David Sanger

The front of the New York Times Sunday Week in Review features a think-piece by the paper’s foreign policy maven David Sanger, “Halfway In With Obama.” The subhead: “In Libya, America lets others command. By letting allies pick up the burden, is its credibility on the line?”

Sanger was a harsh critic of Bush’s foreign policy philosophy, mocking the  president as an incurious George overseas, so his blunt lack of confidence in Obama’s Libya intervention is significant.

When the battle for Libya seemed to be slipping into stalemate last week, the British, French and Italians sent “military advisers,” a phrase that to much of the world suggests the first step on the slippery slope to ground forces.

President Obama offered up his administration’s favorite weapon: armed Predator drones.

Chris Matthews on Friday asked the panelists on the syndicated program bearing his name two questions about the crisis in Egypt that must have made his liberal viewers gasp.

Moments after surprisingly asking NBC's Andrea Mitchell if "neo-conservatives who believe in really trying to push democracy" were right all along, Matthews asked David Sanger of the New York Times if George W. Bush was "better equipped than this President to deal with this crisis" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Rush mentioned this when he opened his show today, and it deserves a bit of graphic support.

Today's New York Times print edition has a headline at the top right which reads: "Obama's Economic View Is Rejected on World Stage" (captured here for future reference).

Ouch. But there's also a story about the story, specifically concerning its stinging headline.

George Will on Sunday gave a much-needed economics lesson to New York Times Washington correspondent David Sanger that greatly demonstrated the difference between how conservatives and liberals view unemployment benefits.

As the Roundtable segment of ABC's "This Week" shifted to the G20 summit in Toronto, Sanger said, "Just the day before [Barack Obama] left, Congress could not come to an agreement on a very small extension of unemployment benefits, you know, the most basic stimulus effort that the President tried to push."

Host Jake Tapper asked, "George, why can't they pass this extension?"

With the ball sitting up nicely on the tee, Will smacked it out of the park (video follows with transcript and commentary, relevant section at 4:10):  

Wow, just wow. Never would have seen this one coming, but is one of the standard-bearers of the media elite recognizing the Obama administration's anti-business populist tone is inhibiting the U.S. economy?

On the June 18 broadcast of CNBC's "Squawk Box," NBC "Meet the Press" moderator David Gregory was asked to respond to a June 18 New York Times article by David Sanger suggesting the Obama administration may be "overstepping" and discouraging business growth in the United States. Gregory told "Squawk Box" viewers that in his view they were and called it "a real problem."

"It is, certainly beyond Washington," Gregory explained. "You all know it talking to business leaders every day and I do speak to business leaders quite often as well and I hear it time and time again that what you got at the administration are two problems. One, you've got nobody in the inner sanctum of the President's advisers who has ever run a business - who have never run a business. And that's a real problem. I think there's a level of recognition about that being a problem in the West Wing as well. But the rhetoric and the policy substantively, a lot of people feel, is anti-business and getting to a point where it could really discourage businesses in the United States and certainly the multinationals working here as well. That's a problem and I think that element of criticism from Joe Barton, while off the reservation substantively, got to that larger point, which is this populist string."

Asked by George Stephanopoulos to name the “most important thing we've learned” about President Barack Obama during his first one hundred days in office (which is still three days away), David Sanger, a Washington correspondent for the New York Times, asserted: “I think we've learned that he's more moderate than we had expected.” That says a lot about the mindset of New York Times reporters and prompted George Will to retort, during the roundtable segment on ABC's This Week: “He's less moderate than I thought. He's going to design our cars. He's going to design our light bulbs. He's going to tell us where our house shall be built. This is supervisory liberalism in the most nagging, annoying sort.”

Bob Schieffer brought aboard CBS's Face the Nation the Washington Post's Bob Woodward and Tina Brown, Editor-in-Chief of The Daily Beast site, to assess Obama. Brown could barely contain herself, trumpeting “what a force-multiplier Michelle Obama has turned out to be” as she and her husband work in “flawless concert,” so while “the world is talking about torture and the Bush administration, then we have Michelle with her vegetable garden. Talk about Spring time in America!”

