Fairy Tales

Editorials in most daily newspapers still don't carry a byline, although that's bound to change sooner rather than later, so readers of The New York Times' flabbergasting Jan. 13 editorial, Call It Fiction, can only guess which writer at the W. 43rd St. bunker has elephant-sized balls. 

The short piece professed deep concern over the revelation by The Smoking Gun (typically, referred to simply as an investigative Web site) that best-selling author James Frey fudged the truth in his memoir A Million Little Pieces. I never read the bookredemption tales in the 12-step era are tiresomebut my wife did and thought Frey's yarn was quite absorbing. She still does, despite the fact that he's been outed as a fabricator on the order of, say, Jayson Blair, Rick Bragg and, according to left-wingers, Judith Miller.

Perhaps the best line in the edit, considering the ongoing problems that the Times is having in deciphering the line between fact and fiction, is this: It is a rare [book] publisher that troubles to fact-check an author's claims, especially in times when proofreading can seem like too much trouble. Man, that's raising the cliché of the best defense is a good offense to a stratospheric level!

I read a lot of books, both for pleasure and reviewing purposes, and it is distressing to come across typos and factual errors, especially in a work that's not restricted by the rigors of a daily or weekly deadline. The sloppiness of the Times' own proofreading is just a minor example of this editorial's extreme exercise in hypocrisy. (It still bugs me, though, as in David Carr's Jan. 16 article about a possible sale of The New York Observer, in which he called the broadsheet pink, instead of salmon or light orange, and misspelled the name of James Windolf.) The list of corrections the paper prints, by no means exhaustive, demonstrates how a large publishing company, one that boasts far too many editorial employees, is hardly in a position to criticize a relative peon like James Frey.

The following paragraph in the paper's Jan. 15 editorial isn't technically a lie, I suppose, but it certainly meets the test for delusional writing. The conclusion of The Imperial Presidency at Work, which manages to once again smear Samuel Alitonot incidentally, the country's two other leading liberal dailies, The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, have, with the requisite reservations, endorsed Alito's confirmationborders on the territory Maureen Dowd has patented with her lame satire about Rummy, General Rove and Dick Cheney running the country while drinking scotch in a dark parlor and ignoring the Boy Emperor.

The writer says: The administration's behavior shows how high and immediate the stakes are in the Alito nomination, and how urgent it is for Congress to curtail Mr. Bush's expansion of power. Nothing in the national consensus to combat terrorism after 9/11 envisioned the unilateral rewriting of more than 200 years of tradition and law by one president embarked on an ideological crusade.

Never mind that nearly a century of that tradition condoned slavery; forget that women weren't allowed to vote in presidential elections until 1920; let it slip about the interment of thousands upon thousands of Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor; likewise the wiretapping employed by Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, and Woodrow Wilson's suspension of the First Amendment during World War I, an odd omission for a newspaper.

The fear, at least in my home, is that Bush's proper and responsible crusade may have lost steam. It isn't only Israelis who are petrified by Iran's admission of building a nuclear arsenal that could be used to obliterate not only America's staunchest ally but, given provocation, parts of Western Europe as well. Yet even after Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad noisily proclaimed that the Holocaust was a myth and that Jews ought to be banished from the Middle East, the Bush and Blair administrations are, after the rat-a-tat-tat criticism of the Iraq War, relying on diplomacy to reason with the unreasonable Iranian government.

Let's rely on the United Nations to sort it all out. 

It's fortunate that the Times, in the modern technological age where its own fabrications can be discovered just as easily as Frey's embellishments or liberal historian Doris Kearns Goodwin's plagiarism, can be targeted for its own crusade against a president it doesn't believe was fairly elected in 2000. So the Op-Ed page features lightweight Bob Herbert, whose Jan. 12 column The Lawbreaker in the Oval Office is of a piece with his employer's overarching philosophy.

Herbert is driven to distraction by Bush's spying on men and women, both internationally and domestically, who are believed to be involved in terrorist activities. Herbert, apparently not up to snuff about just how quickly an enemy can act, says that Bush must apply to a court for a warrant allowing such activities, even if it takes three days. As if the U.S. mail was still delivered by train and cell phones hadn't yet been invented.

Herbert argues: It has become fashionable [although not at the Times] to say that this controversy is about the always difficult problem of balancing civil liberties and national security[But] the real issue is President Bush's apparent beliefstoked at every opportunity by that zealot of zealots, Dick Cheneythat he can do just about anything he wants (mistreat prisoners, lock people up forever without filing charges), and justify it in the name of fighting terror.

On Jan. 16, Herbert had a go at Alito. (It was judge-hunting season all weekend: Newsweek's Conventional Wisdom, which carries the disingenuous disclaimer that The CW is not NEWSWEEK's opinion, but an informal distillation of the ever-changing thinking of Beltway pundits and the chattering classes, mocked the likely justice: Nerdy rope-a-dope gets him through, and weepy wife is a bonus.) Herbert wrote: I can understand why the Republican Partythe party of Bush, Cheney, Frist, Abramoff and DeLaywould want such a man. But why the general pubic would want him is beyond me. I think a lot is beyond poor Bob.

I don't endorse Bush aping Wilson and jailing imperial journalists like Herbert, Dowd, Paul Krugman, E.J. Dionne, Jonathan Alter, Robert Kuttner and Margaret Carlson, to rattle off just several apostles of appeasement, but it does make one realize, again, just how biased the media is, despite liberal thinker Thomas Frank's fantastic claim in the February issue of Harper's that there are hundreds of conservative newspaper columnists deceiving those silly red-staters on a daily basis.

Joe Klein, hardly a member of what Dowd calls Bush's cabalwhen she wrote on Jan. 11 that W. has spent five years in fantasyland on Iraq, a Times editor or proofreader might have pointed out that five years ago Bill Clinton was still presidentchided his liberal colleagues in the Jan. 16 issue of Time.

He said, in defense of the absolutely necessary Patriot Act, among other Bush policies: [L]iberal Democrats are about as far from the American mainstream on [national security] issues as Republicans were when they invaded the privacy of Terri Schiavo's family in the right-to-die case last year. But there is a difference. National security is a far more important issue, and until the Democrats make clear that they will err on the side of aggressiveness in the war against al-Qaeda, they will probably not regain the majority in Congress or the country.

That sort of opinion is certain to get Klein scratched off the invite list of liberal lion Teddy Kennedy's next clambake at Hyannis Port.