New York Times editorial, November 17:
It has been two long months since Gen. David Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq, cowed Congressional Democrats into silence, championing President Bush’s misguided course on the war.
New York Times article, November 20:
The security improvements in most neighborhoods [in Baghdad] are real. Days now pass without a car bomb, after a high of 44 in the city in February. The number of bodies appearing on Baghdad’s streets has plummeted to about 5 a day, from as many as 35 eight months ago, and suicide bombings across Iraq fell to 16 in October, half the number of last summer and down sharply from a recent peak of 59 in March, the American military says.
By the Times’ logic, “President Bush’s misguided course on the war” has produced real “security improvements in most neighborhoods.”
[...] AMERICAN FUTURE placed an interesting blog post on Hoisted by Its Own Petard [...]
In 1931, on Saint Patrick’s day, Stanley Baldwin said with regard to power hungry newspapers of the time:
“The papers conducted by Lord Rothermere and Lord Beaverbrook are not newspapers in the ordinary acceptance of the term. They are engines of propaganda for the constantly changing policies, desires personal wishes, personal likes and dislikes of two men. What are their methods? Their methods are direct misrepresentation, half truths, the alteration of a speaker’s meaning by publishing a sentence apart from the context. . . . What the proprietorship of these papers is aiming at is power, and power without responsibility—the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.”
Stanley Baldwin, March 17, 1931. pp. 209-210 A History of the English Speaking Peoples Since 1900, Andrew Roberts, Harper Collins, New York, 2007.