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Kicking and screaming, the Old Grey Lady begins to creep back from the cliff's edge.

By Moe Lane Posted in It's About Time | Like Pulling Teeth | The Old Grey Lady | War — Comments (4) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Let us see how far we may go before I must call the New York Times on its silliness.

Making (Some) Progress in Iraq

Good news is rare in Iraq.

OK, I cheated. I already knew that they were being silly; I read the blessed thing, didn't I? You dunderheads, the reality is that good news is rarely reported in Iraq. Something that you should already know, given that your paper is one of the most enthusiastic devotees of selective perception in that area.

But after months of bitter feuding, Iraq’s Parliament has finally approved a budget, outlined the scope of provincial powers, set an Oct. 1 date for provincial elections and voted a general amnesty for detainees.

All these steps are essential for national conciliation. As always in Iraq, it is best to read the fine print. Final details of the legislation aren’t known. The country’s three-member presidency council must still sign off. And then the laws have to be implemented.

One month after Parliament approved a law intended to open government jobs to former members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party, American officials insist it will ensure that more former Baathists will be hired than barred. That will take a lot more good will and follow-through than Iraq’s central government has so far shown.

...and so on, and so on. Commentary on this and Captain Ed's own commentary after the fold.

Read on.

Regarding the Times' rather bizarre attempt to shoehorn this into a narrative that all of this is a prerequisite for national conciliation, Ed's comment is too good not to pass along:

No, all of these are indications that national conciliation has already begun. In a democracy, the conditions for these steps have to already exist before a legislature decides to pass them. The elected representatives of a republic don't just decide to impose policy that the vast majority of their constituents reject.

He then goes on to note - as I do - that the NYT somehow neglects to mention that all of this is in the teeth of American domestic opposition, including (but not limited to) Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Senator Hillary Clinton, and, of course, the New York Times itself (I would add Senator Barack Obama to that list, but I suppose that it was fair for Mr. Morrissey to give him a pass; after all, the poor man's just reading what's on the Teleprompter). The reason why is obvious, of course: to do that, you'd have to admit that all those people were wrong, which would imply - shock, horror, 'zounds! - that the Bush administration was right about something.

We will now pause for the quaint Leftist rituals that grown up in response to such a statement: that is to say, running around, screaming, cut-n-paste jobs, publications of illiterate primal screeds, bad sarcasm, worse snark, slightly frantic attempts at self-reassurance that they really aren't the bad people here, mindless republishing of half-understood "rebuttals," badly-obscured Antisemitism, and general knavery.

(pause)

That should be enough time.

What's going on here? It's election year, baby: and the New York Times is trying to cram a year's worth of progress into as little a time as possible. It's going to look really dumb of them if a Democratic President actually gets elected in November and they have to sheepishly admit that, yeah, things weren't quite as bad in Iraq as were reported, but they're ready to be objective now, yeah, you bet*! So... get started now, report things as being in flux, as it were: that way, they're covered either way. It's not like they're actually lying, after all; just... choosing a narrative**.

For the record, this last is why I'm explicitly not congratulating them for admitting, however reluctantly, grudgingly, and with a nigh-infinite supply of qualifiers, that good news has come out of Iraq. They're not sorry; they're just sorry that they got caught. God knows we have enough people in Western society who think that the two statements are semantically identical to want to encourage more of the same.

Moe Lane

*Believe it or not, ye NYT-haters, they really do care about the embarrassment. Their stock's going through the floor; they can't keep hemorrhaging readers for too much longer before the advertisers notice.

**I don't mind this quite so much in an editorial - in fact, now that I think about it, I don't mind it at all. What I object to is when the above mindset creeps into the front page.