What follows appeared in the Albuquerque Tribune Oct. 28, 2004:
Makes Me Wonder
President Bush and Co.’s war decisions would have even paranoid Nixon ask questions
By Arthur Alpert
Never, never did I think I would look back to the Nixon Administration with nostalgia.
After reporting on Watergate, I fell under its spell, reading countless books to grasp the who, what, where and when of that strange Presidency.
I never fully understood the "why," though, not until former Nixon aide John Ehrlichman told me over lunch in 1980, "We were paranoid."
So here I am watching an Administration that makes Nixon look brilliant and, again, I don’t understand why.
Having done the reading, though, I see this: The Bush team arrived at the White House fixated on Iraq, not terrorism. Maybe that’s why they failed to rush to battle stations when the CIA warned Osama bin Laden wanted to kill Americans on American soil.
Second, Administration neo-conservatives knew -knew!- that were the US to destroy the Iraqi regime, we could convert some Muslim nations to democracy and scare others into blessing an Israeli- Palestinian peace deal, while making sure the oil kept flowing That doctrine is why we invaded Iraq, Not the rumored ties between Saddam and Osama in Dick Cheney's dark mutterings. Not the weapons alarums. They were camouflage.
Unfortunately, the neo-cons were simple-minded. The first President Bush’s sophisticated notion that knocking off Saddam could destabilize the Mideast, maybe even create a quagmire in Iraq, was all wrong. They knew better. With one stroke, they would change history.
President Nixon, master of realpolitik, harbored no such Wilsonian delusions.
Apparently, the neo-cons also dismissed chances that:
warring on Iraq might unite religious and secular terrorists in unholy matrimony; free elections could put radical Islamists in power in Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia; or we’d be answering bin Laden's most fervent prayer - may infidels attack an Arab state.
But how did these ignorant imperial idealists recruit George W. Bush? His respect for dour Dick Cheney, maybe. Or his passion for defying Daddy Bush.
It’s clear that the White House seized upon 9/11, wrapped itself in the flag and set about exploiting the murders of almost 3,000 Americans. How George W. Bush’s psyche, Karl Rove’s political agenda and the neo-con fantasy dovetailed will be historians’ work, but dovetail they did.
The Administration set about erasing the space between al Qaeda and Iraq so as to create one enemy, one "war on terrorism."
That phrase is a political tool used to mobilize support. Like the "war on drugs." But it’s inane - as if it’s possible to war on a tactic; as if the terrorists are one; as if defeating terrorists doesn’t require politics as well as firepower.
But I succumb to rationality.
Not this Administration, though; it wanted a simple conflict with an evil enemy. Evil is a moral word. And the joy of moral judgement is that it makes thinking superfluous. If Osama was evil, why waste time wondering why he murdered or – because we are innocent - if we bear any responsibility?
This may reflect W’s dedication to a righteous-warrior version of Christianity. Or Karl Rove’s practical wisdom - you win elections by preaching fear of a deadly enemy.
Conservative it’s not, which is why George Will, Pat Buchanan and Chuck Hagel have expressed polite skepticism. Nixon would have had choice obscenities for today’s far-out idealists.
I am left with whys. Why did the Administration’s radicals get so far? Why the crusade? Ehrlichman said the Nixon crew was "paranoid." I fear that this White House harbors something darker still.
Email Alpert, a semi-retired Albuquerque newsman, at ArthurAlpert@swcp.com. His column runs the fourth Thursday of the month.
The trend I thought I spotted at the Albuquerque Journal is real. (You may remember I detected a change on the editorial and Op-Eed pages - they are less rightist, better balanced and and more educational.)
Yesterday, for example, the editor ran contrasting columns on the Administration's economic record. A local bond attorney was sharply critical of the White House and the Congress, while a retired UNM professor of economics gave the President's performance a rave.
Today the editorial page was diverse. It featured liberal and right-wing voices on national issues, as well as a dash of humor, while the Op-Ed page gave us an argument against the extension of Paseo del Norte and a critique of the White House's science policies from a local physicist.
