Helen Thomas, Again

All those Bush Derangement Syndrome therapy sessions must be paying off for Helen Thomas. She manages to keep her snark and rage under control for the roughly 15 minutes it must have taken her to write this throw-away book review. The price of accomplishing that was to simply describe the book, not comment on it. Even so, I bet she had to have a drink and lie-down afterward.

It helps, of course, that the book is by a black American. Ron Christie served as special assistant to Bush before he left the White House in 2004. His new book is titled "Black in the White House," which, though not very original, is more clever than anything Helen has written for a long time.

So she's rolling along nicely simply repeating what Christie wrote, then she finally can't keep the bile in any longer:

Christie also said Bush was not fond of staffers who liked to "hang around in his presence." You had to have a reason to be there.

It appeared Christie stayed in good graces by speaking only when spoken to. He said that while the president "can be extremely hard on his staff if they are unprepared, Mr. Bush possesses a warmth and true love of people that the press has elected to largely ignore."

Where on earth did that highlighted (by me) sentence come from? It bears no connection to anything before or after. It has no connection to anything anywhere in the article, or anything except the need of people like Helen Thomas to paint any black Republican as some sort of crude racist caricature.

Something the rest of you can't see about this column is the title her column bears as it moved on the New York Times wire. I can see it, though:

FORMER BLACK AIDE PRAISES BUSH

"Former black aide" ... not "Black former aide" ... nice zinger, Helen. Hope you're proud.

Three Lame Horsemen

So I picked up a page to proofread, and just my luck it was our editorial page for tomorrow. Then I looked at the column sigs and saw the line-up. Sigh. A murderer's row of flailing hacks strung out on Bush Derangement Syndrome.

First we have E.J. Dionne, in a column our editorial page editor headlined "Bush’s bad summer." Why is Bush having a bad summer? Well, it's like this: Because his Republican party won the election in Ohio.

Yes, you read that right. The Republican victory is "the culmination of doubts about Bush that have germinated below the surface of public opinion for much of his presidency."

The winning Republican, former state Rep. Jean Schmidt, ran a poor campaign and still won. In Dionne's eyes, that proves "the GOP knows something is badly wrong." And that "something?" It begins with "I" and ends with "raq."

Bush's obvious problem is Iraq. The sharp rise in casualties over the last fortnight has pushed the war back into the television news and aggravated opposition.

Which could as easily have been written like this: "The media ignores Iraq until something goes dramatically bad for the Americans, and then floods the TV screen with images of grieving survivors. And when that happens, Bush's poll numbers go down. The media seems to enjoy this game immensely."

Before long, Dionne is writing as though Hackett, the Democrat who lost the Ohio election, won it. "Iraq certainly played a role in Hackett's showing in Ohio," he boasts. "But the closeness of the contest may also have reflected disaffection among moderate Republicans and independents."

Here's where the logic gets more strained than Rafael Palmeiro's explanation of what he told Congress. Why are moderates disaffected? Because outsider social conservatives intervened in GOP primary election. Yet the social conservatives' first choice, as Dionne writes, was former Rep. Bob McEwen, who lost the primary, not Schmidt. But ... but ... but "Schmidt was closer" than the third candidate in the primary "to the conservative camp." [Here insert peasant shouts of "She's a witch; burn her!"]

What a straw. What a grasp.

It got worse. At the top of the page was that Helen Thomas, with a column sig head shot that made me remember "Throw Momma From the Train."

"Historic voting law in jeopardy," her headline shouted. What's wrong? "There is apprehension among civil rights groups that some key parts of the historic 1965 Voting Rights Act may be diluted or eliminated when the law comes up for renewal in 2007."

It looks like that Shrubbie McChimplerburton is up to his old tricks! Why, the evidence is staggering, according to Helen.

"White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the administration will work with Congress on legislation to renew the law, but he has been vague on the touchy question of whether President Bush would support the renewal of the tough parts of law."

But wait, it gets worse. Bush designated Saturday as a day of celebration in honor of the 40th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act.

The law reaffirmed "this bedrock commitment to equality and justice for all," he said, adding that "America is a stronger and better nation" because of it.

