Stories you’d think would be more important than hunting accidents.
Via The American Thinker.
Reader letter
AT just received the following letter and we are passing it on. Absent assume [sic] the writer is who he claims he is, but have not had an opportunity to independently authenticate it. It does make sense…
Ray Robison on the Saddam tapes
Ray Robison, whose letter we published yesterday, writes again, regarding the Saddam tapes, John Loftus, and appearance of Bill Tierny last night on Hannity & Colmes. Here is the complete letter:…
The Saddam tapes (2)
Today the Intelligence Summit released transcripts from the Saddam tapes on the intelligencesummit.org website. There are some interesting revelations in the MS PowerPoint presentation they have posted…Able Danger Summary
A.J. Strata has summarized the Able Danger open hearings. And it appears that this program was working, that it was used to roll up Al Qaeda quickly after 9/11 , and that the reasons for discarding what it had oncovered [sic] do not pass a laugh test…
These items apparently are not as newsworthy as the press navel-gazing (can you froth at the mouth while doing that?) and finding lint: One of their number apologized, sort of, for calling the White House Press Secretary a jerk because the reporter hadn’t been informed immediately of VP Cheney’s hunting accident.
These stories cast doubt on the conventional wisdom about Iraqi WMD and raise the possibility of the Clinton administration’s misfeasance via Jamie Gorelick’s insistence on “the wall” between the CIA and the FBI prior to 9-11. Nope, nothing to see here. Move along.
Mark Steyn has this delightful bit:
The third jolly event of the week was those other excitable fellows — the Big Media White House reporters — jumping up and down shouting “Death to Dick Cheney!” NBC’s David Gregory, the George Clooney of the press corps, was yelling truth to power about why the Elmer-Fudd-in-gun-rampage story was released to “a local Corpus Christi newspaper, not the White House press corps at large.” I know how he feels. I remember, like, four or five years ago — early September, maybe second week — there was this building collapse in New York and I had to learn about it from the TV because this notoriously secretive paranoid administration couldn’t even e-mail me a timely press release. For an NBC guy discovering that some hicksville nowhere-burg one-stop-light feed-price sheet got tipped off before he did is like a dowager duchess turning up at the royal banquet to discover the scullery maid’s been seated next to the queen.
So anyway David Gregory’s going bananas and yelling “I will yell!” and “Don’t be a jerk!” at the White House press secretary, and there’s more smoke coming out of his ears than from Ronald McDonald in Lahore, and I’m thinking, you know, maybe Karl’s latest range of Rovebots that he planted in American media corporations are just a wee bit too parodically self-absorbed to be plausible. And then this lady pipes up and asks, “Would this be much more serious if the man had died?”…
Meanwhile, from Malaysia to Jordan to Scandinavia, it was a bad week for journalists increasingly constrained — not to mention fired and otherwise humiliated — in their ability to cover the big story of our time. If I had to pick a single moment to contrast with the hilariously parochial narcissist buffoons of the Washington press, it would be another press conference in another government building, this time in Oslo, called by Norway’s minister of labor. Surrounded by cabinet ministers and a phalanx of imams, Velbjorn Selbekk, the editor of an obscure Christian publication called Magazinet, issued an abject public apology for reprinting the Danish Muhammed cartoons. He had initially stood firm in the face of Muslim death threats and the usual lack of support from Europe’s political class, but in the end Mr. Selbekk was prevailed upon to recant and the head of Norway’s Islamic Council, Mohammed Hamdan, graciously accepted the apology and assured the prostrate editor that he was now under his personal protection. As the American author Bruce Bawer commented, “It was a picture right out of a sharia courtroom.”
All of it here.
Of course, reporting on press obeisance to Islamic fundamentalists casts the press in a bad light and requires criticizing Islamofascism instead of the Bush administration. What’s free speech compared to that?
Update: 19-Feb-06, 2:31PM
MAIN PRESS PLANS ANOTHER WEEK OF CHENEY SHOOTING COVERAGE
That’s the PNB press (parochial narcissist buffoons), (TM) Mark Steyn (see above).
You just can’t make this stuff up. Too bad.