Mindful of its own past failing (i.e., Janet Cooke) The Washington Post editorializes today about the “poor judgement” at CBS. Not surprising that the cable talk shows are having a field day with it, with both ABC and NBC apparently enjoying every minute of it.

But then The Post editorial concludes with “[m]eanwhile, we continue to entertain the notion that there are subjects more important in this presidential campaign than even Swift boats or the Alabama National Guard.”

Then exactly why has The Post given Howard Kurtz acres of newsprint over the past week? He can’t seem to get enough of the story. Kurtz, whose columns are now sometimes slugged by The Post as “Politics” and whose ties to the Republican party through his wife give at least the appearance of a conflict of interest, seems to fuel the fire by his apparent bias. In his online chat Monday, he was asked about the Bush campaign ties to the Swift Boat Veteran. He replies, “Sure the Swifties drew funding from Republicans and Bush supporters, but that doesn’t mean the Bush campaign can be held responsible for the attack, any more than Kerry can be held responsible for some of the harsher MoveOn ads.”

Such a comment suggests that MoveOn ads were in the same league as the Swifties. But that is so far from the truth that it again begs the question of whether Kurtz can ever be trusted to be fair. Just which ad does he think was so personal an attack that was has been so thoroughly discredited as the Swifties ad? You can see all the MoveOn ads here. Kurtz then goes on to say

Clinton’s active avoidance of the draft was a legitimate political issue, as is Cheney’s (though he got pretty standard college and parental deferments). In the case of Bush, despite the fact that he obviously had some help getting into the Guard and benefited from being a congressman’s son, he did serve and flew airplanes, which is not like pushing paper.

This apparent judgement that there should be no questions about Bush’s lack of Vietnam service and that Cheney’s deferrals were standard procedure and therefore beyond reproach reveal a clear bias, in my view.

But now that Kurtz has attacked CBS and impugned its integrity for more than a week now, I guess I should move on to “subjects more important.” Perhaps like The Post’s hypocrisy.

Now I’m not convinced, because after all this is just a hunch. But our president is not very smart. Again, I don’t know. But after reading this, I’m just guessing.

Fifty veterans show up for a Bush rally in Richmond and The Washington Post does a story about it. Turns out some of the 50 weren’t Bush fans but put stickers on suggesting they were and then debated the pro-Bushies after the rally. Still, I can get 50 people to show up to watch grass grow. The Post going to do a story about it?

Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly is one of my favorite bloggers. He mixes a little humor with outrage and perception for a good daily read.

But I’ve got to agree with Lean Left on this one: Kevin doesn’t like Robert Scheer of the LA Times even though he is a conservative who has turned against Bush. He cites Scheer’s column today and this passage.

If they were true to their principles, moderate Republicans and consistent conservatives would be supporting John Kerry. Instead, their acquiescence to the reckless whims of George W. Bush marks a descent into that political abyss of opportunism where partisanship is everything and principle nothing.

How else to explain their cynical support for this shallow adventurer, a phony lightweight who has bled the Treasury dry while incompetently squandering the lives of young Americans in a needless imperial campaign?

My reaction in his comments section:

“If this were written for a liberal blog or The Nation it would be fine.”

It’s fine that you don’t like Scheer, Kevin, but I find it curious that you expect less of bloggers than columnists. If we had a little more passion in daily papers instead of some of the bland “Oh-I’m-so-clever” blather, we might have an electorate a little more engaged.

“Daily Show” on the Comedy Channel is the most consistently funny show on television. It also just might be the most honest news show, fake or real.

Link

Reading and viewing MoveOn ads for a post later, I was reminded that CBS, which is catching flak for memogate that is presented by the right as proof of the network’s bias, refused to air MoveOn’s ad Child’s Play about the Bush deficits. The network also pulled the Reagan biography after criticism from conservatives. And they think the CBS is biased against the administration, huh?

Poor John Kerry. No sooner does he deliver a speech that’s receiving praise for its clarity and stinging rebuke of Bush’s folly, than the liberal pundits are now suggesting that maybe Dennis Kucinich was right.

You remember Dennis, the squeaky-voiced Democratic iconoclast who said during the presidential primaries that we should withdraw from Iraq. Even Howard Dean wouldn’t go that far.

