Daily Howler - May 19, 2005

DAVID AND KATRINA! Brooks licks every man in the house. We’ll zero in on Katrina:
THURSDAY, MAY 19, 2005

DAVID AND KATRINA: How about credit where credit is due? David Brooks is essentially right, about all comers, in today’s New York Times column.

First, he’s right about our embarrassing White House. “I can't believe what I'm seeing,” he says, denouncing the Bush Admin’s reaction to the ballyhooed Newsweek flap. “[W]hat have the most powerful people on earth become? Whining media bashers,” Brooks writes. “They're attacking Newsweek while bending over backward to show sensitivity to the Afghans who just went on a murderous rampage.”

And, yes, Brooks is also right about his conservative colleagues. “Many of my friends on the right have decided that the Newsweek episode exposes the rotten core of the liberal media,” he writes. “Excuse me, guys, but this is craziness.” What a shame it took a conservative pundit to state a couple of obvious facts: “The people who run Newsweek are not a bunch of Noam Chomskys with laptops. Not even close. Whatever might have been the cause of their mistakes, liberalism had nothing to do with it.” We don’t necessarily agree with every particle of that last statement. But no—the perfumed poodles running Newsweek are not a bunch of crazy liberals. They proved this, over and over again, in their wars against Clinton, then Gore. But it’s amazing how hard it is to get our fiery “liberal spokesmen” to say this. They have decided to “get over” those recent wars—wars which their fiery “liberal” publications all agreed to ignore in real time.