Yeah, and cholera, no electricty, hospitals being looted.
I still don’t see how stating this stuff is somehow a “gratuitous swipe” at the Bush administration.
:dubious:
bolding mine
december
“appears to have actually behaved” and “it looks like” is not gonna cut it in a Great Debate. Which brings me to my previous post. The only thing you have responsed to is my five lines on the context of the Howard Raines quote at the end of the post. What about the rest?
BTW, IIRC the man’s name is Howell Raines, not Howard.
Look at the tone of the entire editorial. The first comment might have been, “Most Iraqis are fantastically grateful to no longer be subject to the sadistic terror of Saddam.” The very next word is But. The editorial acknowledges the horror of Saddam, but minimizes it. Most of the editorial is concerned with the supposed current disaster, rather than the huge improvement compared with life under Saddam.
BTW, Mandelstam, you haven’t responded to my main point. The comment “Like it or not” implies that Bush might not even want to do a proper job caring for the Iraqi people. Not only is there no evidence, but Bush’s war has already improved the lot of the Iraqis. The Times moral posturing is uncalled-for and disgusting.
BTW, the NGOs and the UN are also being criticized for doing too little for the Iraqis.
This article from MSNBC includes an estimate from one Committee which claims to have files showing that Saddam Hussein’s regime slaughtered 8 million people in a country of 25 million. That’s an extreme figure and hard to believe. Still, the magnitude is breathtaking. This is what George Bush brought an end to.
Meanwhile the Times says, yes but there are currently long gas lines, so Bush needs to be lectured to.
The only thing I’ve heard/read about this incident (other than this thread) is the article you link to in the OP.
It says:
and
Other than the Raines’ quote (which I haven’t heard in context), where has anyone said that Blair was hired because he’s a minority?
This Washington Post article.
Since you continue to conveniently ignore the important points, here goes:
Where is the evidence that he was not fired after the NYT learnt of his deception?
december said
When did “breathtaking” become equivalent to “moronic?”
Perhaps if you searched hard enough, you could find a “committee” who suggests that there were 35 million killed, in a country of 25 million.
December, you’re hopeless. The NYT is urging the Bush team to do a decent job administering Iraq.
Things over there are a mess and need to improve. They’re also expressing concern about putting Baathists back in power. Wouldn’t you agree this might be a bad thing?
Where you get from there to “the lastest Liberal smear”, I have no idea. Is anything more profound than shouting “Rah! Bush!” on the topic of Iraq a partisan screed ?
I’m waiting for the day you denounce a headline that reads “Dow falls in weak trading” as a liberal smear on the Bush team’s handling of the economy. :rolleyes:
(Disclaimer: I normally avoid rolleyes like the plague, but nothing else seems even remotely appropriate to the partisan reality distortion beig observed. )
December, the way I read that quote from the Post is that Landman was referrring to Blair’s record while at the Times, not before being hired.
In any case, both the Times article and the Post article do make it clear that Blair had job performance problems stretching back several years – the high correction rate, etc. – and that people at the Times were aware of those issues. Does that prove that he was hired (and retained) because he’s black?
I wonder why NBC News bothers to have reporters all over the globe, when they could simply check with samclem and find out what the facts are. 
Although the 8 million figure looks unbelievable, consider that Saddam was in power for 24 years. His regime could have killed as many as 8 million people by killing 333,000 per year. Even if this estimate is too high, there is little doubt that Saddam killed at least hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people.
litost, my point is that Blair was not fired when his first series of problems came to light.
vix, the quote I posted said, " Blair was hired as part of an intermediate reporter program in 1999, after a summer internship the year before, and that the paper had been aware of his substandard record." I read this to mean the paper had been aware of his record at the time Blair was hired.
If he was hired with a known substandard record, it seems like an obvious deduction that his race played a role in his hiring, although the article doesn’t quite say so.
It’s seems likely to me that race also played a role in his retention at the time he was suspended. Why else would the Times give extra opportunity to someone who had a substandard record to begin with and then f*cked up so badly?
squeegee, granted things need improvement in Iraq, the especial smear is in the sentence, “Like it or not, the United States is now the legally responsible occupying power in Iraq.” The highlighted phrase implies that the Bush adminstration isn’t trying hard enough to make things work (and they need the Times to tell them to shape up.) That’s a serious accusation. If the Times has real evidence that Bush isn’t really trying, they should print it. If not, they shouldn’t imply it.
