He gives a really high-class reason for our invasion of Iraq. Via ThinkProgress:

Later, of course, he continually said that “in six more months” things would be better, or “the next six months is critical” or decisive or whatever—so frequently did he trot our the “next six months” that Atrios defined “the next six months” as a Friedman Unit (or FU).

Greg Mitchell looks back to that famous day:

On May 1, 2003, Richard Perle advised, in a USA Today Op-Ed, “Relax, Celebrate Victory.” The same day, exactly five years ago, President Bush, dressed in a flight suit, landed on the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln and declared an end to major military operations in Iraq — with the now-infamous “Mission Accomplished” banner arrayed behind him in the war’s greatest photo op.

Chris Matthews on MSNBC called Bush a “hero” and boomed, “He won the war. He was an effective commander. Everybody recognizes that, I believe, except a few critics.” PBS’ Gwen Ifill said Bush was “part Tom Cruise, part Ronald Reagan.” On NBC, Brian Williams gushed, “The pictures were beautiful. It was quite something to see the first-ever American president on a — on a carrier landing. This must be very meaningful to the United States military.”

When Bush’s jet landed on an aircraft carrier, American casualties stood at 139 killed and 542 wounded.

The following looks at how one newspaper — it happens to be The New York Times — covered the Bush declaration and its immediate aftermath. One snippet: “The Bush administration is planning to withdraw most United States combat forces from Iraq over the next several months and wants to shrink the American military presence to less than two divisions by the fall, senior allied officials said today.”

Continue reading the amazing stories from the Times at the time.

Tom Tomorrow—well worth clicking.

From Huffington Post:

In March 2007, New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor published a brief story about how Rev. Jeremiah Wright had been uninvited from delivering the invocation before Barack Obama’s official presidential announcement.

Wright responded by writing the following letter:

March 11, 2007

Jodi Kantor
The New York Times
9 West 43rd Street
New York,
New York 10036-3959

Dear Jodi:

Thank you for engaging in one of the biggest misrepresentations of the truth I have ever seen in sixty-five years. You sat and shared with me for two hours. You told me you were doing a “Spiritual Biography” of Senator Barack Obama. For two hours, I shared with you how I thought he was the most principled individual in public service that I have ever met.

For two hours, I talked with you about how idealistic he was. For two hours I shared with you what a genuine human being he was. I told you how incredible he was as a man who was an African American in public service, and as a man who refused to announce his candidacy for President until Carol Moseley Braun indicated one way or the other whether or not she was going to run.

I told you what a dreamer he was. I told you how idealistic he was. We talked about how refreshing it would be for someone who knew about Islam to be in the Oval Office. Your own question to me was, Didn’t I think it would be incredible to have somebody in the Oval Office who not only knew about Muslims, but had living and breathing Muslims in his own family? I told you how important it would be to have a man who not only knew the difference between Shiites and Sunnis prior to 9/11/01 in the Oval Office, but also how important it would be to have a man who knew what Sufism was; a man who understood that there were different branches of Judaism; a man who knew the difference between Hasidic Jews, Orthodox Jews, Conservative Jews and Reformed Jews; and a man who was a devout Christian, but who did not prejudge others because they believed something other than what he believed.

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Hendrik Hertzberg has an excellent column in the current New Yorker:

A few days before Senator Barack Obama swept the Democratic primaries in Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia, people across the country, picking up their favorite newspaper, were greeted with the following headline:

OLD FRIENDS SAY DRUGS PLAYED
BIG PART IN OBAMA’S YOUNG LIFE

In any event, that’s what some readers thought they read. On second glance, they realized their mistake. The headline actually said this:

OLD FRIENDS SAY DRUGS PLAYED
BIT PART IN OBAMA’S YOUNG LIFE

Maybe, though, the mistake wasn’t just the readers’, especially the bleary-eyed among them who hadn’t yet had their morning coffee. After all, it wasn’t exactly news that “drugs” had played a part (and only a “bit part” at that) in the adolescence of the junior senator from Illinois. That particular factoid had been on the public record for more than twelve years. And if it wasn’t news, what was it doing on the front page of the New York Times?