PS If the Op-Ed editor can offer perspective, so can I. Do read Charles Krauthammer's column today on Afghanistan the Taliban (A16) and a short AP story from Kabul on A18. Then pick up "Imperial Hubris", by Anonymous (a CIA analyst) for his analysis of what the US did in Afghanistan and where the situation stands. I was surprised into thought. Maybe you will be, too. And if you do not agree fully with the author, you will like him for his righteous anger.
Winthrop Quigley’s "Money & Medicine" column in today’s Albuquerque Journal is superior journalism.
He sets out to debunk an "astonishing collection of canards, half-truths, hokum and nonsense" uttered in this election year and does it neatly
If it’s not a perfect job that's because Quigley sometimes falls victim to the temptation of "balance." For example, having knocked down the idea that John Kerry is proposing a government takeover of health care, he rips into the charge that George Bush is "…proposing that only millionaires have quality health care."
Sounds fair, but here’s the problem – while the Bush forces have run TV commercials pushing that lie about Kerry’s plan, I have neither seen nor heard any Democratic charge that Bush favors health care only for millionaires.
Democrats have, it is true, complained that there are more uninsured on Bush’s watch. And they have campaigned against the Bush Administration’s tender loving care for insurance and pharmaceutical companies.
Quigley’s piece has another weakness, revealed when he notes that the Medicare prescription drug legislation was neither "dreadful" nor "brilliant. True enough, but not very helpful. Space is always a constraint, but we would have benefited from analysis of that complex legislation or a clear narrative of how the Administration got it passed.
Still, Quigley knows his subject so well he can confidently clobber half-truths and then outline underlying philosophical differences.
His accomplishment looks even better when you compare it to most daily reporting on the same issues. Or even with most Op-Ed pieces from partisan or ideologically committed sources.
Paul Greenberg is a conservative from Arkansas whose syndicated column frequently appears in the Albuquerque Journal. His piece today about the "Liberal Media Bias" – his capitals - makes two points.
First, he uses a memo written by ABC TV’s political director, Mark Halperin, to make "perfectly clear" the existence of LMB at ABC. What Halprin says in his memo is that the Bush camp is relying heavily on distortions, Kerry less so. He also says ABC’s job is to hold both sides accountable without falling into the trap of holding them equally accountable "when the facts don’t warrant that."
This, says Greenberg, is proof of liberal bias. No, it isn’t. It’s proof that Halperin wants to get beyond the idea of "balance," something news people often resort to when they cannot pin down the truth.
But Greenberg – misunderstanding this – uses it to make another argument "It’s the pretense of objectivity at the old established networks," he writes, "that offends, or should. Now it lies shattered."
I couldn’t agree more.
Greenberg doesn’t understand, I guess, that "balance" often is a pretense of objectivity. But no matter, He’s 100% correct, whatever his reasoning, in objecting to the networks’ "pretense to objectivity." That stance (adopted to protect media corporations from being punished for the sins of their news division), worked when the nation had a consensus on the big issues. That time – 1932 into the 1960s? - is long gone.
Fox has led the way by giving us a right-wing slant upfront.
I don’t know how the news operations at ABC, CBS and NBC should follow, what labels they ought to affix, but they ought to be thinking very hard on how to catch up to reality.
Moving to another issue, the Journal chose to pair Greenberg’s column today with one from Michael Kinsley (Los Angeles Times). Kinsely, having cited an egregious Bush campaign distortion, continues this way:
"The media – with an undiscriminating appetite for issues, and a professional commitment to be fair and balanced to Republicans and Democrats, true and false, good and evil, crunchy or creamy, or any other dichotomy the news confronts them with – were helpless to resist."
Congratulations to the Journal editor who saw the similarities and differences between Greenberg’s and Kinsley’s columns and paired them to provoke thought. Way to go.
