Television's Aging Rock Star

Ron Brownstein in the LAT:

"President Bush barreled straight ahead with old answers when ABC's Elizabeth Vargas asked him a new question about Iraq last week. And like any driver who missed a turn in the road, the president quickly found himself in a ditch. Vargas sensibly asked Bush how the growing civil strife in Iraq between the majority Shiites and the Sunnis who dominated the country under Saddam Hussein might change the U.S. mission there. Bush, to his credit, acknowledged the importance of encouraging Iraqis to form a 'unity government' in the dangerously prolonged political haggling that has followed December's election...

"Those arguments reflect the model that Bush, his aides and most Americans have used to understand the war in Iraq. In that framework, Iraq -- like Vietnam -- is a contest between a central government and an insurgency determined to overthrow it. But many experts are asking whether that construct really explains the challenge in Iraq anymore -- especially after the horrific sectarian violence that swept the country following the Feb. 22 bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra."

American Prospect's Michael Tomasky throws down a challenge to the right:

"I'm really not sure at this point that the country and the world will survive three more years of this bumbling, deceitful, artificial, and thoroughly mediocre man, and his bumbling, deceitful, artificial, and thoroughly mediocre courtiers. (Liberals, let's just start saying it insistently and unapologetically: We were not being 'elitists'; we were right in the first place -- he is just not smart enough to be the president of the United States.) . . .

"Virtually everything is inside-out; virtually every reality, the opposite of what they say. Saddam has the weapons to harm us; Saddam had no such weapons. The terrorists are on the run; the terrorists are increasing in number and violence. The insurgency is in its death throes; the insurgency was just kicking into gear when Dick Cheney said that. We will prevail in Iraq; the soldiers themselves say that isn't possible. Clear skies; relaxed pollution standards. Intelligent design, something that deserves equal footing to science; a massive case of intellectual fraud, payola to a constituency, completely invented out of whole cloth. We won't negotiate with rogue states; we will instead isolate and vanquish North Korea; North Korea now has nuclear weapons it never had before. Dubai is our ally; Dubai boycotts Israel. This list could go on for about 5,000 words."

Well, speed it up, Mike, I'm running out of space.

"Honest conservative intellectuals: your nation needs you. Say, 'Enough.' By tradition, you believe in honorable principles. Today, you are flacking for an administration that has betrayed many of those principles. The principles to which it has maintained fealty, like low taxes, it has pursued at a high price to other principles you cherish, like fiscal prudence."

Andrew Sullivan is still upset over a letter from Sam Alito to a leading Christian conservative:

"A few emailers have asked what I see troubling in the Alito thank- you note to Dr James Dobson. First, Supreme Court Justices should be very careful associating with overtly political entities, and you don't get much more political than Dobson. Secondly, Dobson himself read it out loud on the air to brag of his influence on national affairs. Thirdly, there is more than just a hint of a constitutional quo for a political quid in the letter. That kind of horse-trading undermines the integrity of the court and the impartiality of the justices. Look: I endorsed Alito. But I hoped his jurisprudence would not amount to a carte blanche for whatever the Christianists demand. The letter suggests otherwise."

Eric Boehlert says the New York press is falling down on the job:

"Last month Gov. George Pataki, who is winding up his third term at the helm of New York state and busy positioning himself for a White House run in 2008, checked himself into a local hospital after complaining about abdominal pain. Later that day doctors announced they had removed Pataki's appendix and that the governor would be allowed to leave the hospital in a day or two.

"Pataki's wife assured the press, 'He's doing absolutely great,' and his flak echoed that spin: 'Doctors have indicated that the surgery was performed as expected without incident.' The thumbs-up talk was key since Pataki's unscheduled hospital visit came during the state's annually bruising budget negotiations, as well as against the backdrop of president Bush's port security controversy, where New York stands as a key player. Not to mention the fact Pataki had to cancel a speaking gig in New Hampshire.

"Problem is that was more than 14 days ago . Since the initial operation Pataki's health has continued to falter, he's been shipped off to another hospital and had to undergo a second surgery to try to unclog his digestive track and clean up internal infections. For now, New Yorkers have no clue when their governor will return to office, in part because during Pataki's never-ending, Groundhog Day hospital stay aides have given out very little useful information about the governor's health. In fact, they obviously concealed what was really going on in order to protect their boss. Yet to date, the press corps, while dutifully covering the story, has shown little enthusiasm or initiative. Instead, most New York news outlets have simply aired or published daily, 'He's-up-and-around' updates that read more like Pataki staff hand-outs."

Knight Ridder's Washington bureau breaks its share of stories, and in a letter to Romenesko , editors Clark Hoyt and John Walcott says that big papers are basically ripping them off:

"On Feb. 7, Warren Strobel reported on a State Department reorganization that sidelined career arms control experts who don't share the Bush administration's mistrust of international arms negotiations and agreements. Exactly two weeks later, The Washington Post published a virtually identical story by Glenn Kessler. We say 'virtually identical' only because the stories were written with different words. There was not a single fact in Kessler's story that was not in Strobel's, the product of weeks of careful enterprise reporting and interviews with 11 current and former government officials.

"We have asked, through the Post's ombudsman, Deborah Howell, who was once executive editor in St. Paul, for a published acknowledgements of the Knight Ridder story. To date, it hasn't happened. We understand that there has been vigorous opposition from the Post reporter, who has claimed, in essence, that the 'trade press' had already widely reported the story, a contention that is in fact not correct. We're waiting to see what happens.

"Friday morning, The New York Times led the paper with a story that concluded that fines for mine safety violations are down in the Bush administration. The story was based on 'a data analysis by The New York Times.' That's interesting. Knight Ridder -- the bureau's Seth Borenstein and Linda Johnson and Lee Mueller of the Lexington Herald-Leader -- published a data analysis on January 9 that arrived at precisely the same conclusion."

Kessler responds in Post ombudsman Deborah Howell 's column, which also deals with the paper's higher-than-everyone-else's death toll for last week's Iraq warfare. And NYT public editor Byron Calame says here that the Times was already working on its piece and had no reason to credit Knight Ridder.

A new media scandal is brewing: Napgate! Power Line's Scott Johnson is concerned:

"It appears that none of the three network news shows mentioned Justice Ginsburg's nap during the oral argument of the Texas redistricting case earlier this week. The folks at Fox's 'Special Report with Brit Hume' noted it. . . .

"Newsbusters asks us to 'pretend for a moment that this had happened to a conservative member of the Supreme Court.' I don't think it takes too much imagination to come up with the correct answer to that question."

Well, the oh-so-liberal Washington Post did report the judicial snooze.

By the way, I stand corrected in saying that President Bush wielded a fake turkey in Iraq. The bird was real; what I meant was that the staging was kind of phony.