The big news, or bit news, about Obama and drugs had been broken by the future Presidential candidate himself, in “Dreams from My Father,” published in 1995, when he was thirty-three years old. In “Dreams,” Obama treats his teen-age chemical indulgences the way he treats pretty much everything else in his coming-of-age story: subtly, with impressive emotional acuity, against a richly drawn personal, cultural, and social background. Ripped from their context like the heart of an Aztec sacrifice, the facts Obama presents are these: He smoked pot during his last couple of years of high school, in Hawaii, and his first couple of years of college, at Occidental, in California. Once in a while, he treated himself to “a little blow.” After his sophomore year, he transferred east, to Columbia, where he took up running (three miles a day), stopped hanging out in bars, and started keeping a journal. Also, he writes, “I quit getting high.” That’s about all. Substance, apparently, became more interesting to him than substance abuse.

Read the rest of this entry »

The main reason is that the columns I’ve read have been vacuous. But this too:

My boy Greg Sargent catches Maureen Dowd in — why mince words? — a lie. Dowd datelined yesterday’s column Derry, N.H. But at the time, it turns out, she was in Jerusalem, covering the president’s trip. Apparently, she was following her paper’s lead. Greg confirmed that the paper allows such dateline manipulation as long as someone contributed on-the-ground reporting to a piece. In this case, that someone is Dowd’s assistant, who is uncredited in the column. The Times says that’s OK.

But it isn’t. In the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal, a Pulitzer Prize-winner, Rick Bragg, resigned after it turned out he relied heavily on an uncredited stringer for a series with an Apalachicola, Florida dateline. That was the honorable thing to do when faced with such a misrepresentation. But Dowd’s is worse. At least Bragg, in the words of the paper, “indeed visited Apalachicola briefly” for “his” piece. Dowd was half a world away from events she claimed to witness firsthand.

How can it be that four and a half years after Blair/Bragg, the NYT still lets its writers play fast and loose with datelines? Datelines aren’t frivolous things. They exist — and writers covet them — because they bequeath an implicit authority to journalists. That authority is based on the simple concept of due diligence. Readers trust an on-the-ground report far more than they trust a 7,000-mile-distant vantage. That’s why high-budget glossy magazines spend thousands of dollars to shuttle high-profile reporters around, say, the Middle East, even when they’re working on thinkpieces that don’t require exotic stamps on passports. Somehow, the NYT believes that casual manipulation of readers’ trust is acceptable. It raises questions about what other toe-touching is going on at the paper. And we wonder why people don’t trust our profession.

Take, for example, this post.

Kit Seelye was one of the NY Times reporters who led the attack against Al Gore in the 2000 election, writing pieces that were slanted greatly in favor of the GOP. And now she’s at it again. Paul Krugman:

I have a lot of problems with this Kit Seelye piece. It’s kind of weird that the usual “both sides may have a point” reporting gave way to a clear declaration that one side is right — precisely on an issue where many, many health experts believe that Obama is wrong, and that mandates are both feasible and essential. Much better coverage of the issue, I’m sorry to say, in the Murdoch news.

But this takes the cake:

Joseph Antos, a health policy expert at the American Enterprise Institute, a nonpartisan group.

Is it really possible for a veteran reporter to believe that AEI is nonpartisan? Not even a qualifier, like “right-leaning” or “free-market-oriented”?

That is, skillfully, quickly, efficiently. Read the article, which includes a video. Click the thumbnail for an illustrated guide.

Interesting exchange of columns: Ruth Marcus at The Washington Post saying that Paul Krugman’s head is in a place where it does no good regarding the Social Security crisis (she said “head in the sand,” but we all know what she was thinking), and Paul Krugman responding to point out the flaws in her quotations, etc. Interesting exchange.

Krugman, from his blog:

Well, I’ve gotten a dismissive review in the NYT. It’s sort of a tradition. After all, The Great Unraveling received an equally dismissive review from Peter Beinart, in which he portrayed my conclusion that the Bush administration deliberately misled us into war as a crazy conspiracy theory, and contained this immortal pronouncement:

But most Americans do not consider the Bush administration corrupt, and Paul Krugman cannot convincingly prove it is.

I think David Kennedy’s review will hold up about as well as Peter Beinart’s. I presented facts on voting behavior, which point to the centrality of race — he ignores them. I presented polling evidence about the timing and role of the perception that Democrats are weak on national security; he just waves it away.