PS I only wish the Journal’s editorial page layout permitted putting columns like these side-by-side. Oh, well
PPS Note that Kinsely writes "the media….were." Plural. Next he’ll be telling us that terrorism is not one thing to war on…..that it's not us against them...etc., etc.
I do not want to overstate this, but I think I detect a trend at the Albuquerque Journal toward making its editorial and Op-Ed pages less predictably rightist. You can do that two ways – balance them by recruiting more left-wingers or emphasize "news analysis" over "opinion" pieces.
Today, it’s the latter. David Broder writes on the pitfalls of electoral college reform. Jonathan Chait argues, with numbers, that President Bush’s attack on John Kerry’s tax votes is phony. Fred Hiatt complains that election-year politics deprives us of a needed debate on security. Finally, John Dendahl, the GOP attack dog, rather sedately considers security and the gender gap.
This trend – if that is what it is - will be worth watching.
I read today that Wal-Mart will no longer carry comedian Jon Stewart’s new book, America, because it features nude pictures of the justices of the United States Supreme Court. (Or pictures that purport to show the justices; I’m not sure.) In any case, the photos violate the corporate sense of decency.
My first reaction is that Stewart must be delighted; not only will he will sell more books but the story provides more material for his Comedy Central show.
My second reaction - Wal-Mart has every right not to sell the book.
However, that does not make the decision OK. It’s part of a pattern wherein a business or public institution labels a book, play, painting, film or video "indecent" and tries to restrict access to it.
"Indecency" it turns out, always is sexual. Never is it indecent to send young people to kill and be killed in war. Nor is capital punishment "indecent."
Wal-Mart’s action against indecency is, therefore, political and from the right. Since books are mediums of communication, this is rightist media bias.
I thought it worth mentioning.
Today's Albuquerque Journal includes a letter to the Editor from one Donna J. Hutton of Corrales that accuses the newspaper of failing to distinguish between fact and opinion and - get this - biasing the news toward its "liberal and socialist" agenda.
This letter - which I find unbelievable! - reminds me that bias is in the eye of the beholder. To put it another way, we bring our own imperfect selves to the party. And though I'm sure my eyesight is 20-20, l can fall victim to bias, too.
Sinclair Broadcasting has ordered its 22 TV stations to play an anti-Kerry "documentary."
Ah, the liberal media.
I note the Sinclair actioon only because many Americans continue to believe- despite the evidence and logic - that there is a "liberal media" conspiracy.
PS One of the Albuquerque Journal's favorite liberal Op=Ed authors is William Pfaff. And he is a liberal. Unfortunately, he writes as badly as William F. Buckley.
In today's piece, however, where he points out that John Kerry shares President Bush's desire to "stay the course" in Iraq, Pfaff writes in English.
It's a thought-provoking column.
The New York Times is fallible. Its failure to question George Bush's Middle East fantasies cannot be forgiven. Yet the Time is indispensible, as today's column by Frank Rich - about the White House and the press - reminds me. It's so good that I had to reproduce it. I don;t whether to say "Enjoy" or "Read it and weep."
"Will We Need a New "All the President's Men"?
October 17, 2004
Such is the power of movies that the first image
"Watergate" brings to mind three decades later is not
Richard Nixon so much as the golden duo of Redford and
Hoffman riding to the nation's rescue in "All the
President's Men." But if our current presidency is now
showing symptoms of a precancerous Watergate syndrome - as
it is, daily - we have not yet reached that denouement
immortalized by Hollywood, in which our scrappy heroes
finally bring Nixon to heel in his second term. No, we're
back instead in the earlier reels of his first term, before
the criminality of the Watergate break-in, when no one had
heard of Woodward and Bernstein. Back then an arrogant and
secretive White House, furious at the bad press fueled by
an unpopular and mismanaged war, was still flying high as
it kneecapped with impunity any reporter or news
organization that challenged its tightly enforced message
of victory at hand.
