Cursor's Media Patrol - 11/18/05

As 'Iraq Critics Meet Familiar Reply,' the White House issued a six-page rebuttal to a 900 word editorial it described as coming "from the newspaper that gave us Jayson Blair."

"The American people don't believe this president," said Rep. John Murtha in a "NewsHour" interview, after the White House took the "unusual step" of invoking the name of Michael Moore to dismiss Murtha's criticisms. Editor & Publisher's Greg Mitchell invoked another name.

The 'Unlikely Lonesome Dove' also said, "I like guys who've never been there that criticize us who've been there. I like that. I like guys who got five deferments ... and send people to war, and then don't like to hear suggestions about what needs to be done." Plus: what a difference a day makes.

Our Man In Iraq The list of charges against a comptroller and financial officer hired by the CPA despite having served time for felony fraud in the 90's, "does little justice to the astonishing brazenness of the accusations described in the complaint," reports the New York Times, one day after introducing the other main character.

Quoted in a Washington Post article on the pair, Rep. Henry Waxman "said that while the Republican-controlled Congress has held 13 hearings on the U.N. oil-for-food scandal... it has held only one hearing on the spending of reconstruction funds."

Calling the new Medicare drug benefit "an example of gratuitous privatization on a grand scale," Paul Krugman compares it to a GOP senator's effort to protect private companies from competition with "the government’s free weather service.