbians, women and Jews. In a column and a front-page cartoon, the paper had portrayed Mr. Freedman, who was Jewish, with a Hitler mustache and wearing a Nazi uniform and had likened the effects of his campus policies to the Holocaust. Mr. Freedman defended The Review's right to publish, but he declared, ‘Racism, sexism and other forms of ignorance and disrespect have no place at Dartmouth.’”

     A less hagiographic view of Freedman comes from Dartmouth English professor and columnist Jeffrey Hart, and quotes the president’s slandering of the university’s conservative paper.

     As Hart explains, after someone planted a Hitler quote in the Review in 1990, the administration hurriedly organized an anti-hate rally targeting the paper.

      “At this Rally Against Hate, all sorts of wild things were said by Mr. Freedman, historian Arthur Hertzberg, and many others. Most notable, perhaps, was the following statement by Mr. Freedman, which was later printed and distributed by the College information service, and which he himself often described, I'm not joking, as his ‘Gettysburg Address.’

     “‘For ten years, The Dartmouth Review has attacked blacks because they are blacks, women because they are women, homosexuals because they are homosexuals, and Jews because they are Jews.’ Every word of this ‘Gettysburg Address’ except the first three is false, and can be shown to be so from the text of the newspaper, not to say the composition of its staff. The current editor of the Review, standing by as Mr. Freedman bellowed through his amplifier, was Kevin Pritchett, who is black. Two previous editors-in-chief came from the Indian subcontinent, one of them being Dinesh D'Souza, who now has published two important best-sellers on education and on race. The first president of the Review had been Nathan Levinson, and the Review had had many Jewish staffers and editors.”

For the rest of Aranson’s obituary for James Freedman, click here.