E.g., suppose I posted, “Like it or not, squeegee, you are responsible for accurate posts.” Wouldn’t you read that to imply that your posts were inaccurate and that you might not even care about accuracy?
December, you’re over-parsing that editorial.
No, I’d read that as my having a duty and responsibility to the other members of this online community.
I read “like it or not” as saying the same thing: “the U.S. took on this duty, and it’s now thier responsibility to do a good job. Failure is not an option, so getcher ass in gear, folks.”
All of which seems like a reasonable point of view.
So, how about putting Baath folk back in charge in Iraq. You have no problem with that?
[bdecember**: "“Like it or not, the United States is now the legally responsible occupying power in Iraq.” The highlighted phrase implies that the Bush adminstration isn’t trying hard enough to make things work (and they need the Times to tell them to shape up.) That’s a serious accusation. If the Times has real evidence that Bush isn’t really trying, they should print it. If not, they shouldn’t imply it.
"
You know, december, somewhere a long time ago I read that the Times is written so that anyone with about a sixth-grade reading level can follow. No I know you’ve got at least a sixth-grade reading level.
To wit: 1) the highlighted phrase implies nothing of kind.
“Like it or not” applies to the United States, not directly to Bush who is not (like a monarch was in the pre-modern world) a figure for the United States is in its entirety. “Like it or not” is addressed to the readers of the editorial. Its meaning is along these lines:
Reader, you may not like the fact that your country is now obligated to shell out billions and expend political capital in order to see to it that this thing ends all right; but that’s what the administration has signed us on for and we (the Times) are now providing our opinion as to how to go about that…like it or not.
- Although the phrase “Like it or not” doesn’t imply that Bush isn’t trying hard enough at his nation-building endeavor, that is in a reasonable way of casting the main point of the editorial as a whole. To which I reply, what is “unfair” about the Times holding the opinion that the Bush administration needs to do some things differently and better? It is always possible to try harder: and in this case there is evidence that the adminstration didn’t put a great deal of thought into the aftermath (for the simple reason that it’s not as politically invested in the aftermath than it was in the relatively easy victory). I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase easy to win the war, but let’s win the peace. That is about the gist of the Times’s position right now, and they’re entitled to take the position that the administration’s planning was not sufficient to the task, and they have, therefore, to try even harder–and also not (and this is one of the Times’s main opinions) to try to place things in Iraqi hands too quickly, particularly if that means restoring power to Bath Party personnel. (There is of course room to disagree about these points; but there’s a difference between saying, no, the Times doesn’t have the story quite right; and saying, they times is exaggerating gratutitously in order to smear the president. The Times, in other words, doesn’t have to be a booster for the President, or a flatterer of your own dearly held opinions in order to be fair in presenting its own positions.
Note that in making these points the Times adopts a deliberately moderate rhetorical style: it’s too soon to make a judgment, etc. etc.
I repeat: the Times’s editorial is so much more fair, balanced and judicious than is your own characterization of the Times that you really ought to memorize this editorial so as a kind of instructive exercise.
Well, I don’t know enough to judge. My view is that so far the Bush and Blair Administrations and the US and UK militaries have gotten most things right in Iraq. They have done a superb job. Their judgment has been more accurate than many on the New York Times, who predicted a long war or a “quagmire.” For now, I’ll go along with those who have demonstrated capability in Iraq.
If the administrative SNAFU turns into more than a short-term problem, then I’d be willing to start listening to critics. Until and unless that happens, I will have greater confidence in the judgment of the Bush Administration than of the New York Times editorial writers. I think the Bush Administration has earned the benefit of the doubt.
december: "Their judgment has been more accurate than many on the New York Times, who predicted a long war or a “quagmire.”
Cite please. Or rather, don’t waste your breath trying to find one. The Times predicted no such thing. Journalistically the Times tended to publish what a wide range of people were predicting, especially the government, the main gist of which was that it was hard to predict: one article said could be 3 weeks, or 3 months, but it also could be 3 years (and that was IIRC a government account). Editorially the Times was even more cautious; yet while they never “predicted” a quagmire, they did predict that the aftermath of the war could be very tricky indeed. Although I often disagree with Times editorials and don’t want to come off in this thread as I though I personally identify with that page, on the matter of both the war and its aftermath thus far, the Times’s predictions, such as they were (usually consisting in representing a range of educated opinion as to what might happen), have been spot on.