Oh, and when Kennedy says, to illustrate my alleged factual problems, that

Kansas, whatever its other crimes and misdemeanors, is not customarily regarded as the birthplace of Prohibition

you have to ask who’s got the factual problems. I don’t know what “customarily regarded” means, but Carrie Nation wielded her ax in Kansas - and Kansas was the first state to ban alcohol in its constitution.

Add it to your reader: the Paul Krugman blog. Here’s a sample:

For some reason a couple of people who have written to me in the last few days, on matters unrelated to this post, have mentioned in passing that the Democrats won a “narrow victory” in 2006. Apparently this is conventional wisdom, what you get from reading or watching a lot of commentary. So I thought it might be worth pointing out that it’s absolutely not true.

In fact, it’s quite strange how the magnitude of the Democratic victory has been downplayed. After the 1994 election, the cover of Time showed a charging elephant, and the headline read “GOP stampede.” Indeed, the GOP had won an impressive victory: in House races, Republicans had a 7 percentage point lead in the two-party vote.

In 2006, Time’s cover was much more subdued; two overlapping circles, and the headline “The center is the new place to be.” You might assume that this was because the Democrats barely eked out a victory. In fact, Democrats had an 8.5 percentage point lead, substantially bigger than the GOP win in 1994. Also, the new Democratic majority in the House isn’t just larger than any the Republicans achieved over their 12-year reign; it’s much more solidly progressive than their pre-1994 majority.

It’s just one election, and may not represent a trend (although I think it does.) But the 2006 election was, in fact, a progressive landslide.

We on the liberal side have often bemoaned the treatment that Al Gore received at the hands of the supposedly “liberal” press, notably the NY Times and the Washington Post, during his campaign for president. Now there’s a good article on that, which begins:

As he was running for president, Al Gore said he’d invented the Internet; announced that he had personally discovered Love Canal, the most infamous toxic-waste site in the country; and bragged that he and Tipper had been the sole inspiration for the golden couple in Erich Segal’s best-selling novel Love Story (made into a hit movie with Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal). He also invented the dog, joked David Letterman, and gave mankind fire.

Could such an obviously intelligent man have been so megalomaniacal and self-deluded to have actually said such things? Well, that’s what the news media told us, anyway. And on top of his supposed pomposity and elitism, he was a calculating dork: unable to get dressed in the morning without the advice of a prominent feminist (Naomi Wolf).

Today, by contrast, Gore is “the Goreacle,” the elder statesman of global activism, and something of a media darling. He is the Bono of the environment, the Cassandra of Iraq, the star of an Oscar-winning film, and a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize. To the amusement of his kids, some people now actually consider him cool. “If you had told me 10 years ago that people were going to be appealing to me for tickets to a hot rock concert through my parents, I would have fallen over,” says his daughter Karenna Gore Schiff, 34, referring to the Live Earth 24-hour extravaganza in July.

What happened to Gore? The story promoted by much of the media today is that we’re looking at a “new Gore,” who has undergone a radical transformation since 2000—he is now passionate and honest and devoted to issues he actually cares about. If only the old Gore could have been the new Gore, the pundits say, history might have been different.

But is it really possible for a person—even a Goreacle—to transform himself so radically? There’s no doubt that some things have changed about Al Gore since 2000. He has demonstrated inner strength, rising from an excruciating defeat that would have crushed many men. Beyond that, what has changed is that he now speaks directly to the public; he has neither the patience nor the need to go through the media.

Eight years ago, in the bastions of the “liberal media” that were supposed to love Gore—The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, CNN—he was variously described as “repellent,” “delusional,” a vote-rigger, a man who “lies like a rug,” “Pinocchio.” Eric Pooley, who covered him for Time magazine, says, “He brought out the creative-writing student in so many reporters.… Everybody kind of let loose on the guy.”

Read the rest of this entry »

There’s something odd about this news story in the NY Times.

 An Army investigation into the Baghdad Diarist, a soldier in Iraq who wrote anonymous columns for The New Republic, has concluded that the sometimes shockingly cruel reports were false.

“We are not going into the details of the investigation,” Maj. Steven F. Lamb, deputy public affairs officer in Baghdad, wrote in an e-mail message. “The allegations are false, his platoon and company were interviewed, and no one could substantiate the claims he made.”