It was then that the vice president, Spiro Agnew, scripted
by the speechwriter Pat Buchanan, tried to discredit the
press as an elite - or, as he spelled it out, "a tiny,
enclosed fraternity of privileged men." It was then that
the attorney general, John Mitchell, under the pretext of
national security, countenanced wiretaps of Hedrick Smith
of The Times and Marvin Kalb of CBS News, as well as a full
F.B.I. investigation of CBS's Daniel Schorr. Today it's
John Ashcroft's Justice Department, also invoking "national
security," that hopes to seize the phone records of Judith
Miller and Philip Shenon of The Times, claiming that what
amounts to a virtual wiretap is warranted by articles about
Islamic charities and terrorism published nearly three
years ago.
"The fundamental right of Americans, through our free
press, to penetrate and criticize the workings of our
government is under attack as never before," wrote William
Safire last month. When an alumnus of the Nixon White House
says our free press is being attacked as "never before,"
you listen. What alarms him now are the efforts of Patrick
Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor in the Valerie
Plame-Robert Novak affair, to threaten reporters at The
Times and Time magazine with jail if they don't reveal
their sources. Given that the Times reporter in question
(Judith Miller again) didn't even write an article on the
subject under investigation, Mr. Fitzgerald overreaches so
far that he's created a sci-fi plot twist out of Steven
Spielberg's "Minority Report."
It's all the scarier for being only one piece in a pattern
of media intimidation that's been building for months now.
Once Woodward and Bernstein did start investigating
Watergate, Nixon plotted to take economic revenge by
siccing the Federal Communications Commission on TV
stations owned by The Washington Post's parent company. The
current White House has been practicing pre-emptive media
intimidation to match its policy of pre-emptive war. Its
F.C.C. chairman, using Janet Jackson's breast and Howard
Stern's mouth as pretexts, has sufficiently rattled Viacom,
which broadcast both of these entertainers' infractions
against "decency," that its chairman, the self-described
"liberal Democrat" Sumner Redstone, abruptly announced his
support for the re-election of George W. Bush last month.
"I vote for what's good for Viacom," he explained, and he
meant it. He took this loyalty oath just days after the "60
Minutes" fiasco prompted a full-fledged political witch
hunt on Viacom's CBS News, another Republican target since
the Nixon years. Representative Joe Barton, Republican of
Texas, has threatened to seek Congressional "safeguards"
regulating TV news content and, depending what happens Nov.
2, he may well have the political means to do it.
Viacom is hardly the only media giant cowed by the prospect
that this White House might threaten its corporate
interests if it gets out of line. Disney's refusal to
release Michael Moore's partisan "Fahrenheit 9/11" in an
election year would smell less if the company applied the
same principle to its ABC radio stations, where the equally
partisan polemics of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are
heard every day. Even a low-profile film project in
conflict with Bush dogma has spooked the world's largest
media company, Time Warner, proprietor of CNN. Its Warner
Brothers, about to release a special DVD of "Three Kings,"
David O. Russell's 1999 movie criticizing the first gulf
war, suddenly canceled a planned extra feature, a new
Russell documentary criticizing the current war. Whether
any of these increasingly craven media combines will stand
up to the Bush administration in a constitutional pinch, as
Katharine Graham and her Post Company bravely did to the
Nixon administration during Watergate, is a proposition
that hasn't been remotely tested yet.
To understand what kind of journalism the Bush
administration expects from these companies, you need only
look at those that are already its collaborators. Fox News
speaks loudly for itself, to the point of posting on its
Web site an article by its chief political correspondent
containing fictional John Kerry quotes. (After an outcry,
it was retracted as "written in jest.") But Fox is just the
tip of the Rupert Murdoch empire. When The New York Post
covered the release of the report by the C.I.A.'s chief
weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer, it played the story on
page 8 and didn't get to the clause "while no stockpiles of
W.M.D. were found in Iraq" until the 16th paragraph. This
would be an Onion parody were it not deadly serious.
