Boston Globe

"Yesterday's fighting at Waterloo was extraordinary, highlighting the daunting challenge faced by the coalition of British and Prussian forces in fighting Napoleon."

That's how the Boston Globe might have spun the Battle of Waterloo, judging by the negative gloss the New York Times' Beantown subsidiary managed to put in on the major success of Iraqi-US coalition forces at Najaf yesterday. Coalition forces killed an estimated 250 insurgents who were planning to attack Shias, possibly including their supreme religious leader, the Ayatollah Sistani, who had gathered in the city south of Baghdad for a major religious holiday.

What made the success that much more encouraging was that while US forces provided support, it was the Iraqi military that took the lead. This is the best, latest evidence that the Iraqis are indeed standing up. It augurs well for the 'surge' operation in Baghdad, which also will rely on major Iraqi army involvement.

Here’s something you don’t see every day: a columnist at a liberal newspaper saying bad things about Democrats. In this case, it’s especially odd given that the targets of the disaffection were primarily media darlings Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Yet, there it was in Wednesday’s Boston Globe:

James Carroll, whose Boston Globe columns might be viewed less as reasoned discourse and more as auto-therapy for his famous rift with his father, predictably turns his MLK, Jr. Day piece into a condemnation of all things American.

Vietnam was at the root of his split with his father, as Carroll documented in God, My Father, and the War That Came Between Us. So Carroll naturally drags a Vietnam/Iraq analogy into his piece: "like Bush, Johnson was presiding over a lost war." Of course, if there was a lesson of Vietnam it's that we lost it because we lost the political will to win it.

It's not enough to embrace defeat in Iraq. The United States should preemptively capitulate to Iran too. That's not Noam Chomsky's latest fevered pronouncement, nor the impassioned plea of Cindy Sheehan at the gates of Gitmo. It is the opening paragraph of a column in this morning's Boston Globe by Robert Rotberg. And who is Rotberg? Former President of Lafayette College, former professor at MIT, now Director of Harvards's Kennedy School Program on Intrastate Conflict and Conflict Resolution.

"The only way to promote sustainable peace, stability, and order in Iraq is to forge an unholy alliance with Iran -- and accept Iran's dominant influence in the Middle East. Only by accepting Iranian hegemonic pretensions, odious as they are, can the United States extricate itself somewhat honorably from Iraq."

In case we missed the point, here's how Rotberg concludes his column:

The detritus of Nancy Pelosi's imperial celebrations have barely been cleared, and already at least one member of the liberal punditry, Robert Kuttner, is demanding that the new Dem majority do more of what Dems do best: tax and spend.

It's as if one of the Smithsonian's dinosaurs, taxasaurus democratae, patiently gathering dust all these last dozen years, had suddenly roared to life, broken from its exhibit, and began slouching toward Capitol Hill to be reborn. To mix a metaphor and a poem.

Annotated excerpts from Kuttner's impassioned plea, Get Serious Democrats, from this morning's Boston Globe:

I considered making Paul Krugman's column, "Helping the Poor, the British Way", my subject of this Christmas Day. I even had a snappy headline sussed out: "Let It Snow Socialism". But when it comes to using the message of the day to berate the United States, Krugman can't hold a Christmas candle to James Carroll of the Boston Globe.

Krugman took a glancing shot: "It’s the season for charitable giving. And far too many Americans, particularly children, need that charity."

Penny-ante pessimism, Paul in contrast with James Carroll's jeremiad. In his column, Carroll - a former Roman Catholic priest who has written about his bitter conflict with his military-officer father - condemns the United States in explicitly religious terms:

• "The birth of Jesus is the reversal of the imperial order. . . Empire lives in the United States of America, and, despite assumptions of many Christian Americans, Christmas still rebukes the empire."

Last week it was George Clooney, with some timely cheerleading from ABC's Kate Snow, making the case for intervention in Darfur. Today, those bellicose boys of the Boston Globe jump on the Great Liberal War-in-Darfur bandwagon.

In its editorial of this morning, the Globe lambastes "the great powers" for failing to take "effective action" to stop the killing and for "refusing to rescue the men, women, and children who are marked for death in the coming year."

The Boston Globe can't put two and two together on immigration. Just last week it wrung its editorial hands over the fact that illegal immigrants are taking jobs away from. But naturally it didn't make the logical connection and call for a crackdown on illegal immigration. Then today, the paper lends its pages to a union official who, when it comes to illegals, sees only employers, with nary an illegal immigrant to be found.

Annotated excerpts from Protect the rights of immigrants by Rocío Sáenz, shown here, president of a Service Employees International Union local in Boston:

• "The national political climate both exploits immigrant workers and punishes them for seeking the American dream."

Wrong. To the meager extent they're punished at all, it's for violating the laws of the United States.