The brief statement, however, left many questions unanswered. Just last week The New Republic published on its Web site the results of its own investigation, stating that five members of the same company as Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp, who had written the anonymous pieces, “all corroborated Beauchamp’s anecdotes, which they witnessed or, in the case of one soldier, heard about contemporaneously. (All of the soldiers we interviewed who had first-hand knowledge of the episodes requested anonymity.)”

The report goes on to detail the claims that Beauchamp made, along with other details.

What the report (mysteriously) does not include is any mention whatsoever of the many official statements by the Army that turned out to be lies: Pat Tillman, Jessica Lynch, the Abu Gharib scandal (”only a few enlisted soldiers”), and so on. You’d think that, when an organization demands that we believe its statements, that a reminder of a pattern of prevarication and falsehoods would be relevant and even important.

First, of course, was the report in the Washington Post about all the arms going astray—the military cannot account for about 30% of the weapons distributed to Iraqi forces:

A Government Accountability Office report last week found that the U.S. military has lost track of about 190,000 AK-47 assault rifles and pistols given to Iraqi security forces, and experts worry that many of those weapons could have fallen into the hands of enemies in Iraq. The report noted that 125,000 pieces of body armor and 115,000 helmets also were missing from inventory records.

And then it’s worse: The Anonymous Liberal today:

In the New York Times this morning is Part 47 of Michael Gordon’s ongoing series devoted to uncritically passing along unsubstantiated allegations against Iran. As usual, Iran is up to no good (say military sources). The allegation is a familiar one by now:

Attacks on American-led forces using a lethal type of roadside bomb said to be supplied by Iran reached a new high in July, according to the American military.

The devices, known as explosively formed penetrators, were used to carry out 99 attacks last month and accounted for a third of the combat deaths suffered by the American-led forces, according to American military officials.

As with previous versions of this story, Gordon doesn’t do nearly enough pushing back. How, for instance, can we be sure that these devices are being supplied by Iran when, as has been reported elsewhere, we’ve actually found factories in Iraq that are making them? And even if these devices are being supplied by Iranians, what reason is there to believe the Iranian government is responsible, as opposed to regular Iranians trying to make a buck or support their fellow Shia in Iraq? To date, the U.S. military hasn’t done much of anything to substantiate these allegations publicly or to address obvious questions, and until they do, their claims deserve far less deference than Gordon is giving them.

Gordon is more precise is one key respect, though. In previous versions of this story, the military was intentionally vague about whom the Iranians were supposedly supplying these bombs to. Was the military claiming that Iran was arming Sunni insurgents? It was never clear. Military briefers would cryptically refer to “extremist groups” or “militants” in an obvious attempt to imply, without actually saying so, that Iran was somehow in league with al Qaeda and Sunni insurgents groups, who were responsible for the vast majority of American deaths. This never made any sense, but to the extent people believed it, it helped shore up the narrative the administration wanted to tell.

In this morning’s piece, however, Gordon is quite clear:

Such bombs, which fire a semi-molten copper slug that can penetrate the armor on a Humvee and are among the deadliest weapons used against American forces, are used almost exclusively by Shiite militants.

This makes sense, of course. It would be strange indeed if Iran was supplying Sunni militants. But this is also a key fact, one that, at least to my knowledge, has never been stated quite so clearly. Remember, many of these Shiite militants are allied with the Malaki government, which we are fighting to protect. Most of our military efforts in Iraq have been directed at fighting Sunni insurgents. Gordon reports:

While the group [al Qaeda] is seen by the American military as the most serious near-term threat, there are other signs that Shiite militias remain active. According to General Odierno, the day-to-day commander of American troops in Iraq, Shiite militants carried out 73 percent of the attacks that killed or wounded American troops in Baghdad in July.

That’s a staggering number, if true. The administration would have us believe, particularly of late, that our primary enemy in Iraq is al Qaeda of Mesopotamia. But if 73% of attacks in Baghdad in July were carried out by Shiite militants, who are certainly not al Qaeda fighters, then that’s a major story, one that underscores just how unmanageable the situation in Iraq is.

We are simultaneously under attack by Sunni and Shiite militants, who, when not attacking us, are attacking each other. Both Sunni and Shiite militant groups are (apparently) being supplied, whether with official blessing or not, by sympathetic parties in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Syria. Some have suggested that we are in a proxy war with Iran. I think it’s far more accurate to say that we are stuck in the middle of a proxy war between Iran and its Sunni rivals.