But with a Jeffersonian democracy in Iraq light years away, pulling out may not be such a bad idea.

“If there ever was a chance to turn Iraq into a pro-American beacon of democracy, that chance perished a long time ago,” writes Paul Krugman this morning in the New York Times.

…But if the chance to install a pro-American government has been lost, what’s the alternative? Scaling back our aims. This means accepting the fact that an Iraqi leader, to have legitimacy, must be able to deliver an end to America’s military presence. Unless we want this war to go on forever, we will have to abandon the 14 “enduring bases” the Bush administration has been building.

It also means accepting the likelihood that Iraq will not have a strong central government – and that local leaders will end up with a lot of autonomy. This doesn’t have to mean creating havens for hostile forces: remember that for a year after Saddam’s fall, moderate Shiite clerics effectively governed large areas of Iraq and kept them relatively peaceful. It was the continuing irritant of the U.S. occupation that empowered radicals like Moktada al-Sadr.

The point is that by winding down America’s military presence, while promising aid to those who don’t harbor anti-American terrorists and retaliation against those who do, the U.S. can probably leave behind an Iraq that isn’t an American ally, but isn’t a threat either. And that, at this point, is probably the best we can hope for.

Is it time for us to reject the notion that while pulling out would bruise our ego and be the cause for dancing in the mountains of Afghanistan, it may be not only the best we can hope for but a stragetically good move to repair our standing in the Muslim world and hence, slow the tsunami of fundamental terrorism?

Even a former Iraq war hawk such as Richard Cohen has begin to wonder.

At one time I would have ruled out anything less than what might be called a U.S. victory in Iraq — a secure nation governed by democratically elected rulers. I would have argued that no matter how the United States got into Iraq, it simply could not preemptively pull out. To do so would have great and grave consequences. It could plunge the country into civil war, Shiites against Sunnis and Kurds against them both. It would cause the country to disintegrate, maybe dividing into thirds — a Kurdish north, a Sunni center and a Shiite south. Where things are not so ethnically neat, expect a bloodbath — and expect outsiders to join in.

Now, though, we all have to face the prospect that Iraq will end up a mess no matter what. The administration’s own national intelligence estimate raises the possibility that civil war may erupt by the end of next year. That’s the direst prediction, but it now seems more likely than the one President Bush once envisioned: an Iraq with some sort of Jeffersonian democracy. That ain’t about to happen and bit by bit, Bush has been scaling back his rhetoric. The truth is that we’d now settle for a pro-American strongman such as Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf or Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak. Both countries are essentially military dictatorships.

Who’d like to be the last man to die for that? I’m looking for a show of hands. But more than that, I’m looking for someone to raise questions that go to the heart of this matter of life and death. In this sense, Iraq is fast becoming Vietnam — only the stakes are higher. (Vietnam had no oil.) It is also Vietnam in the way the presidential campaign is handling it. Once again the GOP is playing the odious patriotism card to silence dissent. As for Bush, he talks about Iraq with the same loopy unreality as he does his National Guard service. He’s a fabulist.

I still don’t think the United States can just pull out of Iraq. But I do think the option is worth discussing. Would the threat of a U.S. pullout concentrate the minds of Iraqis so that they take control of their own destinies? Would the loss of the Yankee enemy cause Iraqis to blame actual bombers for the bombing — and not the United States? Would a threatened U.S. withdrawal get the attention of NATO, not to mention neighboring Middle Eastern countries? Do they want Iraq in shambles? I doubt it.

Bush ought to come clean. What are his goals for Iraq now? Does he plan to bring in more troops if he wins in November or is he simply going to accept defeat, call it victory and bring the boys (and girls) home? If I were still in the uniform I once wore, I’d sure like to know. It’s terrible to die for a mistake. It’s even worse to die for a lie.

Pulling out of Iraq summarily probably isn’t a good idea, and certainly no one in either presidential campaign would dare suggest it, although some, according to this conservative, are saying that’s Bush’s plan if he’s re-elected.

But can we announce a pull-out timetable that tells the rest of the world that we’re unwilling to keep losing men and woman? It might focus other nations’ attention as well as the Iraqis themselves. It might also be the first step in convincing the world that we are not anti-Muslim and respect that Islamic democracies might not need to like Jeffersonian ones.

