Monday, May 23, 2005
Ok, Richard Cohen, I finally forgive you.
Newsweek's Mistakes by Richard Cohen - The first reaction I saw to Newsweek's retraction of that now-famous item came from out of the blogosphere -- someone attributing the mistake to the magazine's "antiwar reporting." The headline -- just in case you missed the point -- was "Newsweek's Antiwar Crusade Kills," and though the piece marshaled many facts, it came to the wrong conclusion. Newsweek, I am here to tell you, simply made a mistake...
...I will spare you any harangue today about the mistakes and lies that got us into Iraq in the first place. Suffice it to say that for the White House and the Pentagon to come down on Newsweek for making a mistake is the height of hypocrisy.
Where, just for starters, is the retraction from Dick Cheney, who said that Iraq had "reconstituted" its nuclear weapons program? Where are the right-wing bloggers insisting he do so? And where, when it comes to such a touching sensitivity to the feelings of the Muslim world, was the conservative objection to the mad screeds of Ann Coulter, who wrote right after the Sept. 11 attacks, "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity"? The National Review subsequently dropped her and virtually pronounced her unbalanced -- but she has been adopted by right-wingers everywhere...
Cohen pissed me off, some time ago, with his pro-war columns. I stopped reading much of what he wrote. Every once in awhile, I would read one of his pieces and think "Not good enough, bud!" He had finally taken a turn in his thinking, but I wasn't fogiving him just yet.
His article Baloney, Moore or Less was kind of pissy, too.
Well, with this latest article, I've decided that I will forgive him (not that he would know or care:). People do make mistakes and he really has done a good job, lately.
...I will spare you any harangue today about the mistakes and lies that got us into Iraq in the first place. Suffice it to say that for the White House and the Pentagon to come down on Newsweek for making a mistake is the height of hypocrisy.
Where, just for starters, is the retraction from Dick Cheney, who said that Iraq had "reconstituted" its nuclear weapons program? Where are the right-wing bloggers insisting he do so? And where, when it comes to such a touching sensitivity to the feelings of the Muslim world, was the conservative objection to the mad screeds of Ann Coulter, who wrote right after the Sept. 11 attacks, "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity"? The National Review subsequently dropped her and virtually pronounced her unbalanced -- but she has been adopted by right-wingers everywhere...
Cohen pissed me off, some time ago, with his pro-war columns. I stopped reading much of what he wrote. Every once in awhile, I would read one of his pieces and think "Not good enough, bud!" He had finally taken a turn in his thinking, but I wasn't fogiving him just yet.
His article Baloney, Moore or Less was kind of pissy, too.
Well, with this latest article, I've decided that I will forgive him (not that he would know or care:). People do make mistakes and he really has done a good job, lately.
