If No News is Good News,
This News is Bad News
Rich Galen
Monday March 23, 2009
Click here for an Easy Print Version
The editors and columnists who wrote for the New York Times weekend Op-Ed sections appeared to have lost track of who is President.
Politico's Jonathan Martin used up a perfectly lovely Sunday morning in Washington by detailing the pounding Barack Obama took from the NY Times.
"It is perhaps unprecedented for [Obama] to get hit on the same day by columnists Frank Rich, Thomas Friedman and Maureen Dowd and in the paper's lead editorial."
The lead editorial was so negative, it was as if the editors were forgot that they don't have George W. to kick around any more.
Well, actually, they did kick George W. around by complaining that Barack Obama doesn't appear to be surrendering to Islamic Terrorists nearly as quickly nor as completely as the Times believes Obama had promised:
"Some of what the public has heard from the Obama administration on issues like state secrets and detainees sounds a bit too close for comfort to the Bush team's benighted ideas."
SIDEBAR
The New York Times is probably the only English-language newspaper to have used the word "benighted" in any editorial written since the 19th Century.
To save you the time on this busy Monday I looked it up for you. According to Merriam-Webster's Third Unabridged:
Benight: To envelop in intellectual, moral, or social darkness
I guarantee you no one on the planet has yet to use nine of the 140 characters permitted in a Twitter message by typing the word, "benighted."
END SIDEBAR
Further on in the editorial, "Even as they dropped the 'enemy combatant' terminology, Mr. Obama's lawyers did not seem to rule out indefinite military detentions for terrorism suspects and their allies.
About which, Dennis Miller said on the Bill O'Reilly program last week, "I can't believe we've decided to do battle with al-Qaeda by "vernacular-ing them to death."
On Saturday, professional Bush-basher, Paul Krugman, wrote in a blog that whatever the next version of the bank bail-out is likely to be is going to be a fail-out because no one actually knows what the toxic assets of the major banks are worth - if anything:
"It's just horrifying that Obama - and yes, the buck stops there - has decided to base his financial plan on the fantasy that a bit of financial hocus-pocus will turn the clock back to 2006."
Frank Rich, also no friend of President Bush, titled his column "Has a 'Katrina Moment' Arrived?"
Whoa! It's one thing to compare Barack Obama to George W. It's something else again to compare him to Mike "You're-doing-a-heckuva-job, Brownie" Brown.
Rich points out that the White House has thrown chief economic advisor, Larry Summers, in front of the cameras to 'splain this stuff. However,
"Summers is so tone-deaf that he makes [Treasury Secretary Timothy] Geithner seem like Bobby Kennedy.
"Given that Summers worked for a secretive hedge fund, D. E. Shaw, after he was pushed out of Harvard's presidency at the bubble's height, you have to wonder how he can now sell the administration's plan for buying up toxic assets with the help of hedge funds."
Really? That seems to be a pretty important point. Even Rich didn't tell us about Summer's fairly significant conflict of interest until the 19th paragraph of his 20-graf piece.
Thomas Friedman who usually looks at foreign affairs for the Times took a whack at everyone when he wrote in Saturday's paper:
There don't seem to be any adults at the top - nobody acting larger than the moment, nobody being impelled by anything deeper than the last news cycle. Instead, Congress is slapping together punitive tax laws overnight like some Banana Republic, our president is getting in trouble cracking jokes on Jay Leno comparing his bowling skills to a Special Olympian, and the opposition party is behaving as if its only priority is to deflate President Obama's popularity.
Yeah, well, Obama keeps reminding us that he won the election, the Democrats have huge majorities in both Houses and there is precious little for the GOP to do so that's exactly what they're doing.
Maureen Dowd wrote in her column that maybe - just maybe - the President has lost touch with the American people in just thirty-something days in the Oval Office.
"Now that Mr. Obama has made $8,605,429 on his books - including $500,000 for letting his memoir be condensed into a kids' book - maybe he's lost touch with his hole-in-the-shoe, hole-in-the-Datsun, have-not roots."
If no news is good news, then this news from the Newspaper of Record is really bad news for Barack Obama.
On the Secret Decoder Ring today: Links to all of the columns and blogs listed above. Plus a Mullfoto which I DEFY you to decode and an amusing Catchy Caption of the Day which is not so much a "separated at birth" as "father-and-son?"
--END --
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