It's hard to imagine an operation more insidious than Mr.
Murdoch's, but the Sinclair Broadcast Group may be it. The
owner or operator of 62 TV stations nationwide, including
affiliates of all four major broadcast networks, this
company gets little press scrutiny because it is invisible
in New York City, Washington and Los Angeles, where it has
no stations. But Sinclair, whose top executives have maxed
out as Bush contributors, was first smoked out of the
shadows last spring when John McCain called it
"unpatriotic" for ordering its eight ABC stations not to
broadcast the "Nightline" in which Ted Koppel read the
names of the then 721 American casualties in Iraq. This was
the day after Paul Wolfowitz had also downsized American
casualties by testifying before Congress that they numbered
only about 500.
Thanks to Elizabeth Jensen of The Los Angeles Times, who
first broke the story last weekend, we now know that
Sinclair has grander ambitions for the election. It has
ordered all its stations, whose most powerful reach is in
swing states like Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania, to
broadcast a "news" special featuring a film, "Stolen
Honor," that trashes Mr. Kerry along the lines of the Swift
Boat Veterans for Truth ads. The film's creator is a man
who spent nearly eight years in the employ of Tom Ridge.
Sinclair has ordered that it be run in prime time during a
specific four nights in late October, when it is likely to
be sandwiched in with network hits like "CSI," "The
Apprentice" and "Desperate Housewives." Democrats are
screaming, but don't expect the Bush apparatchiks at
federal agencies to pursue their complaints as if they were
as serious as a "wardrobe malfunction." A more likely
outcome is that Sinclair, which already reaches 24 percent
of American viewers, will reap the regulatory favors it is
seeking to expand that audience in a second Bush term.
Like the Nixon administration before it, the Bush
administration arrived at the White House already obsessed
with news management and secrecy. Nixon gave fewer press
conferences than any president since Hoover; Mr. Bush has
given fewer than any in history. Early in the Nixon years,
a special National Press Club study concluded that the
president had instituted "an unprecedented, government-wide
effort to control, restrict and conceal information." Sound
familiar? The current president has seen to it that even
future historians won't get access to papers he wants to
hide; he quietly gutted the Presidential Records Act of
1978, the very reform enacted by Congress as a
post-Watergate antidote to pathological Nixonian secrecy.
The path of the Bush White House as it has moved from
Agnew-style press baiting to outright assault has also
followed its antecedent. The Nixon administration's first
legal attack on the press, a year before the Watergate
break-in, was its attempt to stop The Times and The
Washington Post from publishing the Pentagon Papers, the
leaked internal Defense Department history of our failure
in Vietnam. Though 9/11 prompted Ari Fleischer's first
effort to warn the media to "watch what they say," it's
failure in Iraq that has pushed the Bush administration
over the edge. It was when Operation Iraqi Freedom was
bogged down early on that it spun the fictional saga of
Jessica Lynch. It's when the percentage of Americans who
felt it was worth going to war in Iraq fell to 50 percent
in the Sept. 2003 Gallup poll, down from 73 that April,
that identically worded letters "signed" by different
soldiers mysteriously materialized in 11 American
newspapers, testifying that security for Iraq's citizens
had been "largely restored." (As David Greenberg writes in
his invaluable "Nixon's Shadow," phony letters to news
outlets were also a favorite Nixon tactic.) The legal
harassment of the press, like the Republican party's
Web-driven efforts to discredit specific journalists even
at non-CBS networks, has escalated in direct ratio to the
war's decline in support.
"What you're seeing on your TV screens," the president said
when minimizing the Iraq insurgency in May, are "the
desperate tactics of a hateful few." Maybe that's the sunny
news that can be found on a Sinclair station. Now, with our
election less than three weeks away, the bad news coming
out of Iraq everywhere else is a torrent. Reporters at
virtually every news organization describe a downward
spiral so dangerous that they can't venture anywhere in
Iraq without risking their lives. Last weekend marines
spoke openly and by name to Steve Fainaru of The Washington
Post about the quagmire they're witnessing firsthand and
its irrelevance to battling Al Qaeda, whose 9/11 attack
motivated many of them to enlist in the first place. "Every
day you read the articles in the States where it's like,
'Oh, it's getting better and better," said Lance Cpl.