Of course that would be only a first step. The next step needs to be addressing the real concerns of Muslims in the West Bank, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and, as Fareed Zakaria points out today, the hypocrisy of some of those same European countries that have told us what a mistake the Iraq war was.

Update: Kevin Drum has a pretty good post and a citing commenting on The Washington Post’s analysis http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36909-2004Sep20.html piece this morning on the Kerry plan for Iraq. But I still think Cohen, Krugman — and Kucinich — might be on to something.

The Washington Post’s Ombudsman Michael Getler criticizes his paper not only for they didn’t do when Bush began building his case for invading Iraq, but for what they are doing now. Which is to make the same mistake.

However one feels, it seems legitimate to ask: Is this war winnable? If so, how and at what cost? If no, should there be consequences or penalties for launching it? Is it making us safer? Or is it producing more terrorists and hatred of the United States and turning Iraq into a breeding ground for both? Has it diminished our ability to fight the force that did attack us, al Qaeda, and find its leader, Osama bin Laden? How do we make informed judgments about these questions, and how much can the press help us?

… In recent months, some news organizations, such as the New York Times and The Post, have done some soul-searching about their prewar coverage. Where was the press when we needed it, was the question properly asked by press critics and critical readers. Yet that question may well be asked again, and with far greater force and consequence, in the months and years to come if those gut questions about the war are not substantively addressed in this election campaign.

He then gives the press an excuse that’s indicative of part of the problem.

One reason the press didn’t do well before the war is that Congress didn’t do well. With few exceptions, Congress provided virtually no challenge to administration policies and claims. When that happens the press has fewer people to quote outside the White House. Too often, the early challenges some lawmakers did pose were missed or under-reported by The Post.

With Kerry’s difficulty explaining his vote on the war, some may think he was swept in a tidal wave of patriotism, or cowardice. But some Congressman did provide another view. The Senate vote for the Iraq resolution was 77-23. In the House it was 296-133. But apparently almost a quarter of the Senate and 30% of the House does not meet the threshold for providing a “challenge to the administration policies.” The same was true of the 100,000 or more demonstrators that descended upon Washington and the millions throughout the world. But unless the opposition emanates from a majority of party leaders, it’s discounted.

…Kerry, who might be expected to carry on this debate, has thus far presented such a conflicted and contorted view of the war that there has still been no one to quote whose views are likely to make the front page very often. The arguments still are being framed and expressed with more clarity inside a torrent of books, magazine articles and op-ed columns. When Kerry did speak out on Thursday, citing a newly disclosed and pessimistic intelligence report, The Post — wrongly and unfairly, I thought — buried the story on Page A20.

The daily news reporting from Iraq remains solid. But will the big news organizations somehow be able to capture and present to citizens the larger questions that this war raises?

Another example of why I’m not optimistic occurred last Monday. The outgoing commander of Marine Corps forces in western Iraq told reporters from The Post, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times and CNN that he opposed the assault on militants in the volatile city of Fallujah in April and also disagreed with the subsequent order to halt the attack once underway. “When you order elements of a Marine division to attack a city, you really need to understand what the consequences of that are going to be and not perhaps vacillate in the middle of something like that,” said Lt. Gen. James T. Conway.

Several Iraqi cities are controlled or dominated by insurgents, and the battle over Fallujah symbolizes the dilemma faced by U.S. forces, who could undoubtedly overrun the resistance, or at least displace it, in these cities. But they would also surely pay a big price in Iraq and the Arab world. It will be a long time, if ever, before Iraqis will be able to undertake such missions. The Globe put the story on Page One. The Los Angeles Times referred to it on Page One. The Post put it on Page A17 with a one-column headline.

As Getler points out, placement may not be everything, but it’s important, extremely important. The Post often makes the same mistake about the placement of Middle East stories. Israelis die: front page. Palestinians die: Look for a World Brief item on A24.

The Post has done a good job occasionally, even putting a fact check piece on the front page. But it seems the other side of spin has a hard time getting much attention in even the best newspapers. What a shame.

A speech that’s a little tougher and little more compelling.

While not denying the underlying story, CBS now says the memos’ authenticity cannot be verified.