Frank Bruni has been named the new Sunday op-ed columnist at the New York Times. Bruni has been writing restaurant reviews for the past few years, but came to a lot of people's attention as the reporter covering the 2000 campaign of George W. Bush. Bruni went on to write a book about that experience, and one of the lessons in the book was that what Bruni actually thought about Bush's campaign rhetoric and debate performances wasn't really what he was reporting at the time. I wrote something about this when the book came out, though I can't recall whether [...]
May
10
2011
Newsweek, Like Time, Clutching at Straws to Cheer for Torture
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The argument that the finding and killing of Osama bin Laden shows that George W. Bush's torture policies were justified got another rehearsal in Newsweek fromYale professorStephen Carter (5/5/11): In the end, we were able to track bin Laden because he communicated only through two couriers believed to be brothers. And what was the source of this vital clue? The intelligence apparently came from detainees imprisoned in secret facilities overseas and subjected to what has been euphemistically called "enhanced" interrogation…. So the information from the detainees was crucial, and we face an uncomfortable irony, both political and ethical. The finest [...]
May
05
2011
Did the WaPo Hire Sean Hannity?
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OK, this isn't Sean Hannity's byline in the Post today, but it might as well be. The headline should stop you: In bin Laden Victory, Echoes of the Bush Years The piece–actually written by Scott Wilson and Anne Kornblut–lays out the argument: As President Obama celebrates the signature national-security success of his tenure, he has a long list of people to thank. On the list: George W. Bush. After the September 11, 2001, attacks, Bush waged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that have forged a military so skilled that it carried out a complicated covert raid with only a minor [...]
May
02
2011
Bush's Palpable Persistence in Pursuit of bin Laden
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In today's edition of the Washington Post (5/2/11), Dan Balz puts forth what is probably going to be a popular theme in the coverage of the killing of Osama bin Laden: that catching the Al-Qaeda leader was a top concern of both the Bush and Obama administrations. Bush put down the marker not long after the September 11 attacks, saying he wanted bin Laden "dead or alive." That was taken as a sign of cowboy swagger by a Texan president by some of his critics, but it was a reflection of the absolute importance that he and much of the [...]
Jan
10
2011
Violent Rhetoric and False Balance
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Today in the New York Times Paul Krugman (1/10/11) suggests that we not pretend that "both sides" are responsible for toxic political rhetoric: Where's that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let's not make a false pretense of balance: It's coming, overwhelmingly, from the right. It's hard to imagine a Democratic member of Congress urging constituents to be "armed and dangerous" without being ostracized; but Rep. Michele Bachmann, who did just that, is a rising star in the GOP. …Listen to Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann, and you'll hear a lot of caustic remarks and mockery aimed at Republicans. But you won't [...]
Jan
03
2011
Newsweek: Obama=Bush on War, and That's a Good Thing
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Stephen L. Carter has a piece over atNewsweek that points out that Barack Obama hardly differs from George W. Bush when it comes to war; as the subhead explains: "How does Barack Obama differ as a commander in chief from his swaggering predecessor? A lot less than you might think." Now that'ssomethingyou don't hearvery often in the corporate media. But Carter meansthis more as a compliment than a criticism, explaining that there were people on the left and right alike who thought that America had elected an antiwar president, but that simply turned out not to be true. Rather, the [...]
Nov
30
2010
Richard Cohen Nails That Lying George W. Bush
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Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen uses WikiLeaks as a jumping off point to talk about George W. Bush's new book and the run-up to the Iraq War (11/30/10): As my colleague, the indefatigably indefatigable Walter Pincus, has pointed out, Bush manages to bollix up both the chronology and the importance of the various inspections of Iraq's weapons systems so as to suggest that any other president given the same set of facts would have gone to war. "I had tried to address the threat from Saddam Hussein without war," he writes. On that score, he is simply not credible. The [...]
Nov
12
2010
What–if Anything–Does Bush Know About the Iraq War?
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Time magazine's Joe Klein has read George W. Bush's memoir, and has a few criticisms (11/11/10); for instance, he points out that Bush never stops to wonder if the UN inspectors, whom Saddam Hussein had allowed back into Iraq, were not finding weapons of mass destruction because, maybe, uh, the WMD didn't exist. That's a good question, but it's not surprising that Bush didn't raise it, sinceBushhas repeatedly claimed thatSaddam Hussein did not allow weapons inspectors into Iraq in the first place.As FAIR pointed out in an Action Alert ("Media Still Letting Bush Lie on Iraq Inspectors," 12/2/08), Bush peddled [...]
Nov
10
2010
Interviewing Bush: Lauer's Lowlights
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NBC star Matt Lauer's one-on-one interview with George W. Bush revealed very little in the way of information, though some lessons could be drawn fromLauer's mediocre performance. Here was one comment from near the top of the interview: The Florida recount. Hanging chads. A divided Supreme Court. George Bush had a rough road to the White House. Bush lost the popular vote in 2000 by half a million. By many reasonable standards, he should have lost the Florida recount too. The Supreme Court made him the president. I'm not sure "rough" is the right way to describe what happened to [...]
Nov
09
2010
Bush Is Back–And So Is Softball Journalism
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Over athis Nation Media Fix blog (a must-read), Greg Mitchell watched Matt Lauer's NBC interview with George W. Bush, and wasn't impressed. He writes: Time after time Bush would offer a whopper and Lauer either said nothing, or expressed sympathy for the poor man who was subjected to such harsh criticism. It went that way, from Bush saying there was "no intelligence" prior to 9/11 about terrorists maybe wanting to fly planes into buildings to stating flatly that lack of regulations had anything to do with the financial meltdown. Bush said he had zero doubts about the WMD intelligence on [...]
Nov
08
2010
Bush's 'Sickening Feeling' on WMDs Was an Inside Joke With the Press
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"I had a sickening feeling every time I thought about it. I still do." That's how George W. Bush referred to the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in his new book Decision Points. The quote is featured in Time magazine's Verbatim section (11/15/10), and has been discussed pretty widely. This is an interesting claim.When Bush appeared at the Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner on March 23, 2004, his sickening feeling was gone–and replaced by his funny bone . Bush's speech included a routine where he joked about the fruitless search for Iraq's deadly weapons, showing slides where administration [...]
Nov
03
2010
NYT: It's Still Not Torture If Bush Did It
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Back in June, a study by Harvard students (echoing earlier work in Extra!–5-6/08) found that media outlets like the New York Times consistently called things like waterboarding torture when they reported on them–that is, until the Bush administration's torture came to light. The study sparkeda lot of discussion, with the Times responding that it didn't refer to waterboarding as torture because it wanted to avoid "taking sides in a political dispute." In today's New York Times (11/3/10), a review of George W. Bush's new book shows that the Times is sticking with that formula: He likewise defends his decision to [...]
Jul
16
2010
NYT, Equating Stimulus With the Iraq War, Recalls the Bush-Era 'Boom'
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Notingthat policies like the stimulus plan tend to poll pretty badly, New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg writes (7/16/10) that Obama says he has pursued such policies because they're "the right thing to do for America." To Stolberg, that sounds familiar: It is an argument that sounds eerily similar to the one Mr. Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, made to justify an unpopular war in Iraq as he watched his own poll numbers sink lower. Mr. Bush and his aides often felt they could not catch a break; when the economy was humming along–or at least seemed to be [...]
