Saturday, January 29, 2005Smackdown. Moderate applause to Benedict Carey, who responds to a Bush gay-marriage lie today with a well researched, unambiguous smackdown:
Are children worse off being raised by gay or lesbian couples than by heterosexual parents?
Responding on Thursday to a question about gay adoption, President Bush suggested that they were. "Studies have shown," Mr. Bush said in an interview with The New York Times, "that the ideal is where a child is raised in a married family with a man and a woman."
But experts say there is no scientific evidence that children raised by gay couples do any worse - socially, academically or emotionally - than their peers raised in more traditional households.
Unsurprisingly, no such studies as Bush alludes to actually exist. I say "moderate applause" because, after all, it shouldn't really be an occasion for remark when a paper challenges a false claim from a Presidential interview conducted by that very paper. That's right—the quote was featured prominently in Friday's pathetic A1-leading interview with Bush, where it went (of course) completely unchallenged, indeed uncommented on. Today's gesture toward reality is not written by one of the Bush-interview trio of big Times hacks, nor does it receive more prominent placement than A12.
But I guess you take what you can get. Tough times when you have to pat the NYT on the back just for belatedly assigning somebody to do a basic damn journalist's job.
Addendum: What I ought to have made clear above is that Carey's piece is just as much, if not more, a smackdown of Bumiller et al. for their dead-from-the-neck-up interview as it is of Bush for lying in the first place. You have to wonder whether some editor at the Times—outside the Washington bureau, presumably, where such atrocities pass regularly unrebuked—decided this was just one toke too many over the line, and set Carey to amend the record that the senior writers had botched. (Hard to imagine that Carey, a science writer who only moved to the NYT in the last half-year, would have pitched this on his own, though of course I'm in no position to know.) If so, it's good to see that there's at least someone with some pull inside the paper who can recognize journalistic nonfeasance, and has enough moxie to make a protest. Think Bumiller's stewing over this one?
posted by michael 1:50:51 PM
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From the Department of Distinctions without a Difference. David Johnston et al. report today on Homeland Security nominee Michael Chertoff's "previously undisclosed involvement" in evaluating how far CIA interrogators could go in abusing the agency's terror detainees.
Depending on the circumstances, [Chertoff] told the intelligence agency, some coercive methods could be legal, but he advised against others ... The advice came in the form of responses to agency inquiries asking whether C.I.A. employees risked being charged with crimes if particular interrogation techniques were used on specific detainees.
Asked about the interaction between the C.I.A. and Mr. Chertoff, now a federal appeals court judge in Newark, Erin Healy, a White House spokeswoman, said, "Judge Chertoff did not approve interrogation techniques as head of the criminal division." Ms. Healy added, "We're not aware that anyone in the criminal division was involved in approving techniques because that responsibility would have belonged in the Office of Legal Counsel," another Justice Department unit.
One current and two former senior officials with firsthand knowledge of the interaction between the C.I.A. and the Justice Department said that while the criminal division did not explicitly approve any requests by the agency, it did discuss what conditions could protect agency personnel from prosecution.
Even in the act of breaking news, the Times seems paradoxically eager to soften the blow; the report makes as much as it can of Chertoff's having recommended against various techniques of coercion, rather than having devised or given actual sanction to them. Because of course there's such a wide gulf, practically and morally, between formulating torture policy, and merely advising the torturers on policy so as to give them maximum cover from whatever pathetic threat of law the administration might yet have left in force. Yeah, Chertoff has nothing on his conscience.
posted by michael 1:23:48 PM
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Snark-queen Jodi Wilgoren gets off the attitude bus this morning just long enough to cheerlead for American-sponsored Iraqi democracy®:
Ali Mohammed, who spent eight years in the Abu Ghraib prison in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, called the owner of the grocery store where he is a stock clerk before sunup on Friday to say he was putting on his best suit, the charcoal pinstripe he usually saves for weddings.
Glowing like proud papas, Mr. Mohammed and his supervisor, Hussain al-Jebori, cast the first ballots of their lives and lingered at the polling place here for three hours, clapping for friends and strangers and searching for familiar names, including a former cellmate, on the daunting list of 7,700 Iraqi legislative candidates. Mr. Mohammed, 39, said he decided on Friday to start a family, "because now my children's future is secure." Mr. Jebori, 35, planned to return here on Saturday and Sunday with his five children, ages 4 to 17, "to read the happiness in Iraqi people's eyes."
As moving as it genuinely is to see people realize—in however fragile, partial and equivocal a form—their aspirations for democracy, isn't this laying it on a bit thick?
Add to this the grudging, parenthetical appearance of Wilgoren's sole admission, six grafs in, that the scope of the expatriate-voting event is somewhat, well, limited—
Although registration in the United States was sparse, with 1 in 10 signing up among the estimated 240,000 eligible Iraqis, the first day attracted a steady stream of voters to a former home-improvement store here [in Michigan] and to similar sites in Nashville and the suburbs of Chicago, Washington and Los Angeles—
add as well the story's A1 above-the-fold placement, under a photo of a tearful elderly Iraqi submitting his ballot, and I can't help wondering why the Times believes it has to pimp the feel-good of this latest Iraq Liberation moment quite as hard as it does here. The LA Times, by contrast, offers no front-page coverage of the domestic voting. And while the Washington Post makes just as much A1 splash as the NYT, its treatment of the event is noticeably more reality-based:
In the United States, polling stations were set up in the Washington area, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles and Nashville. Security was tight, and turnout appeared relatively light at the sites yesterday, although no estimates were released by election organizers.
Some Iraqi immigrants have complained that there were too few voting sites. Nearly 26,000 Iraqi Americans registered for the election, about 10 percent of those eligible.
Rep. Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) dropped by the Ramada yesterday, where 2,048 people have registered. He praised the voters but criticized the International Organization for Migration, which received $92 million from Iraq's electoral authorities to coordinate the vote abroad.
"People were excited. People were hopeful. Clearly, in their view, this was a positive day for themselves and for their families still in Iraq," Hoyer said. "I would have hoped that with a $92 million contract, more people would have come to the polls." ...
The fault lines in Iraqi society appeared evident among voters in the Washington area. Those casting ballots appeared to be mainly Kurds and Shiites, both groups oppressed by Hussein's government. There were few Arab Sunnis, the minority that dominated Iraq under Hussein. Many Sunnis in Iraq have decided to stay away from the polls.
Some Iraqis made no secret of the fact they were voting on ethnic lines.
No such untoward facts are allowed to damage the mood in the Times' reporting. Then again, the paper has a history of excessive genuflection when it comes to Bush-defined Great Moments in Iraqi History, so I guess this is really no surprise.
posted by michael 11:54:51 AM
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Last update: 5/12/2005; 11:21:33 AM .
