Canned grad speeches from speakers who get college’s name in the paper. Blah. Line up the speaker qua speaker, not qua celebrity, you oafs. “Bingo!” the Harvardites yelled every time Russert, with 42 honorary degrees on his wall, used one of his boilerplate phrases, which apparently were not hard to look up.
Day: March 8, 2007
Two with one blow
Hey, good news out of Iraq from Chi Trib:
BAGHDAD — The U.S. Army has reported a sharp decrease in insurgency attacks in Baghdad.
In the week of Feb. 24 to March 2, officials said, insurgency strikes and suicide bombings dropped for the fourth consecutive week in Baghdad. They linked this to the steady increase of security patrols in the city.
Oops, scratch that. World Trib there. Chi Trib has this:
To Iraq’s Sunnis, Iran’s ascendancy as a regional power and its close relationship with the Shiite-led government represent a pernicious threat to the survival of Iraq’s Arab identity.
“America handed Iraq to Iran on a golden plate,” says Sunni politician Saleh al-Mutlaq. “Everything Iran fought for in the Iran-Iraq war, America gave to it when it invaded.”
That’s on page one today, top left, by Liz Sly. No, it’s not the lede. This is the soft-led Trib, remember. The lede was about legislature cafeteria mumblings in “Persian” (she means Farsi?) and an Iranian charity that buys wedding dresses and arms caches seized from insurgents.
So in one story you have two characteristics of Chi Trib coverage: bad news out of Iraq and soft lede-ism.
Different strokes, I guess
MoveOn.org Civic Action, objecting to Nevada Dems’ partnering with Fox News for a candidates’ debate, says Fox is a “mouthpiece for the Republican Party, not a legitimate news channel.”
That’s funny. I was saying just the same thing the other day, about all channels but Fox, except I said mouthpiece for Dems! What do you know?!
Fitzg goofed? Bush flunks?
Novak’s two concluding paragraphs say a lot about the Libby verdict. “No underlying criminal violation,” but Fitzg went ahead? Looks like scalp-hunting to me:
On Fox’s “Hannity & Colmes” Tuesday night, super-lawyer David Boies said Fitzgerald never should have prosecuted Libby because there was no underlying criminal violation. Boies scoffed at Fitzgerald’s contention that Libby had obstructed him from exposing criminal activity. Boies, who represented Al Gore in the 2000 election dispute, is hardly a Bush sympathizer. But neither is he a Democratic partisan trying to milk this obscure scandal.
As for GW, Novak is good at not letting him off the hook:
George W. Bush lost control of this issue when he permitted a special prosecutor to make decisions that, unlike going after a drug dealer or mafia kingpin, turned out to be inherently political. It would have taken courage for the president to have aborted this process. It would require even more courage for him to pardon Scooter Libby now, not while he is walking out of the White House in January 2009.
Blithe Spirit 