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What National Intelligence Estimate?: Good news fails to slow anti-Iran campaign
By Steve Rendall


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Start your two-year subscription with a free copy of Interventions, a collection of Chomsky's essays for the New York Times Syndicate. These columns were published all around the globe, but rarely in major U.S. media -- and certainly not in the New York Times. Foreword written by FAIR's Peter Hart.


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NYT Again Excludes Critics From Iraq War Discussion
5/6/08

Paper reprises one-sided panel to discuss "Mission Accomplished"

The New York Times' May 4 Week in Review section featured a discussion of the state of the Iraq War with advocates of that war—-the same advocates who prompted a FAIR action alert on March 17. The following letter was sent to New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt, Op-Ed page editor David Shipley and Week in Review editor Sam Tanenhaus. Their contact information is listed below, as is FAIR's earlier alert.



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Media views
FAIR's annotated newswire
The Hardball host makes "something of a confession" to a Harvard audience: "Television is limited in the way it can tell the political story of our time." He had some other observations on the politics of TV:
"The people I work with—all my bosses—seem to be for Hillary," he added. "I just sense it. They don't actually say it, but there's no sense from the top I can tell you that it's pro-Obama... by any means....

"And it was basically pro-war during the war.... The bosses were. And I was up against that."


All believable enough, up until that last part.... See Matthews' quotes in the FAIR Media Advisory: 'The Final Word Is Hooray!': Remembering the Iraq War's Pollyanna Pundits (3/15/06)

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Chicago Tribune: McCain Finds His Own Radical Friend (5/4/08) by Steve Chapman
In light of the media pounding Barack Obama has taken for his various associations, Chapman notes that John McCain "has his own Bill Ayers" in the form of Watergate felon and ultra-right violence advocate G. Gordon Liddy.
Last November, McCain went on his radio show. Liddy greeted him as "an old friend," and McCain sounded like one. "I'm proud of you, I'm proud of your family," he gushed. "It's always a pleasure for me to come on your program, Gordon, and congratulations on your continued success and adherence to the principles and philosophies that keep our nation great." Which principles would those be? The ones that told Liddy it was fine to break in to the office of the Democratic National Committee to plant bugs and photograph documents? The ones that made him propose to kidnap antiwar activists so they couldn't disrupt the 1972 Republican convention? The ones that inspired him to plan the murder (never carried out) of an unfriendly newspaper columnist?

Lest this all "sound like ancient history," Chapman reminds us of Liddy's 1994 post-Waco advice to any listeners approached by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms: "Resist them with arms. Go for a head shot; they're going to be wearing bulletproof vests. ... Kill the sons of bitches."

See Extra!: Liddy's Lethal Advice: Red Meat for Republican Voters? (7–8/95) by Richard Bottoms

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New York Times: For Clinton, Options Seem to Dwindle (5/7/08) by Adam Nagourney
Nagourney writes as though Hillary Clinton were a small child who needs to be told in the gentlest possible way that she isn't going to get a pony:
Despite narrowly winning Indiana, while losing North Carolina, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton did not fundamentally improve her chances of securing the Democratic presidential nomination. If anything, Mrs. Clinton’s hopes for overtaking Sen. Barack Obama dwindled further on Tuesday night.

Yes, if you start out the day 140 delegates behind the other candidate and end up the day 150 behind, then you did not "fundamentally improve" your chances of being nominated. In fact, "if anything," they're worse! Or, as Nagourney puts it (after a couple of paragraphs talking about what the events of the night symbolized):

Her showing in the two states did not permit Mrs. Clinton to cut into Mr. Obama's lead in pledged delegates or his overall lead in the popular vote.

Indeed, Mr. Obama may have widened his delegate lead over Mrs. Clinton, an outcome with mathematic and political resonance.

Yes, it has "mathematic and political resonance"--plus the delegates, you know, decide who the nominee is.

