Subtle but substantial. Having allowed Steven R. Weisman to take a turn as Elliott Abram's ventriloquist dummy on the front page yesterday, the Times plays Elisabeth Bumiller's straight-news piece on the Bush declaration of support for Sharon's disengagement plan ("Bush to Accept West Bank Plan in Talks With Sharon") back on A6. It hasn't ignored the story, though: James Bennet's news analysis ("Sharon Coup: U.S. Go-Ahead") is slotted on A1, giving us the unusual configuration, for the Times, of a major Presidential announcement which (a) doesn't lead the paper and (b) has the analysis fronted in place of the news report. I'm happy to note that Bennet is saying pretty much what I did yesterday in my post about Weisman's obscurantist triumph:

By throwing his support on Wednesday behind an Israeli plan to withdraw from the Gaza Strip, President Bush provided diplomatic assurances that represented a victory for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

Mr. Sharon wanted three commitments: backing for the Gaza withdrawal, American recognition that Israel would hold on to parts of the West Bank, and an American rejection of the right of millions of Palestinian refugees from the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 and their descendants to return to their lands in what is now Israel. He got them all by promising to trade something Israelis overwhelmingly do not want any more: the Gaza settlements and a handful of settlements in the West Bank. And he got them without having to negotiate with the Palestinians.

Palestinian officials knew that Israel strongly opposed yielding the whole West Bank or accepting the "right of return," and they had explored compromises in the past. But they relied on both demands as formidable negotiating levers. Mr. Bush has now moved to pluck both from their hands. ...

For the first time in American diplomacy in the Middle East, Mr. Bush announced that major Jewish settlements on the West Bank had achieved the status they aimed for: rooted "facts on the ground," or, as Mr. Bush called them, "already existing major Israeli population centers." The innovative, though risky, element in Mr. Sharon's strategy was to trade his concessions in Gaza and the West Bank not to the Palestinians as part of a negotiated agreement but to the Americans, over outraged Palestinian opposition.

eRobin at Fact-esque has some strictures on Bennet's piece, but I think this is pretty tough stuff, especially for the Times, and gets a great deal right; Bennet doesn't fail to mention that the "facts on the ground" settlements strategy has been a feature of Sharon's politics—he's the one "who drew up the settlement plan in Gaza"—since the 1970s.

And where Bennet's analysis doesn't go, Billmon's does.

The net result of this nasty little backroom deal won't just be further violence and random butchery in the territories and in Israel proper. It's also going to contribute to the progressive degeneration of the war against terrorism into the war against the Arabs -- if not the war against the entire Islamic world. The line in front of the Al Qaeda recruiting office is going to get a little bit longer; the struggle to stabilize a rebellious Iraq is going to become a little harder, and a future in which a large part of a major American city disappears in a nuclear firestorm is going to become a little more likely.

But the worst thing about this neocon smash-and-grab job is that it's probably irreversible. In the loopy world of the "special relationship," a presidential statement like this is regarded as the equivalent of a treaty with Israel ("Ratification? We don't need no stinkin' ratification!") It's a commitment that can't be walked back by any subsequent administration -- not without triggering the mother of all battles with the America Israel Political Action Committee and its various assets and instrumentalities on Capitol Hill.

So there you have it: George W. Bush, the accidental president, has now locked the United States into permanent, full-fledged support for the creation of an apartheid Israel -- complete with bantustans. And even if Bush gets the pink slip in November, there doesn't appear to be a damned thing John Kerry can do about it, even if he wanted to, which I strongly suspect he would not.

Be sure to read the whole post, which is well up to Billmon's eloquent norm.

Keep in mind that this development—the Bush Administration's utter trashing of a decades-long, bipartisan commitment to maintaining a position for the U.S. as an honest broker of Middle Eastern peace, replacing it with an explicit recognition of Israel as America's negotiating partner—is what Steven Weisman yesterday labeled, with massive understatement, "a subtle but substantial shift in American policy." Any chance that the Times' fronting Bennet's news analysis today reflects some embarrassment over Weisman's neo-con blowjob?

posted by michael  5:33:50 PM  
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Damn Bob Somerby for incomparably beating me to the punch on Jim Rutenberg's latest A1 thing ("I'm a Proud Drummer in the RNC Marching Band," I think it's called)—this one a repetition of the latest GOoPer spin point about those dastardly 9/11 commissioners playing politics by, you know, talking about their work in public:

Democrats and Republicans alike have raised concerns about the degree to which commission members are discussing their deliberations on television and, even, in newspaper columns — to the point that they are spinning their views like the politicians that many of them are.

Americans can hardly turn on a television or pick up a newspaper these days without seeing or reading about a member of the commission. From the Fox News Channel to ABC to newspapers including The Wall Street Journal, panel members have been providing a running commentary about the investigation as it unfolds, sometimes drawing blunt conclusions months before the final report is to be published in late July.

Probably you already know what to expect from the Howler: That the "Democrats and Republicans" line is purest bullshit cover, that there isn't a single Democrat criticism to be found in Rutenberg's 1400 RNC-scripted words.

Thanks, Bob! Rutenberg was my nice, big, fat target of the day, and Somerby had to go ruin it for me.

To get some back from the Howler, by way of alleging my own incomparability, let me just mention that this isn't the first time Reading A1 has taken notice of Rutenberg's water-carrying. [Rutenberg is apparently A1's newest, favoritest neo-con media critic; note the second paragraph in the quote above, which justifies today's performance by claiming it for a media story. The same thing happened when Rutenberg was assigned a repetition of anti-Kerry spin points in March, positioning it as a story about the Bush campaign's media strategy.] Check this post, which watches the Rute flacking for wingnut Brent Bozell's Media Research Council, detecting—in the purest, most neo-connishly entire absence of facts—a liberal conspiracy among TV producers inserting anti-Bush memes into their shows.

posted by michael  12:31:39 PM  
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The anonymity flag is thrown by Eric Umansky, writing Slate's "Today's Papers" column (scroll down):

Let freedom ring true, or giving Al Siegal the finger ... Reporting on the White House endorsement of Sharon's plan, the NYT's Elisabeth Bumiller quotes a "senior administration official who asked not to be identified because he wanted to speak more freely." Referring to Palestinians' anger, the gutsy SAO said, "I don't think that reaction is going to stop progress because there are real benefits here for Palestinians, and they're going to see those benefits here clearly."

Al Siegal, for those of you not following the link, is the Times standards editor who wrote the paper's recently articulated anonymous-sourcing rules. And yeah, I'd have to say that Lizzy Boo isn't even offering a fig leaf with this one—she's just letting Siegal know who's boss.

posted by michael  9:26:09 AM  
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