Jonathan Snyder of Gettysburg, Pa. "But when you're here,
you know it's worse every day." Another marine, Lance Cpl.
Alexander Jones of Ball Ground, Ga., told Mr. Fainaru:
"We're basically proving out that the government is wrong.
We're catching them in a lie." Asked if he was concerned
that he and his buddies might be punished for speaking out,
Cpl. Brandon Autin of New Iberia, La., responded: "What are
they going to do - send us to Iraq?"
What "they" can do is try to intimidate, harass, discredit
and prosecute news organizations that report stories like
this. If history is any guide, and the hubris of
re-election is tossed into the mix, that harrowing drama
can go on for a long time before we get to the feel-good
final act of "All the President's Men."
Today, the Albuquerque Journal not only ran but gave prominence to an Op=Ed piece by Harold Meyerson, an old-fashioned liberal. It was nothing fire-breathing, mind you, but it was a pro-Kerry column by a guy who's on the masthead of The American Prospect, the nation's most popular liberal magazine.
I thought you should know.
I complimented Albuquerque Journal editors here for telling us October 2 that Lawrence J. Korb, author of an Op-ed piece published that day, was associated with a liberal think tank. I find that kind of ID useful and I suspect most readers do, too.
Today , however, John Dendahl - whose Op-Ed column calls for revision of the Endangered Species Act - is identified this way: "Lifelong New Mexican John Dendahl is a retired executive and political leader."
Now this isn't a huge practical problem - most readers know who Dendahl is.
But why not say Dendahl was chairman of the Republican Party in our state?
Or does the Journal intend to ID only liberals?
PS Dendahl also notes today that the New Mexico District Court upheld the right of Ralph Nader to be on the ballot. That was, of course, the correct ruling. State Democrats ought to be ashamed of themselves for trying to keep him off the ballot.
There is a right way to keep Nader from spoiling the election - steal his platform or much of it. That's what Democrats did years ago to Norman Thomas; the result was the New Deal.
John Kerry didn’t do it last week. Last night, John Edwards didn’t do it.
President Bush and VP Cheney keep telling the voters they are strong and will protect Americans better than the Democratic ticket.
So why not ask, "The way you protected us September 11, 2001? After you got a CIA briefing telling you that Osama bin Laden planned to attack on American soil?"
The Republicans would retort, of course, by blaming Bill Clinton for failing to stop terrorism. Still, the rebuttal to that is obvious – namely, that Ronald Reagan set the pattern for the US response to terror when he cut and ran after terrorists killed 241 Marines in Lebanon. Nor did the first President Bush face up to bin Laden. In a continuing debate, the Democrats could quote Bush and Cheney and the others from Bob Woodward’s books or Richard Clarke to establish that the Bush Administration was fixated on Iraq from the start and gave al Qaeda short shrift. Heck, they might even point out that Attorney General Ashcroft sought to cut intelligence funds shortly before 9/11.
So why don’t the Democrats – assaulted by lying liars - go for the jugular? Basically, it’s that in 2004 liberalism is floundering and liberals lack conviction.
It’s been more than a week since CBS announced – at the behest of its owner, Viacom, I am sure - that it would not run a story on the Administration’s efforts to sell the war on Iraq. The segment was supposed to lead an edition of "Sixty Minutes." If I remember correctly, they said they would not run it because it might influence the election.
Wow! And here I thought news was supposed to influence elections.
Obviously, in the wake of Dan Rather’s stupid misuse of probably phony memos to reawaken a very old story – how idiotic can you get? - this is Viacom covering its corporate derriere. Sumner Redstone, the company’s boss, did the same recently when he endorsed George W. Bush.