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New York Times: For Primaries in Two States, a Variety of Scenarios (5/6/08) by Adam Nagourney
Note how Adam Nagourney's definition of Obama's troubles shifts from paragraph to paragraph. First there's this:
If Mr. Obama loses in Indiana because of white blue-collar support for Mrs. Clinton, it would be the third time in a row, after Ohio and Pennsylvania, that he has lost a big state because of an inability to win over enough of those kinds of voters.

So Obama's problem is "white blue-collar voters." The very next paragraph, though, gives him an entirely different problem:

Mrs. Clinton has argued that those losses in a primary augur poorly for Mr. Obama in the fall; historically, that is debatable, but another defeat at the hands of middle-class white voters in Indiana would add to the perception that he could lose in the general election.

Now the problem is "middle-class white voters"--a different and more serious problem, given that just about everyone in the United States considers themselves to be middle class. In the next paragraph, the problem becomes bigger still:

And should Mrs. Clinton win North Carolina, or come close, with white support for her overwhelming Mr. Obama’s presumed strength among blacks there, that would fuel the argument that he has been hurt by his ties to his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.

So "white blue-collar support" becomes "middle-class white voters" which becomes "white support." It's nice, though, to see the New York Times demonstrating such unusual solidarity with the (white) working class.

Plus New York Times: Price Disparities at the Pump (5/6/08)
A chart purports to give a state-by-state breakdown on the "Estimated savings per driver from a summer break on the state gas tax"--except that it assumes that drivers will pocket the entire difference, whereas if you ask an economist, they'll tell you that when the supply of gasoline is limited, cutting gas taxes will just result in the people who sell gas getting more money. "Estimated increased oil company profits per driver" would have been a more accurate label for this chart.

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On the anniversary of George W. Bush's declaration of "Mission Accomplished," the Post reprints an editorial to show "the Post editorial board disagreed."
It’s wonderful that the WP didn’t buy into Bush’s PR stunt on May 1, 2003. But this self-congratulatory reprinting of its May 4 op-ed is disingenuous. Among the the nation’s major newspapers, the WP editorial board was one of the loudest cheerleaders for war in Iraq. As Chris Mooney wrote for the Columbia Journalism Review: "The paper started out hawkishly, echoing many of Bush’s arguments and calling war 'an operation essential to American security.'"

This is a good catch from Think Progress, but if anything too kind to the Post: Not just their general record, but this particular editorial was terrible, beginning with a big three cheers for Bush:

The victory celebration held aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln Thursday was well-deserved.... None of the disasters feared before the war has come to pass: neither burning oil fields nor bloody street-to-street battles.... It's impossible not to conclude that the United States and its allies have performed a great service for Iraq's 23 million people.

But they don't endorse "mission accomplished" because there are still things to be done. Like what? Well, like finding those weapons of mass destruction!

Evidence that has surfaced so far strongly suggests that illegal weapons or weapons programs will be uncovered as well. But the Bush administration should not treat the matter as an afterthought: The weapons could still prove deadly to Americans if they are not secured.

The Post seems to have been unaware that the war itself was not yet over—and, of course, would still not be over five years later.

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TheAtlantic.com: Culture Clash (5/5/08) by Matthew Yglesias
The Los Angeles Times ponders the strangeness of Iraqis who won’t just accept an envelope full of cash after private gunmen shoot their family dead:
The shooting and its aftermath show the deep disconnect between the American legal process and the traditional culture of Iraq, between the courtroom and the tribal diwan. U.S. officials painstakingly examine evidence and laws while attempting to satisfy victims' claims through cash compensation. But traditional Arab society values honor and decorum above all.

Yglesias is mystified by "how, in the context of war, totally normal attributes of human behavior become transformed into mysterious cultural quirks of the elusive Arab":

I recall having read in the past that because Arabs are horrified of shame, it's not a good idea to humiliate an innocent man by breaking down his door at night and handcuffing him in front of his wife and children before hauling him off to jail. Now it seems that Arabs are also so invested in honor that they don't like it when mercenaries kill their relatives.

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