Meanwhile, in order to root out al Qaeda, we’ve started arming the very Sunni militants we were previously fighting. And we continue to support a Shiite-led central government that is openly allied with Shiite militias who, when not ethnically cleansing Sunnis in the Baghdad area, are apparently blowing up our troops with Iranian-made bombs. There’s a word for this type of situation and it rhymes with fustercluck.

In the comments to this post, I tried to explain what the problem is with the Beltway Media Elite, aka the Mainstream Media. And this morning as part of his column on how the NY Times is credulously passing along Administration handouts, Glenn Greenwald comments on the same problem:

What we have here, yet again, is the administration completely manipulating the NYT by selectively leaking previously “super-top-secret” information when doing so helps them politically. This, as always, is followed by the newspaper — desperate for “scoops” — outrageously granting anonymity to administration officials to do nothing other than disseminate pro-government propaganda, and turning its front pages over to the administration’s claims with very little critical analysis or real scrutiny.

It is obviously “news” that the administration was data mining and that this prompted strenuous objections, or at least it is news that anonymous administration officials claim this was so. So there is nothing objectionable per se about reporting this (though, given that these are plainly pro-administration leaks, it is inexcusable to grant them anonymity).

But, and this is the critical point, the leaked report, for so many reasons — see above — not begin to exonerate Alberto Gonzales or prove that he told the truth. Yet there is the NYT dutifully claiming that this leak “helps to clarify the clash this week between Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and senators who accused him of misleading Congress and called for a perjury investigation,” while the Post proclaims that “the report of a data mining component to the dispute suggests that Gonzales’s testimony could be correct.”

According to the administration, these are spying activities that ceased three years ago. According to the Bush DOJ’s emphatic conclusion, these spying activities were patently illegal — so illegal that they all threatened to resign if they continued. Putting those two premises together, why is it that we do not know what these activities are? What possible excuse exists now for continuing to keep them concealed? Now that the administration has leaked its own allegedly defunct and illegal program, there should a full airing of what they were doing that prompted the DOJ mutiny.

UPDATE: Here is a snapshot of the United States from 2000-present. The Bush administration whispers something to “journalists.” They repeat it uncritically on their front page. Other “journalists” read it. They believe it uncritically and then repeat it. With nothing else required, it becomes “fact” (that is the Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman and Iraqi WMD Process, repeated over and over and over).

Hence, Time’s Karen Tumulty this morning recites the storyline of the NYT and pronounces:

This distinction — one that Senators have not generally made when discussing the two programs –probably means that Gonzales did not commit perjury in last week’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

And presto, just like that — from the administration’s anonymous lips to the American public, making a pit stop with leading journalists only to be amplified and bolstered but never examined or investigated — Alberto Gonzales is vindicated. Equally revealing, several regular Swampland commenters objected to her gullible ingestion of the NYT leak and “caution[ed] against taking the NYT story on its face.” To her credit, Tumulty notes that warning in an update, but this is how our country’s political press works. The administration secretly decrees. Their selected journalist passes it along, soaking up the rewards of their “scoop.” Other journalists believe it and disseminate it. And all administration problems are solved, painlessly fading away.

It occurred to me today, reading these remembrances of Khalid W. Hassan,”Solid Khalid,” that many (most?) of those who have lost their lives in Iraq and will lose their lives over the coming months (years?) are worth so much more, as human beings, than George W. Bush, shallow, uncurious, cowardly, dishonest, uncaring, meanspirited, stubborn, petulant, self-pitying, whining wretch that he is. And yet it’s his war—and a war he keeps in motion so that he can hand it off to his successor and never admit to himself how wrong he was.

Glenn Greenwald points out the enormous leap of faith made by the journalist:

In an otherwise solid NYT article comparing recently revealed CIA abuses of the past and the Bush administration’s current controversial intelligence activities, Scott Shane wrote:

The Bush administration chose to bypass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, created in 1978 to oversee eavesdropping on American soil. The Senate and House Intelligence Committees, created to make sure past abuses would never be repeated, did little to rein in the N.S.A. wiretapping program or to set limits on interrogation practices until news reports set off a furor. On the other hand, the recent surveillance activities appear so far to have been aimed at mostly people believed to pose a terrorist threat, not a political threat. So far there is no evidence of anything comparable, for example, to the F.B.I.’s relentless pursuit and harassment of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. or the political abuses of Watergate.

