6) Frank Rich Praises Peter Arnett: Frank Rich’s March 30 advocacy for war correspondent Peter Arnett abruptly turned embarrassing. The drama critic turned columnist rolled out his usual shtick – the Iraq war as show business – but didn’t yell “CUT!” on his praise for then-NBC correspondent Arnett: “One person on the scene who didn’t buy the initial story line…. [Arnett] recognized a mindless TV rerun when he saw it…. Unlike many of his peers, he had been there to see the early burst of optimism in Persian Gulf War I, which he covered for CNN. “This is going to be tough,” he said just before it became tough.”
The same day Rich praised the notoriously anti-war Arnett for not sticking to the Bush administration’s script, Arnett played a starring role as pro-Saddam propagandist in an interview for state-controlled Iraqi television – an interview given by an Iraqi anchor in green military uniform.
7) Democrats Are Just Too Nice: “Temperament Wars,” James Traub’s contribution to the July 6 Times Sunday magazine, argued that Democrats – get this – are simply too nice to compete in today’s political world against “ruthless, unfair” Republicans: “Could it be that the Democrats are constitutionally incapable of acting as single-mindedly – as ruthlessly, as unfairly – as the Republicans? If so, is this the kind of Christian virtue that leads to being eaten by lions?”
Traub continued in the poor-Democrats vein: “The difference between the two parties is not simply ideological. It is also temperamental….Why are the Democrats so much more willing than the Republicans to make political sacrifices in the name of procedural fairness or of good government? Maybe Democrats are just nicer, but a more philosophical view is that liberals are committed to, are in fact bedeviled by, ideals about process that do not much preoccupy conservatives, at least contemporary ones. Liberals put their faith in such content-neutral principles as free speech, due process, participatory democracy. Is that too lofty?…. Ruthlessness is just not in the party?s DNA.”
8) Coddling a Cuddly Communist Historian: Sarah Lyall’s August 23 profile of Communist historian Eric Hobsbawm, “A Communist Life With No Apology,” portrayed the totalitarian supporter as a benign grandfather: “Mr. Hobsbawm, a gangly 86-year-old with thick horn-rimmed glasses and an engagingly lopsided smile, spoke in his living room in Hampstead, long the neighborhood of choice for London’s leftist intellectuals, in between sips of coffee….[he’s] that unlikeliest of creatures, a committed Communist who never really left the party (he let his membership lapse just before the collapse of the Soviet Union) but still managed to climb to the upper echelons of English respectability by virtue of his intellectual rigor, engaging curiosity and catholic breadth of interests.”
Lyall tries to explain Hobsbawm: “His youth, particularly as Hitler’s fascists began their rise to power, propelled him into Communism and into a lifelong sympathy for revolutions, for contrary thinking, for the ideal of revolutionary utopia.- But being a Communist intellectual was hardly contrarian in the early 40’s. In some circles, it was virtually required.
In her most galling passage, Lyall gushes: “Over his many years and against considerable odds, Mr. Hobsbawm has somehow maintained his belief in human resilience, in man’s ability to live through the most appalling personal and public tragedies and still go on.” This about a man who would have willingly condemned 20 million people to death to fulfill his warped Communist ideology.
9) The Times’s Liberal Cocoon: Democratic partisans who rely on the Times for political coverage woke up to surprising election results November 5: While two Times articles had hyped the chances of Democratic candidates for governor in Kentucky and Mississippi, both were routed by Republicans on Election Day.
Slate journalist Mickey Kaus had previously developed an explanation: “The point is that reporters and editors at papers like the Times … are exquisitely sensitive to any sign that Democrats might win, but don’t cultivate equivalent sensitivity when it comes to discerning signs Republicans might win…. The result, in recent years, is the Liberal Cocoon, in which Democratic partisans are kept happy and hopeful until they are slaughtered every other November.”
On August 13, reporter James Dao’s story on the Kentucky governor’s race included this pro-Democratic rah-rah: “With a tenacity that has surprised his opponent and some supporters, the Democratic candidate for governor, Attorney General Ben Chandler, has attacked Mr. Bush’s stewardship of the economy, contending that Republican policies have drained Kentucky of 56,000 jobs, aided the wealthy at the expense of the poor and helped drill a gaping hole in the state budget.”