Earlier in the week, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales commemorated the anniversary at the Lyndon B. Johnson presidential library in Austin, Texas. ... Gonzales praised it as "one of the most successful pieces of civil rights legislation ever enacted."

Gonzales has said the Justice Department has set a goal to "make voting easier and cheating harder." The department currently has 124 election-fraud investigations underway.

Er, wait, no that's not the evidence. Rewind the tape, it's in there somewhere. No? It seems that this positive talk from the administration is, in fact, the basis of Helen's drumbeat warning. Doesn't matter. All you need for a Helen Thomas attack column is the words "Bush" and "Gonzales" and "civil rights legislation." The rest of the words are irrelevant. A brainwashed moonbat will see the cards turn up and know what to do.

The third column? Paul Krugman telling us, again, why America's economy is doomed. Don't even get me started.

Booting Helen

Mr. Natural sez, Helen Thomas is losing it. Time to give her the boot. Put her out to pasture once and for all, please. Here's from her column insisting that George Bush get all the American troops out of Iraq right this very minute:

There are precedents for the U.S. to retreat from danger zones. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan withdrew from Lebanon after 241 servicemen were killed when their barracks was bombed near the Beirut airport.

President Bill Clinton also pulled out of Somalia in 1993 after 18 American soldiers were killed. Neither president suffered any lasting public repercussions. In fact, the country heaved sighs of relief. Bush should follow suit and leave Iraq to the Iraqis under a protective U.N. umbrella.

No, no repercussions at all. Nope. Nary a one. Oh, OK, maybe one. Or two. Like this one:



Because Osama sez:

"After leaving Afghanistan, the Muslim fighters headed for Somalia and prepared for a long battle, thinking that the Americans were like the Russians. The youth were surprised at the low morale of the American soldiers and realized more than before that the American soldier was a paper tiger and after a few blows ran in defeat. And America forgot all the hoopla and media propaganda ... about being the world leader and the leader of the New World Order, and after a few blows they forgot about this title and left, dragging their corpses and their shameful defeat."

And ... well, I'll let the interviewer tell the rest of the story:

The Somalia operation, in some ways, made bin Laden. During the Afghan war, the CIA had been very aware of him (although the agency now insists it never "controlled" him), but in Somalia, bin Laden had taken a swing at the biggest kid in the school yard and given him a black eye. The next fight, a few weeks later, would begin with a sucker punch.

It was snowing in New York on February 26, 1993, when a massive truck bomb exploded at the World Trade Center, tearing through three levels of the building's underground garage, basement, and foundation. At the time, I was a reporter for NBC. As I walked through the scene, I saw a cop I knew from an antiterrorist unit. Initial reports were that it had been a gas explosion or a transformer that blew up. "They're not saying this now," he warned, "but this was a bomb. Too big to be a car, probably a truck on the lower level of the garage. There just isn't anything down there that could blow up and make a hole this big."

The goal wasn't to gut the parking garage: it was to knock one tower over, into the other, and bring them all down in a rain of ruin on New York City. It took him only two tries to get it right.

Helen should write less and watch more TV. She might have heard CNN's Jeff Greenfield connect the same three dots:

It began as a peacekeeping mission in March, 1983. U.S. Marines were sent to Lebanon to try to stop a bloody civil war. Seven months later, 20 years ago today, a massive truck bomb blew up the Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 U.S. servicemen -- the worst single-day loss of life for the American military since Korea.

Grim as the news was, it was, in part, overshadowed by the U.S. invasion of Grenada two days later, to overthrow a hard-left pro-Cuban government.

And when President Reagan ordered the Marines to leave Lebanon in January, 1984, not many Americans paid attention.

But by some accounts, others did pay attention. That terrorist act of 20 years ago may have helped to convince some of America's adversaries that the United States, for all of its might, was vulnerable, that heavy losses could be inflicted upon it at a relatively low price.

