december, have you been to the doctor lately? Monomania is, I believe, a diagnosible condition that can be helped with treatment.
Is an irrelevant, ad hominem attack the best you can come up with in defence of Maureen Dowd?
No, but it’s all this OP is worth–and all the attention you’re getting out of me.
Sorry to disappoint you but there are better things to do both on this Board and in the great world beyond.
That wasn’t a defence of Dowd…that was a dig at you.
The original speech was crafted to give the subliminal impression that al-Qaeda, in toto was “no longer a problem” because some of them were dead or in jail. The speechwriter was careful to word it so that it would give that impression to the cheeto-munching couch potatos to whom Bush’s speeches are pitched, but would stand up to a careful parsing if anyone cared to try.
Dowd presented an honest paraphrase of the impression the the Bush speechwriters were trying.
Grammar deconstruction is irrelevant. Bush’s speech was obviously written to rhetorically imply that al qaeda itself is no longer a threat. “On the run… decimated… half in jail or dead”, followed by “they’re not a problem anymore.” The key phrases all point to the whole organization.
Not that that means Dowd wasn’t a bit disingenous by spinning something already spun to change the direction of spin. It’s all part of the speechwriter’s game, and really not that big a deal in the long run.
I think it exceptionally odd to be citing rules of grammar in defense of Bush. Even he makes no claims to being able to follow rules of grammar. As to the OP, I would say that Dowd was making the least favorable interpretation of an ambiguous statement (to be honest, reading it, I read it the way she interpreted it first, but I wasn’t taking the time I would were I writing a column about it). That said, it is very true that a skill of Bush’s speechwriters has been deceptively linking concepts so as to give the impression of something without coming out and saying it (see the many speeches implying a link between Iraq and 9/11). So, Dowd could have been more fair, but Bush could show greater speaking precision and integrity. I call it a wash.
I think Dowd assumed too much. The administration is too crafty for stuff like this: everything they say is designed to imply much more than it says, but never actually say or predict very much at all. Dowd was clearly overzealous here: not necessarily intentionally so, and certainly in-line with the sort of sloppy reading that characterizes punditry today.
And december should stop reposting barely reworded Sullivan blogs as GD topics.
http://www.andrewsullivan.com/ (then do a find for “Dowd”)
I mean, it’s not like he’s an equal opportunity warrior against misquotes, or else we’d get a couple of threads on stuff like this.
http://www.newsmaxstore.com/nms/showdetl.cfm?&DID=6&Product_ID=1305&af_id=100#
Yes. That is exactly what the President said, and that is exactly why there was applause. You can listen for yourself here. It’s in his speech on May 5th, and occurs 10:05 into it.
Dowd lied, pure and simple. She should be terminated by the Times.
But that would require original thought. Ain’t likely to happen.
Manhattan has it exactly right! Anybody who lies and/or proffers falsehoods in the course of conducting a public position should be terminated from the position instanter! I’m all for it!
Lets see now, where else might we apply this stern principle of public rectitude?
What is that: Latin?
Anyway, I forgot to add stuff after my “punditry today” comment. I was going to say that while what Dowd did isn’t necessarily a clear example of an intentional lie, it is a pretty major and deeply suspicious selective quoting fuck-up, and certainly worthy of at least a retraction, if not an apology.
Yes, I found the item there, but I thought it would be an interesting debate, and it has been.
I admit to being a partisan. NewsMax.com is far right internet site, which is professional, but barely so. I don’t know how they survive financially. No doubt they have lots of errors, although I didn’t notice any at the page you cited, Apos. One would hope that a regular columnist for the New York Times would have far higher standards than NewsMax, but unfortunately I don’t think Dowd does. Her writing is great, but what she actually has to say doesn’t seem to matter to her as much as writing style.
Manhattan, great cite. The recording shows that after saying half of al Qaeda were jailed or dead, Bush actually said, “In either case, they’re not a problem any more.” There was no ambiguity at all.
Especially with the Jayson Blair scandal so hot, one would hope that the Times will insist on a correction.
In more breaking news, the Bush administration declares that “Hitler and Stalin are now considered to no longer be a problem.”
(mass applause)
It isn’t the instance, it’s the pattern. A robot could start your weekly slew of OPs simply by randomly copy/pasting updates from a few blogs like Sullivan’s.
