March 01, 2005

MR. SULZBERGER TEAR DOWN THE NYTIMES WALL

        Like Hosni Mubarak, Bashar Assad and Moammar Qadaffi, the editorial board of the NYTimes is quite suddenly, running scared. They never thought the dumb cowboy in the White House might know what he was doing. What if they were wrong all along and because of their Liberal faith, utterly missed the signs of Bush and America's success in spreading freedom? Now they are scrambling for safety while their months of unrelenting doom and gloom efforts to undermine the President are shoved down the memory hole. George Orwell once observed that pacifists in the 1940's were 'objectively' on the side of the Nazis because weakening the will of the allies helped our enemies. The New York Times has been 'objectively' on the side of Islamo-fascism, hoping to force President Bush to abandon his aggressive forward strategy of change in the Middle East. Reading today's editorial (See below. Horsefeathers comments in italics) is like visiting an alternate reality. It is as if the NYTimes's own history began yesterday. Nowhere in it do Gail Collins and Co., acknowledge that the successes they now discern are the outcome of policies they fought tooth and nail, policies promoted by the President they condescended to for years. The discerning reader will note, however, that this editorial must have been written with all the enthusiasm of someone dining on well done crow. Horsefeathers confesses to schadenfreude at the troubles of Middle Eastern tyrants and their New York Times enablers. We will even indulge ourselves in the fantasy that Arthur Sulzberger is feeling the heat a la Mubarak, Assad, and their fellow tyrants. Let Freedom Ring--from Beirut to Damascus to 223 West 43d Street.

Mideast Climate Change
Published: March 1, 2005

It's not even spring yet, but a long-frozen political order seems to be cracking all over the Middle East. (Just a natural and inevitable process, like the changing of the seasons. At this point in the editorial no hand of Bush can be discerned)Cautious hopes for something new and better are stirring along the Tigris and the Nile, the elegant boulevards of Beirut, and the impoverished towns of the Gaza Strip. It is far too soon for any certainties about ultimate outcomes. In Iraq, a brutal insurgency still competes for headlines with post-election democratic maneuvering. Yesterday a suicide bomber plowed into a crowd of Iraqi police and Army recruits, killing at least 122 people - the largest death toll in a single such bombing since the American invasion(not a multi-lateral effort, but an 'American invasion', and don't bother mentioning that it was an invasion designed to accomplish something, the overthrow of a brutal and dangerous tyrant. No it was just a de-contextualized U.S. 'invasion')nearly two years ago. And the Palestinian terrorists who blew up a Tel Aviv nightclub last Friday underscored the continuing fragility of what has now been almost two months of steady political and diplomatic progress between Israelis and Palestinians.
Still, this has so far been a year of heartening surprises - each one remarkable in itself, and taken together truly astonishing. The Bush administration is entitled to claim a healthy share (as opposed to an unhealthy share? How about acknowledging that military action, war and the use of overwhelming, killing force after years of diplomatic dithering, of Clintonian apologies, was the ONLY change of policy that mattered?)of the credit for many of these advances. It boldly proclaimed the cause of Middle East democracy at a time when few in the West thought it had any realistic chance. And for all the negative consequences that flowed from the American invasion of Iraq,(here's the real giveaway--"all the negative consequences"--this is what all the Times's whining and carping over our alienating our friends, the UN, the Muslim world, the cause of multilateralism, etc. has been reduced to, and one can practically hear a senior editor shouting "no mas".) there could have been no democratic elections there this January if Saddam Hussein had still been in power. (No shit Sherlock! And who would have been in power in Iraq if the Bush administration had paid attention to Gail Collins, Maureen Dowd, Nick Kristof, Paul Krugman and the never ending parade of op-ed critics?) Washington's challenge now lies in finding ways to nurture and encourage these still fragile trends without smothering them in a triumphalist embrace.("triumphalist embrace" tr.: please don't be too aggressively masculine and rub it in by pointing out what metrosexual wimps we are.)
Lebanon's political reawakening took a significant new turn yesterday when popular protests brought down the pro-Syrian government of Prime Minister Omar Karami. Syria's occupation of Lebanon, nearly three decades long, started tottering after the Feb. 14 assassination of the country's leading independent politician, the former prime minister Rafik Hariri.

Over the past two decades, as democracies replaced police states across Central and Eastern Europe and Latin America, and a new economic dynamism lifted hundreds of millions of eastern and southern Asia out of poverty and into the middle class, the Middle East stagnated in a perverse time warp that reduced its brightest people to hopelessness or barely contained rage. The wonder is less that a new political restlessness is finally visible, but that it took so long to break through the ice.(The real wonder is that it has taken so long for the New York Times to begin, oh so tentatively, and self protectively, to awaken from its utopian slumbers. From the Times's Walter Duranty lying on behalf of the noble Uncle Joe Stalin, to the editorialists who defended Yasser Arafat, the Times has been steadfastly in thrall to totalitarians who cooed noble dreams in the ears of reporters.)

        Like the Times editorialists, we will conclude with a reference to Spring: the baseball season is soon to begin. It took 86 years for Red Sox fans to experience the joy of triumphing over the Yankees. It has been 73 years since Walter Duranty got the Pulitzer Prize for reporting the glorious triumphs of Communism. Perhaps the time is coming, hopefully in less than 12 years, when the mighty Sulzberger edifice will go the way of Ozymandias. Meanwhile, we'll be rooting for the New York Sun.