This passage, in light of the bolded sentence, is simply misleading. There is no basis whatsoever for claiming that Bush’s NSA warrantless (and illegal) eavesdropping activities were “aimed at mostly people believed to pose a terrorist threat, not a political threat.” It is true — as Shane writes — that “there is no evidence” that the administration used its eavesdropping powers against, say, political opponents, but that fact is not exculpatory, because there is “no evidence” at all, one way or the other, regarding how the administration eavesdropped. There has been no disclosure by the administration of any kind — not to Congress, nor to courts, nor to anyone else — of information revealing who was subjected to the administration’s warrantless eavesdropping program, a program which (by its terms and by design) was conducted in complete secrecy. To this day, that remains the overarching unresolved question — what was the administration doing when it eavesdropped on Americans in secret, on whom did they eavesdrop, how were the targets chosen, what was done with the information? That is precisely the information which nobody — including even the Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman, Jay Rockefeller — has been able to discover.

Continue reading.

Glenn Greenwald points out the sad truth that the NY Times seems not to learn from its experience:

Josh Marshall publishes an e-mail from a reader who identifies what is one of the most astonishing instances of mindless, pro-government “reporting” yet:

It’s a curious thing that, over the past 10 - 12 days, the news from Iraq refers to the combatants there as “al-Qaida” fighters. When did that happen? Until a few days ago, the combatants in Iraq were “insurgents” or they were referred to as “Sunni” or “Shia’a” fighters in the Iraq Civil War. Suddenly, without evidence, without proof, without any semblance of fact, the US military command is referring to these combatants as “al-Qaida”.

Welcome to the latest in Iraq propaganda.

That the Bush administration, and specifically its military commanders, decided to begin using the term “Al Qaeda” to designate “anyone and everyeone we fight against or kill in Iraq” is obvious. All of a sudden, every time one of the top military commanders describes our latest operations or quantifies how many we killed, the enemy is referred to, almost exclusively now, as “Al Qaeda.” But what is even more notable is that the establishment press has followed right along, just as enthusiastically. I don’t think the New York Times has published a story about Iraq in the last two weeks without stating that we are killing “Al Qaeda fighters,” capturing “Al Qaeda leaders,” and every new operation is against “Al Qaeda.”

The Times — typically in the form of the gullible and always-government-trusting “reporting” of Michael Gordon, though not only — makes this claim over and over, as prominently as possible, often without the slightest questioning, qualification, or doubt. If your only news about Iraq came from The New York Times, you would think that the war in Iraq is now indistinguishable from the initial stage of the war in Afghanistan — that we are there fighting against the people who hijacked those planes and flew them into our buildings: “Al Qaeda.”

What is so amazing about this new rhetorical development — not only from our military, but also from our “journalists” — is that, for years, it was too shameless and false even for the Bush administration to use. Even at the height of their propaganda offensives about the war, the furthest Bush officials were willing to go was to use the generic term “terrorists” for everyone we are fighting in Iraq, as in: “we cannot surrender to the terrorists by withdrawing” and “we must stay on the offensive against terrorists.”

But after his 2004 re-election was secure, even the President acknowledged that “Al Qaeda” was the smallest component of the “enemies” we are fighting in Iraq:

A clear strategy begins with a clear understanding of the enemy we face. The enemy in Iraq is a combination of rejectionists, Saddamists and terrorists. The rejectionists are by far the largest group. These are ordinary Iraqis, mostly Sunni Arabs, who miss the privileged status they had under the regime of Saddam Hussein — and they reject an Iraq in which they are no longer the dominant group. . . . The second group that makes up the enemy in Iraq is smaller, but more determined. It contains former regime loyalists who held positions of power under Saddam Hussein — people who still harbor dreams of returning to power. These hard-core Saddamists are trying to foment anti-democratic sentiment amongst the larger Sunni community. . . .

The third group is the smallest, but the most lethal: the terrorists affiliated with or inspired by al Qaeda.

