What They're Blogging About
Often you go to a site like Memeorandum and the bloggers on the left are writing about their issues and the bloggers on the right are writing about their issues. Here's one everyone started swinging at -- a Sunday Washington Post editorial that defended the president's selective declassification of intelligence. It's headlined, "A Good Leak." The administration's mis-step was clumsiness, the piece argues. The president had the right to make his best case that Saddam Hussein sought weapons of mass destruction. He just should have disclosed the declassification in a press conference, rather that letting vp Dick Cheney direct his top aide, I. Scooter Libby, whisper it to a New York Times reporter.
Right Wing Nut House took the opportunity to declare its long love for the Post, praising it as more of a national newspaper than the Times, and cheering its minimum of bias. The editorial rekindled blogger Rick Moran's conviction that "the Post is still a fairly honest voice in our national debate. We might not like some of the news they write but that's not their fault; events can be unwelcome and they are, after all, just the messengers."
The Left Coaster, meanwhile, chooses the headline, "A Washington Post Editor Caught Brazenly Lying: When is this going to stop?" Blogger eriposte calls the editorial "deeply fraudulent." "It's not just that they get the facts wrong, but by a fair accounting this editorial involves deliberate lying that also specifically excluded contradictory information, much like what George Bush did ..." The main beef: Libby told reporter Judith Miller that Iraq's pursuit of uranium was a "key judgment" of the intelligence report, a term used for centrally important conclusions. In fact, the uranium claim was not supported.
The Daily Kos finds contradictions between the Post editorial, which argues the administration didn't try to discredit Joe Wilson, the former ambassador and war critic who made the uranium fact-finding trip to Niger, and a front-page piece headlined "A concerted effort to punish Bush critic."
What else are bloggers blogging about? Seymour Hersh's 7,000-word piece in this week's New Yorker, in which he reports the administration is studying a military strike against Iran - including a nuclear option. He concludes that President Bush has already made up his mind that war is the answer to Iran's own nuclear designs. But a New York Times piece quotes four Pentagon, military and administration officials involved in strategic discussions about Iran - all rejected Hersh's contention that the administration was considering a nuclear option.