If either US administration had similarly aimed its guns on Al Qaida before 9/11, it would have been accused of "inflating" Al Qaida....

We haven't subdued the militias yet, how canb we shift our attention to the supposed threat of al Qaeda?

She also mentions taking care of our border problems. Does she even read her own stuff? Let one illegal be arrested in a sweep and she'll scream about civil liberties and the oppressed. Yet, the left intellectuals that I know really like her. She's their hero. I wonder if they actually read her stuff or if she and all her fans just see Bush and bad/dumb in the same paragraph and feel satisfied.

I've got news for Maureen, we're going to do a lot more than defenestrate Saddam. I'm hoping for decapitation . . .



Also, we're not going to deflate North Korea, we're going to disarm them. And we won't detangle Iraq's tribes, we'll help them build a civil society together . . .



And now my de-Dowding is complete . . .

Would it matter if it was archived? Not to most of these people.



Go back and look at the reactions to Clinton's threats against Saddam in Feburary 1998 (post-Monica revelation by Drudge) and his eventual attack in December against Iraq (pre-impeachment vote by the House) and read the usual suspects. Most of them have done complete 180s since then, when Iraq was a "vital national interest" which the U.S. was being forced to ignore, they said, due to the attacks against the President. In hindsight, they were far righter then than they are now (though the cynic in mae says the odds are had there been no Monica scandal there would have been no major 1998 dust-up with Iraq).



Those doing the flip-flops in a span of four years are living in the past in terms of communications, when what you said or wrote then couldn't be googled up in a matter of minutes to go against what you're saying or writing now.



Dowd and others like her think all that past stuff still goes down the memory hole never to be seen again, so consistancy can take a back seat to the ideology de jour
. If you're in place high enough up in the insular world on West 43rd St., you can still survive that world view, but politicians nowadays are finding their past words coming back to haunt them more and more if they fail to be consistant in their beliefs.

John:



Have you ever been in the building? I was there for an editorial board and they led us down this long corridor lined with their Pulitzer Prizes to the conference room. It was like a scene from a Mel Brooks movie where the dictator gives his guests seats with short legs to intimidate them. Unfortunately, like dictators, they seem to think their awards make them unquestionable.

OJ --



I've been in there a number of times over the years, and it is imposing when you go up to the executive floors. But their problem right now is there are too many people working there and in the newsroom who think the paper's history + the staff's intellegence = common sense that should be dispersed to the masses who know far less. But having listened to Gail Collins deilver a pre-election speech in 2000 in Dallas that was something any small town editor could have given just as easily and with better foresight, I'd say the people running the Times right now are far too self-satisfied with their own knowledge.



Raines, Collins, Dowd and Krugman are just killing the paper's creditibilty, and the fact that anyone can go back and look at their contradictions without having to spool through hours of microfilm at the New York Public Library by just going online will make it harder and harder for them to get it back once the Iraq situation is over (even as I write I'm sure people are filing away the Times' "we should take on North Korea first" stories, columns and editorials for the day a year or two down the line when the same people write that "We can't take on North Korea without taking on —— first.")

John:



Google certainly seems to have done an awful lot to destroy the credibility of the commentariat.