“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.” - Winston Churchill

In the course of a Boston Globe column today in which she calls for a referendum in Iraq as to whether the US stays or goes, Ellen Goodman writes:

"Today we have nearly 3,000 American deaths, and by one estimate 650,000 Iraqi deaths."

Ever the environmentalist, Goodman dutifully recycles the findings of a report published in the Lancet magazine on civilian deaths in Iraq. This study, prepared by two anti-war partisans, has - as I noted here back in October - been thoroughly debunked. See more recently this piece which among other things quotes "Hot Air" thusly:

Cato the Elder famously dragged Carthage into every speech, calling for it to be destroyed. Like a modern-day Cato who has played the DVD of "An Inconvenient Truth" way too many times, The Boston Globe manages to drag global warming into an editorial this morning about, of all things, the baby that Mary Cheney is expecting. In doing so, the Globe hypocritically invades the very Cheney privacy it claims to want to champion.

Writing of the decision of Cheney and Heather Poe to bring a child into the world, the Globe claims that:

"Like any couple choosing to become parents, they must have concluded that the joy of raising a child outweighs the uncertainties of introducing it to a planet threatened by global warming, nuclear proliferation, and other terrors of the modern world."

Barack Obama Superstar worship continues unabated in the media. One of the most devoted of the starry-eyed reporters is Susan Milligan of the Boston Globe. Acting like a latter day Mary Magdalene, Milligan wrote a love note to Obama in the form of a "news" story, Obama's star power shows on N.H. visit. Milligan doesn't waste any time expressing her awe for Obama by starting out her story with this pean for her liberal savior:

Barack Obama , a national political newcomer with an uncomplicated message of hope and promise, won standing ovations from enthusiastic crowds yesterday as he tested the New Hampshire landscape for support for a 2008 Democratic presidential run.

You can lead the Boston Globe to the facts about immigration, but you can't make it think. The focus of the Globe's editorial of today, African-Americans need apply, is "the disappearing African-American hotel worker." Precise figures for the Boston hotel industry aren't available but the Globe notes that in Los Angeles, African-Americans "comprise only about 6 percent of workers in downtown hotels."

The Globe acknowledges that "new immigrant populations . . . have been replacing African-Americans in hotel service jobs for about a decade." So you'd think that perhaps the Globe would take the next logical step and call for a clampdown on immigration, particularly illegal immigration.

Sure, the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group might be largely useless. But hey, check out all the wonderful consensus - and cue another chorus of Kumbaya! That, in a nutshell, is the message of the Boston Globe's editorial of this morning, Presidential Ingratitude.

Excerpts:

• "Whatever might be questioned in any particular recommendation of the report, the bipartisan spirit and consensus-building purpose of the Iraq Study Group deserve grateful praise from the president, not a defensive rejection."
• "The Iraq Study Group may not have come up with all the right answers; in their pursuit of unanimity, they may have settled for split-the-difference compromises where only one straight path makes sense. But in their bipartisan spirit of cooperation, they gave Americans a much-needed reminder of how statecraft once was conducted."

In its zeal to undercut the presidential ambitions of its home-state governor, the Boston Globe engages in some blatant intellectual dishonesty this morning. Last week, the Globe breathlessly broke the story that a lawn care company that provides services to Mitt Romney has employees who are illegal immigrants. As the Globe archly put it: "as Governor Mitt Romney explores a presidential bid, he has grown outspoken in his criticism of illegal immigration. But, for a decade, the governor has used a landscaping company that relies heavily on . . . illegal Guatemalan immigrants." The Globe headlined its story: "Illegal immigrants toiled for governor." Toiled. Nice touch. Tote that rake, lift that lawnmower.

Boston Globe columnist James Carroll is no mere defeatist. In the clash of civilizations between West and Islamic East, he doesn't simply believe the West can't win. In his mind, it doesn't deserve to win. With open arms, Carroll embraces Eurabia.

In The Twain Begin to Meet, Carroll begins by citing Rudyard Kipling's famous "East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet." He ends by welcoming what he describes as "the power of Europe's new hope -- the twain meeting at last."

In between, he observes that "Europe became 'Europe' in the first place only in response to a challenge from Islam. . . . [I]t was the external contest with Islam that gave Europe its internal cohesion. The psychological mechanism is basic: Group identity follows from group threat."

While they don't address each other explicitly, you might say that Jeff Jacoby's and Frank Rich's dueling columns on Iraq this morning reflect a civil war among American pundits. On the one hand, Rich of the New York Times, who in Has He Started Talking to the Walls?:

• Claims Pres. Bush is "completely untethered from reality."
• Accuses him of "flouting democracy at home."
• Suggests that "a timely slug" administered to the commander-in-Chief by Jim Webb might have been a good thing; and
• Casts as an "illusion" the notion "that America can control events on the ground."