After all, the reasoning went, the U.S. had lost a war in Vietnam, not because it was militarily weak, but because it did not have the political will to bear the costs. And over the years, these adversaries seemed to take heart from what they saw as American weakness, from what the U.S. did not do when it left Saddam Hussein in power after the first Gulf War, when it pulled troops out of Somalia in 1993 after 18 Americans were killed -- the Black Hawk down incident -- when it failed to strike hard after the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing or the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa that killed 19 Americans, or the attack in 2000 on the USS Cole that left 17 dead.

That history may have been what Osama bin Laden had in mind when he said, three months after 9/11: "When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse." Indeed, one of the principle arguments made for American military action in Afghanistan and in Iraq was that the U.S. had to prove by direct action that America was not a weak horse, that al Qaeda and its allies were misreading America's resolve. If that's true, that Beirut bombing of 20 years ago may have been where that miscalculation began.

So, please bring Helen in out of the rain. And tell her her U.N. umbrella is full of holes.

Two Anecdotes and an Economist

Paul Krugman at the New York Times, writes a column in which he makes the bald statement that George W. Bush deliberately sought out war as a president, unlike any of his modern peers.

In November 2002, Helen Thomas, the veteran White House correspondent, told an audience, "I have never covered a president who actually wanted to go to war" - but she made it clear that Bush was the exception. And she was right.

And that's the extent of his evidence about it. This audacious assertion is true because -- Helen Thomas "made it clear" it was so. And that's good enough for old Paul Krugman.

There's an old anecdote about a university committee empaneled to choose the next chancellor of the school from among three candidates: a mathematician, an economist, and an attorney. The committee meets with each of them separately and asks one final question: "How much is two plus two?"

"Four," the mathematician says at once.

The economist pauses and then responds, "Four, plus or minus one."

The attorney answers with, "How much do you want it to be?"

In the story, the attorney, of course, gets the job. But historian Benjamin F. Martin (in whose "France in 1938" I met that chestnut), suspects a historian was the first to tell it. The lawyer is the butt of the joke, and all three professionals are better-paid than historians, but Martin thinks the real dig is at the economist, and I tend to agree.

The answers portray a continuum of knowledge, from mathematics and physics at the pole of certainty to hypothesis and argument at the pole of conjecture. Between lies the broad range of ambiguity where dwell forms of thought, among them history as well as economics, which combine ineluctable fact with varying degrees of surmise. Economists are always explaining why their forecasts go awry, shifting, as they do so, the balance from more surmise in the forecasting to more fact in the explicating. Historians generally avoid this embarrassing mea culpa by shunning predictions.

So, there's Krugman for you. Anyone who treats "Helen Thomas seemingly said so" as proof of fact, and then builds his argument on that foundation, can be swept aside. He's no historian. But neither is he a reporter. He's a columnist. His job is to sit there at his desk and wring the day's headlines into amusing shapes, like a clown making balloon hats at a birthday party. You can applaud him or you can walk away.

Helen Thomas is a different story. She's retired from active reporting now, but she was for many years a political journalist. And many still in the game think exactly like she do. I can tell you that from experience, because I've worked with them. But you don't have to take my word for it; there are plenty of online sites devoted to collecting the statements and opinions of such folks when they're off the job -- speaking at commencement exercises, for instance.

They're not peripheral voices; they are the media, our eyes and ears on the world. Yet like the economists in Benjamin Martin's paragraph, they've staked their reputations and their hopes on a certain outcome of the current U.S. effort in Iraq.

Which brings me to another anecdote from Martin's splendid little book. It's about Geo London, the French journalist of the 1930s who made a career covering spectacular trials in France -- discarded mistress dresses herself from head to toe in black and guns down her former lover in his office, that sort of thing the French do so well. The story is told by a fellow journalist, Marcel Montarron.

London was in western France covering the trial of a parricide that began in mid-afternoon. Because he had an early deadline, he telephoned a story that he was certain would take place: an angry crowd cursing the accused as he was marched to the courthouse from his holding cell at the police station. London then relaxed over lunch until he saw with dismay the guards and the prisoner coming but "not even the shadow of a gawker." His reputation at stake, he stalked to the door, cried out, "Kill him!" and returned to his table.