So, as Bob Dole used to ask, "Where’s the outrage?"
Where are all those folks who call themselves conservatives, presumably because they revere the Constitution, a document containing the First Amendment? (I know it forbids only government interference, not corporate, with the press, but still…..)
Where are all the so-called media critics? They were quick enough to condemn CBS when Rather blundered. Where are they now?
Fact is, the major broadcast news operations are either White House loyalists (Fox) or fearful of the White House (ABC, CBS, NBC). And PBS still hides behind an its "objective" stance so as not to imperil the federal dollars it still relies upon.
Further, the newspapers, which used to do media criticism of TV when that industry was young, have largely abandoned it now that they own or are owned by TV stations or have working agreements with local TV.
What media oversight we get comes from ombudsmen - found at the Washington Post, the New York Times and a few other serious newspapers - or syndicated columnists. But the columnists tend to be ideologically committed (John Leo) or GOP apparatchiks (Linda Chavez).
The Internet carries lots of "media criticism," of course, but it is not yet a mass medium.
We need regular criticism of news mediums in our daily newspapers.
Back from a brief sabbatical, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times - an early, eloquent supporter of the preemptive war on Iraq - wrote yesterday that he doesn't know what is "salvageable there anymore."
"This war has been hugely mismanaged by this administration, in the face of clear advice to the contrary at every stage," he continues, "and as a result the range of decent outcomes in Iraq has been narrowed and the tools we have to bring even those about are more limited than ever."
Friedman goes on to say that every time the Bush White House had a choice between "doing the right thing in the war on terrorism or siding with its political base and ideology, it chose its base and idology."
Finally, he urges that "we immediately get the Democratic and Republican politics out of this policy...."
The naivete of that last recomendation is identical to the nativete with which the neo-cons in Washington and their friends in the press - Friedman, Zakaria, Hoagland, among them - bought the idea that we could bomb the Middle East into democracy.
But no matter. I cite Friedman because his is just one of many thoughtful voices in the New York Times and in the national debate. As are Zakaria (Newsweek) and Hoagland (Washington Post).
Which leads to a thought about the Albuquerque Journal. Forget its rightist leanings on its editorial and Op-Ed pages. That is the publiusher's right (no pun intended), after all. Our daily compares badly with other dominant newspapers in its level of discourse, in energy and intelligence.
Understand me. I am not talking about point of view here, but rather of the ability to go beyond the conventional. In comedic terms, the Journal, I regret to say, is Jay Leno. Maybe it's asking too much for it to be Jon Stewart, but surely it can aspire to David Letterman or Conan O'Brien.
This state boasts umpteen PhDs. Why not recruit those of them who are literate and have something to say about our concerns? We have lots of artists, too, some world-class. Why not use them, too? There may even be resources at the universities.
OK. I admit it. Yesterday, after reading the Journal, I read several sections of the New York Times and the contrast was huge. But I do not expect the Journal to move to the same level, just narrow the gap.
Or is that naivete on my part?
Reading John Leo's column on the sins of CBS, the New York Times and other big, liberal "media" in this morning's Albuquerque Journal, the irony finally hit me.
Namely, that the Albuquerque Journal, whose editorial and Op-Ed pages list seriously to the right, regularly promotes the "liberal media" calumny, the phony baloney that has energized the Right ever since Spiro Agnew demonstrated its political potency.
On today's Op Ed page, the Albuquerque Journal runs a piece by Lawrence J. Korb, a former Defense Department official. At the bottom, the Journal identifies Korb several ways. For one, the newspaper tells us, he's a senior fellow with the "American Progress Action Fund, a liberal think tank in Washington..."
That identification is helpful to readers, I think, and the Journal ought to be complimented on it.
Of course, for each article from a liberal group or individual that the Journal publishes, it runs several from right-of-center sources. I presume the newspaper will proceed to identify those sources, including the CATO Institute, Heritage and Heartland, as "libertarian" or "conservative."