And in this corner, Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe. In Fighting To Win in Iraq, Jacoby catalogues Jim Baker's history of foreign policy flops, including:

Has it at long last begun to occur that John F. Kennedy is fading from the perennial lists of historian's picks of the "top most influential" historical Americans? If this latest survey of Historians is any indication, it just may be.

And it is about time, too… unless you are a hero worshipping journalist like Peter S. Canellos of the Boston Globe who is calling foul in his piece this morning titled, In pantheon, whither JFK?.

The Atlantic Monthly asked 10 eminent historians to rank the 100 most influential Americans of all time, and Kennedy did not make the cut. Worse, he was named on only two ballots. Only TWO. Gosh, this is a calamity.

Canellos goes on to reveal others on the list, a list that includes the presidents before and after JFK, and informs us why these historians didn't put JFK on the list and why the two who did, did so.

All year long, the media were disgusted with the new Medicare prescription drug benefit that became available this January thanks to George W. Bush and a Republican Congress. It was too confusing. It was too expensive. It wasn’t going to save anybody any money. It was just a big payoff for Bush’s friends in the pharmaceutical industry.

Remember?

Well, almost three weeks after the polls closed, it must be safe to report the truth: 80 percent of seniors are satisfied with the new benefit. So said the Boston Globe Monday (emphasis mine throughout):

Reading the Globe's Nov 18th piece about vice President Cheney, one can palpably feel their fingers being crossed, their wishes being cast into the wishing well, that Cheney is on the outs with this supposed "big demotion" the paper sees for his immediate future.

In short, will Rumsfeld's abrupt dismissal finally diminish Cheney's unprecedented dominance of Bush? Or did the always cunning vice president read the writing on the wall and decide that it was time for his good friend Rumsfeld to go?

And typically, as with every story about the VP, one quotient missing in the analysis is the president himself, prosaically fitting into the the Cheney-as-puppetmaster story line the MSM has created for him. (Though, now they want to cast James Baker in Cheney's puppeteering shoes)

They even want us to believe that Cheney somehow strong-armed Bush into the Iraq policy and the War on Terror as if 9/11 never occurred.

National Review Online's Kathryn Jean Lopez updated yesterday's story on Patrick Leahy pushing for a Justice Department probe of Laura Ingraham with MP-3 audio. (She joked, "Good luck with that, man. Oh, maybe this Democrat Congress thing could be a wee bit fun to watch.") Here's the transcript of Senator Leahy's inquiry to Wan J. Kim, the assistant attorney general for civil rights. Leahy's asking about a show he clearly hasn't listened to, since he couldn't accurately pronounce the host's name:

According to press accounts, right-wing radio host Laura Ingray-ham, or In-gramm, or Ingra-ham, had urged her listeners to jam a phone line set up by Democrats to investigate alleged voter irregularities. She said, uh, she told her listeners everybody call that voting line at the same time and basically, mark it inoperative. Is that something, that, um, that your division investigates?

Now that the Democrats have picked their Majority Leader in the House the outcome gives us (and her) the first hint that Speaker Pelosi is not the powerhouse she thought she was. Her man, Murtha, lost in a landslide: 149 to 86... a thumpin' to say the least.

In my last report on how the MSM covered this little inter Dem fight I pointed out that they were ignoring how distant were the two positions on pulling out of Iraq that is held by the erstwhile candidates for Majority Leader.

I noted how they refused to portray Murtha's position as "extreme", even as he supports pulling out of Iraq immediately to Hoyer's, who does not. I noted that the MSM did not waste much breath contrasting Murtha's position with the far less volatile position held by Hoyer.

It seems strangely inconsistent that the MSM ignored the Iraq war issue in their stories since they made the entire recent election all about Iraq and how it is a mess and that our soldiers should come home. Yet, a guy who does not want an immediate pull out defeated Murtha and this fact went uncommented upon.

The Boston Globe's recent article on Dick Cheney's "fate" after the recent elections is an interesting, if not subtle, attempt to make it seem as if the Vice President were somehow on his way out just like Donald Rumsfeld was. Even painting Bush as "forgetting" the VP was in a recent meeting intimating that Cheney is not included in running the country anymore.(Cheney doesn't need Rumsfeld anymore)

Here is the lead paragraph of the story:

WASHINGTON -- When President Bush and the two top Democrats in the House met with reporters on Thursday, Vice President Dick Cheney was largely silent, sitting impassively with his characteristic half-smile. "All three of us recognize that when you win, you have a responsibility to do the best you can for the country," declared Bush, apparently forgetting that the vice president was there to make it a foursome.

Half smile? Is that another way of saying smirk -- their favorite attack word against Bush himself?