Tina Brown’s liberal Daily Beast website (a Huffington Post wannabe) contains a feature called "Buzz Board," where Brown-favored personalities recommend their new favorite things, from restaurants to movies to books. MSNBC’s Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski sounded a lot like her Carter administration-serving dad Zbig in enjoying a good rip into the Bush foreign policy. Mika recommended a Bush-bashing book by a prominent New York Times reporter:

David Sanger's The Inheritance is one of the best books I've read about the complex foreign-policy issues of the past eight years. Using his incredible access, David lifts the veil of secrecy in Washington and exposes the missteps and missed opportunities of the Bush administration. He interviews high-level government officials and puts you in the front row in the White House Situation Room. This is the kind of reporting we need a lot more of in this country.

David Sanger, chief Washington correspondent of the New York Times, appeared on The Daily Show Wednesday night to plug his new book decrying the Iraq war and offering foreign-policy advice to the new administration. Host Jon Stewart compared the Bush administration to a group of drunken bar bullies who were spoiling for a fight every night. Sanger joked that designation clearly fit Dick Cheney. Stewart asked Sanger how he prioritized his nightmare scenarios for President Obama:

SANGER: Well, the Iranians are building nuclear weapons because we were off in Iraq. The North Koreans went out and built six or seven nuclear weapons right at the time that we were off in Iraq. Afghanistan, obviously a big problem. And the more people I interviewed, the more I discovered that as they came in to go deal with the Taliban, they discovered all our forces were off in Iraq. There’s a story out here.

STEWART: There's a theme in your book here. There's a thread in here. Basically you refer to Iraq as quote-unquote "the distraction."

SANGER: That's right.

STEWART: Is that the whole story of how this has all sort of, exploded on us?

When you have the following meeting of the minds in a public forum - NBC News White House Correspondent David Gregory, former "CBS Evening News" anchor Dan Rather, New York Times White House correspondent David Sanger, and former White House bureau chief and correspondent for United Press International Helen Thomas - there's a near certainty something outrageous will be said.

And that was the case on November 26 at The National Press Club when this roundtable discussion occurred for the taping of "The Kalb Report," a public affairs program broadcasted on various television stations throughout the country.

[Click here for audio]

Gregory Considers White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett a ‘Minister of Propaganda'

This morning's tragic incident in Afghanistan, when a suicide bomber blew himself up outside the gate of the U.S. military base where Vice President Dick Cheney was staying, seems to answer any questions regarding "excessive secrecy" of Cheney's trip to Pakistan and then Afghanistan.

But as of this morning, New York Times reporter David Sanger had his doubts. In his Tuesday morning print story, "Cheney Warns Pakistan To Act Against Terrorists," Sanger devoted a great deal of space to the "unusual secrecy" surrounding Cheney's trip.

Bush stubbornly refuses to give up on the Iraq war, despite what New York Times reporters insists was the message delivered by the voters in November, and they're peeved at him. Congressional correspondent Sheryl Gay Stolberg reacts to Bush's Iraq speech last night outlining his plan for more troops in Iraq in her Thursday "news analysis," "Bush's Strategy for Iraq Risks Confrontations on Many Fronts."

"By stepping up the American military presence in Iraq, President Bush is not only inviting an epic clash with the Democrats who run Capitol Hill. He is ignoring the results of the November elections, rejecting the central thrust of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group and flouting the advice of some of his own generals, as well as Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq."

The inevitable comparison to Vietnam comes up halfway in.

"Augusto Pinochet, 91, Dictator Who Ruled by Terror in Chile, Dies" reads the headline to Jonathan Kandell's front-page obituary for the Chilean ruler in the New York Times Monday. A related editorial calls Pinochet "The Dextrous Dictator" (perhaps a play on words, as the Latin root of dextrous is dexter, meaning "on the right side," hardy har har).

Here's the lead of Kandell's obituary for Pinochet today:

"Gen. Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, the brutal dictator who repressed and reshaped Chile for nearly two decades and became a notorious symbol of human rights abuse and corruption, died yesterday at the Military Hospital of Santiago."

New York Times reporer David Sanger lets the snark fly in Hanoi while marking Bush's post-election trip to Communist Vietnam on Sunday.

While the rest of the press played up liberal-minded comparisons between the Vietnam War and the Iraq War and brought up old and unsubstantiated claims about Bush's Vietnam-era National Guard service, Sanger finds a different anti-Bush angle, one he’s used before – the president’s evidently disturbing lack of curiosity about the world.