So far your knowledge of what Times actually says is, by my count, 0 for 2. Since you obviousy do not read the Times or do not read it very carefully, could you possibly limit your remarks about what the Times has said to direct quotations or, at least, paraphrases backed up by links? It would save us all a lot of time. 
Mandelstam, you have denied something different from what I said. I said "MANY ON the New York Times predicted a long war or a quagmire. This is true. Some of their regular op-ed columnists made such a prediction.
But, the Bush Administration also did better than than their cautious editorials saying the difficulty of the war was hard to predict. The Bush Administration rightly predicted that the war would be successful in humanitarian terms, and it has been. In short, Bush was right about the war and the Times was wrong.
I read the Times’ story on the Blair fiasco today with these conclusions:
The Times was duped, partly through sloppy internal controls, by someone with a clever self-promoting line and great office politics/schmoozing skills. It was a failure primarily attributable to supervisors who dropped the ball (though the article included quotes intended to additionally blame co-workers at his level for failing to report their suspicions to management).
The question of whether Blair was given extra leeway because he was black was raised in the article but denied by his mentors and executives. Hard to prove this one based on the evidence. Was he given so many extra chances because of race, because he appeared to have so much promise, because he was so skilled at deception, or a possible combination of all three?
The Times did a full-scale investigation and story at least in part because other media were picking up on the case (i.e. a San Antonio paper).
The scope of the fraudulent reporting gives the Times a large black eye.
december has not shown that the sloppiness and errors carry over into editorials and news columns. It’s just that he doesn’t like what they have to say.
I read the Times on a fairly regular basis, and I had previously noticed that their domestic reporting contains an excessive amount of errors, particularly when involving the hinterlands - that vast stretch of uninteresting terra firma between the coasts. In recent months, I’ve seen grotesque misspellings of place names, state universities placed in the wrong cities, coal fields moved hundreds of miles to the wrong location etc.
Maybe the Times will now hire a few dozen fact checkers and editors with nothing to do but verify the veracity of its reporting. Or maybe there’ll be some retreats and blue-ribbon panels to discuss the problems and nothing will get done. We’ll see.
"“MANY ON the New York Times predicted a long war or a quagmire. This is true. Some of their regular op-ed columnists made such a prediction.”
Oh, really? Is it “many” or “some”? Or better still who? Kristoff is the only one I can think of who made such a hypothetical warning (I’m not sure that it can rightly be characterized as a prediction without the copy in front of me. In any case, let’s see some cites. Enough of your hearsay. Almost every time that you are asked to provide a citation to back up one your loose paraphrases the latter turns out to be egregiously incorrect. Why should anyone believe you?
" But, the Bush Administration also did better than than their cautious editorials saying the difficulty of the war was hard to predict. The Bush Administration rightly predicted that the war would be successful in humanitarian terms, and it has been. In short, Bush was right about the war and the Times was wrong."
As I said, the Times was quoting the government’s own position on the ultimate unpredictability of the duration of the war–that was not from an editorial. More important, since the Bush administration does not have a crystal ball it is in position to claim victory in humanitarian terms–and in fact it has not. The Bush administration, in other words, has been more cautious in its own claims than you are on its behalf. The war’s humanitarian costs won’t be determined until we learn its aftermath. We don’t even yet know how many Iraqis died in the war; still less whether regime change will turn out to be successful from a humanitarian or any other standpoint. (Let us hope so, of course.)
december, since you appear to know absolutely nothing about the Times’s editorial position, let me say for the benfit of anyone unfortunate enough to read your posts and be misled by them, that you couldn’t be more wrong. The Times actually favored the war but urged as much UN and other international support as possible. Its primary reason for doing so concerned not the viability of winning the war itself–which the Times never doubted in the least–but the political impact of alienating allies, etc. etc.
Almost all of the Times cautiousness in other words, was to do with 1) the US’s political position and its conduct of foreign policy and
2) its concerns that the aftermath of the war would be beyond what US citizens would be willing to take on effectively without broad international support (which we still do not have and are not encouraging). As all of these things are in their early stages, the appropriateness of the Times’s cautions cannot yet be judged.
This has all be said dozens of times on scores of threads. Your willful ignorance on this thread is, even for you, reaching an absurdly high level.
That should be: december has not shown that the sloppiness and errors carry over into editorials and op-ed pieces.