A few weeks ago on the Right Angle TV show I host, my guest was Barry Strauss, the brilliant professor of history and the classics at Cornell University. Our conversation focused on his recent book, "The Trojan War", which one reviewer has described as so authoritative "it may well preempt future historians from ever trying to improve on it."

Toward the end of the show I invited Prof. Strauss to comment on whether he saw any parallels between the fall of Greek and Roman civilizations and the situation in the West today. While eschewing sweeping generalizations, the professor did observe that one sign of a civilization in decline is its disinclination to believe in itself coupled with a loss of will to fight for its survival.

Sparks flew on the set of NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, after Republican Senator Elizabeth Dole observed about Iraq, “It’s almost as if the Democrats, you know, it’s like they’re content with losing because to pull out, to withdraw from this war is losing. No question about it.” Both moderator Tim Russert and Democratic Congressman Rahm Emanuel immediately berated Dole for her statement, but this morning a liberal Boston Globe columnist reveals the real Democratic mindset on Iraq, suggesting the U.S. must “accept defeat” in Iraq. Dole made her comment about 40 minutes into the hour-long debate between the GOP senatorial and congressional campaign committee chairman and their Democratic counterparts. After Russert brought up a Vanity Fair article quoting some Iraq war supporters as criticizing the way the war has been handled, Dole responded by going after the Democrats’ position of withdrawing troops regardless of whether their mission has been accomplished.

Thanks, Bob Kuttner. You might doubt my sincerity. But really, I mean it. With Nancy AWOL, and Charley Rangel coyly claiming at his age he doesn't buy green bananas let alone speculate what he would do as Way & Means Chairman, perhaps Americans have lost sight of what the Dems have up their sleeve if they get back the majority. So in all sincerity, thanks for telling it like it is.

In Nervous excitement builds for Democrats, Kuttner lets the Dem cat out of the bag:

"We are about to get something all too rare in Democratic politics lately -- some progressive leadership . . . With a little gumption on the Democratic side, the lopsided distribution of wealth, security, and opportunity in America could come roaring back."

I was just beginning my read of Ellen Goodman's Boston Globe column today, which argues that Nancy Pelosi is being "demonized" and "used to frighten voters everywhere." Goodman gripes that, among other things, Pelosi is being depicted as a Michael Moore clone. By superb serendipity, at that very moment, Rush Limbaugh began a systematic catologuing of Pelosi's votes over the years proving that the possible Speaker-to-be is, well, a Michael Moore clone.

Rush cited this Washington Times editorial, noting that Pelosi:

While some tabloids capture the drama of John Kerry's uneducated-people-stuck-in-Iraq joke ("KERRY KALAMITY," says the New York Daily News), the nation's biggest newspapers have headlines draining the drama out of the story, and certainly leaving the contents of the "joke" out of the headline:

New York Times: "As Vote Nears, Stances on War Set Off Sparks."

Washington Post: "Bush Calls Kerry Remarks Insulting to U.S. Troops."

(The Post wins some sort of prize for partisanship. Kerry's on A-8. On page one, the big headline is "Campaigner in Chief Has Limited Reach: An Unpopular President Avoids Many Key Races.")

I suppose we shouldn't be surprised. The same kind of folks who professed to find a non-existent right to abortion on demand in the Constitution have "discovered" another imaginary constitutional provision. According to its editorial this morning:

"The First Amendment, with its injunction that Congress shall make no law restricting religion, carries an implied corollary that churches should not meddle in politics."

The context was the Globe's complaint that Mitt Romney is reaching out for support to his fellow BYU alums who - oh, the horror! - also happen to be his Mormon co-religionists. The Globe sternly warns Romney to "make sure that the church stays out of his nascent presidential campaign."

Will someone please explain to me the MSM's standards for airing graphic footage?

At the time of 9-11 itself, the MSM apparently made a collective decision that it wouldn't show any of the graphic evidence of the horror that had been visited on thousands of our fellow citizens. No pictures of victims. No close-ups of the poor souls who chose to jump rather than being consumed by the flames. Even years later, there was somber MSM discussion, as here and here, as to whether movies like 'World Trade Center' or 'Flight 93' had come too soon.

I was dutifully working my way through Robert Kuttner's Boston Globe column of this morning, Cleaning Up the Mess, on the lookout for some outrageous MSM morsel with which to arouse NewsBusters readers.

But all I was getting were Kuttner's "on the one hand, but on the other hand" arguments as to whether it is in Democratic interests to retake one or both houses of Congress come November. His thesis is that America is such a mess thanks to years of Republican misrule that fixing it could be a thankless task for Dems, who might be better off waiting for the deluge of the 2008 presidential elections. For the record, Kuttner does come down on the side of taking power now.