Has there ever been a self-created thread you haven’t found “interesting”?
Yeah, I mean, there’s nothing wrong with grossly misreppresenting quotes to prove that people are doggedly anti-American (granted, a couple are brainless twits, but what was Dan Rather’s crime, exactly?)
On preview, I just noticed that they were charmingly enough to organize all the foriegners (and most of the only non-whites in the deck) under “spades.” subtle.
I’ve said this before: I can’t stand Dowd, her writing, or her “arguments.” Mistakes like this are par for the course in her excreciably sloppy style, which is essentially to skim over tons of popular commentary items like an Entertainment Tonight gossip collumnist, and then spit them back out in a mess of conjecture and pop psycho-analysis of public figures. I am guessing that, best case scenario here, she was in the throes of having to say something about the recent Al Queda attacks, something nasty about Bush, googled, got the quote in an already editted form from some leftist site, and used it without thinking. That’s inexcusable, even for someone that has to write a collumn so often.
**“Busy chasing off Saddam, the president and vice president had told us that Al Qaeda was spent.” **~ Dowd
Good God yall, read the text. That’s not what Bush said.
I will offer that most of you fully understand Dowd’s slight-of-hand rhetoric and in your heart know the truth but somehow find this topic an irresitable vehicle to bash poor George W bush. But who cares. That’s your right as a misguided american. But I wonder, why do over 90% of the responders to this thread disagree with mr. december, or grudgingly agree but with a disclaimer.
90% is a large and unlikely number of like-thinking bedfellows, especially when any casual semantical dissection of Dowd’s quoted remarks readily reveal her obvious intent to ///slant///.
Why then I wonder, do only 10% of you all choose to say in public what is so glaringly apparent?
Let’s not miss the forest for the trees here. Bush’s speech began with:
Okay, maybe he didn’t link the topic sentence of his paragraph to a report about dozens of people dying in a highly coordinated, Al-Qaeda-style attack, but you get the point.
Bush was technically correct, but his overall point – that Al Qaeda is on the run – is clearly false.
Dowd was technically incorrect, but her overall point – that Bush is overselling the success of the war on terror – is clearly and horribly true.
Look, I hate Maureen Dowd’s column. It annoys the spit out of me, and I usually skip it when I turn to the Times op-ed page. I hope it was clear that I think her paraphrase of Bush was incorrect.
At the same time, I can see that her basic premise was much more on-target than Bush’s basic premise.
Daniel
Also, note Dowd’s throw-away implication that the war against Saddam distracted Bush from fighting al Qaeda. Not only does Dowd offer no evidence to support that point, the facts are against it. Several top al Qaeda leaders were apprehended during the Iraq war period. Of course, Bush wasn’t personally chasing either Saddam or al Qaeda. These were being done simultaneously by two separate groups of people.
Do you honestly believe that Bush the Unready even knows what the word antecedent means? The intent of what he said is clear from the way he said it, and the clever use of the immediately preceding statement by his speechwriter was a transparent attempt to build in some modicum of deniability in the event of an attack like the recent one in Saudi Arabia.
Honestly, before the war I used to try to explain away Bush’s execrable pronunciation of English to my son, who used to look at me in astonishment whenever he saw him on TV. I did so in the belief that he should, at his age, have a modicum of respect for the President. Now, since this idiotic war, I don’t bother. He deserves no respect whatsoever. He’s an aspiring Third World dictator, with zero respect for the office he holds, which was shown by his grandstanding in a military uniform on that carrier deck, a stunt that no President has ever pulled, and there have been lots with military experience. The difference is that the rest of them had more respect for the office in their pinkies than this President will ever have in his whole body and what passes for his mind.
It’s spin. Bush’s statement was a self-serving overstatement of his success in the war on terra. Dowd’s abbreviation of his statement made it even MORE self-serving and overstated than even Bush was willing to say.
She did this in order to make him look foolish, and I’m sure she knew that her edits made him look worse than his original statement did.
On the other hand. Bush’s original statement is a cleverly (and weaselly) worded claim intended to give the impression that Al Queda has been rendered no-threat while not actually making that claim.
One expects opinion columnists to play spin games. What’s Bush’s excuse?