And note that even for the “smallest” group among those we are fighting in Iraq, the president described them not as “Al Qaeda,” but as those “affiliated with or inspired by al Qaeda.” Claiming that our enemy in Iraq was comprised primarily or largely of “Al Qaeda” was too patently false even for the President to invoke in defense of his war. But now, support for the war is at an all-time low and war supporters are truly desperate to find a way to stay in Iraq. So the administration has thrown any remnants of rhetorical caution to the wind, overtly calling everyone we are fighting “Al Qaeda.” This strategy was first unveiled by Joe Lieberman when he went on Meet the Press in January and claimed that the U.S. was “attacked on 9/11 by the same enemy that we’re fighting in Iraq today”. Though Lieberman was widely mocked at the time for his incomparable willingness to spew even the most patent falsehoods to justify the occupation, our intrepid political press corps now dutifully follows right along.

Here is the first paragraph from today’s New York Times article on our latest offensive, based exclusively on the claims of our military commanders:

Read the rest of this entry »

Jack Shafer in Slate dissects an excessively stupid page-one piece in the NY Times. Question: why did the editors let this piece of steaming tripe go to print? Here it is:

Nothing lives up to our expectations. My parents. Your children. Television season finales. Yesterday (June 17), the New York Times located its disappointment in Web-based retailing in a 1,200-word, Page One piece titled “Some Buyers Grow Web-Weary, and Online Sales Lose Steam.”

The lede of the article asks, “Has online retailing entered the Dot Calm era?” The story answers resoundingly, “Yes.”

The Times finds consternation in the fact that since the Web commerce got started, annual online retail sales have grown at about 25 percent. But those overall rates are slowing, the paper reports, and market-research firms project further slowing. The Times quotes a Jupiter Research finding that online retailing’s growth rate has peaked and will slow to 9 percent a year by the end of the decade.

The Times presents a few bogus anecdotes to explain the slippage, including “Internet fatigue” on the part of consumers who are “changing their buying habits.” A shopper tells the Times that he now prefers real stores to online ones because of better lighting and better service. His example: Book Passage in downtown San Francisco. The shopper’s wife—who just happens to be an executive at the brick-and-mortar department store Macy’s—says shopping online is “much more of a task.” What else would she say?

The piece provides additional evidence to account for online’s decline. Dell now sells computers at Wal-Mart, it reports. Gone unmentioned is the fact that Dell sold PCs at Best Buy, Costco, and Sam’s Club as recently as 1994, according to this Times article from one year ago. Another anecdote: Expedia.com has “almost tripled” its number of ticketing kiosks in hotels and other touristy spots. It could be a terrific supporting statistic if the story included the base number of kiosks that have been almost tripled, which it doesn’t. The most bogus anecdote claims that “Borders … recently revamped its Web site to allow users to reserve books online and pick them up in the store.” There’s nothing “recent” about that service. Borders spokeswoman Anne Roman says via e-mail that the book chain has given customers the option to reserve books online and retrieve them in stores since November 2002.

One hallmark of a bogus trend story is the “to be sure” passage that undercuts the story’s entire thesis. This piece has two. In the fourth paragraph, the Times reports that Internet sales are projected to top $116 billion this year, “making it harder to maintain the same high growth rates.” In other words, Web retailing is totally huge, it’s still growing by leaps and bounds, but the bigger a fast-growing thing becomes—online sales, giant squid, or an algae bloom—the harder time the thing has sustaining 25 percent annual growth. If no industry can sustain 25 percent annual growth forever, why is it Page One news that the very healthy business of online retailing can’t either?

The second “to be sure” passage comes in the final paragraph, where a Berkeley economics professor turns the piece upside down as he raves about the growth potential of online retailing. Online commerce constitutes less than 1 percent of the overall economy.

“There’s still a lot of head room for people to grow,” says John Morgan of Berkeley’s Hass School of Business.

Addendum: My “financial adviser” offers these observations: The economy grows about 3 percent in real terms per year, or about 5.5 percent to 6 percent in nominal terms. So, anything that’s growing faster than that is growing faster than the economy as a whole. Online sales, even if their growth rate would fall to 9 percent, would still be growing much faster than the economy (and hence other retailers as a whole). Wal-Mart has sales of a few hundred billion dollars (i.e., about three times the size of the Internet retailing space). Its same-store sales are basically flat, rising about 1.5 percent to 2 percent—in real terms, they’re shrinking. Online sales are continuing to grow impressively in both absolute and real terms. Even if they grow only 6 percent a year, they will still grow nicely and take market share from bricks-and-mortar outlets.