Times Watch for September 16, 2003
Frank Rich: Triumph of a Willful Bush-Hater
Associate editor Frank
Rich returns, in full rant, to his regular column for the Sunday Arts & Leisure
page. In Top Gun Vs. Total Recall, he compares Bush unfavorably to Arnold
Schwarzenegger: Only in America could a guy who struts in an action-hero's
Hollywood costume and barks macho lines from a script pass for a plausible
political leader. But if George W. Bush can get away with it, why should Arnold
Schwarzenegger be pilloried for the same antics? At least Mr. Schwarzenegger is
a show-biz pro. He never would have signed on for a remake of Top Gun without
first ensuring that it would have the same happy ending as the original.
After a litany of movie
references, Rich then gets really nasty. Critiquing the TV movie on 9-11, DC
9/11: Time of Crisis, Rich suggests it would make a fitting memorial to
Hitlers filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl: But this film, made with full Bush
administration cooperation (including that of the president himself), is
propaganda so untroubled by reality that it's best viewed as a fitting memorial
to Leni Riefenstahl. The script vouched for by Mr. Krauthammer and a couple of
other Beltway boys presents Dick Cheney as a mere supplicant to the all-knowing
Mr. Bush and somehow lets the administration (though not its predecessor) off
the hook for letting Osama bin Laden and his Saudi enablers slip away. New polls
reveal that Americans increasingly realize that they have been had.
For the rest of Frank Rich on Bush,
click here.
George W. Bush
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Iraq War |
Movies
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Frank Rich
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Leni Riefenstahl
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Arnold
Schwarzenegger
The
Times California Leanin
The Times leads with yesterdays top political
news: A federal appeals panel has delayed the California recall election, citing
the unreliability of punch-card voting. The pause is widely considered to be
good news for embattled Democratic Gov. Gray Davis.
The news pages of the Times play the story fairly straight (though the
front-page story by Charlie LeDuff and Nick Madigan typically dwells on the
anger from the right angle).
But the Times editorial,
Delaying the California Recall, ignores some inconvenient facts in order to
assert that the panel did the right thing. The editorial warns of mass
disenfranchisement that would violate the equal-protection principle. Then
the Times plays the race card: Counties using punch cards have nearly 50
percent more members of minorities than the others. Such a system, which the
state knows will throw out more minority than white votes, is inconsistent with
the Voting Rights Act.
The Times made no mention
of the liberal outlook of the panel, noted by election-law expert
Robert Alt on National Review Online. The Times was rather less sanguine
about ideologically tilted judges meddling in elections in a December 13, 2000,
editorial, written after the Supreme Court barred a recount of presidential
election votes in Florida, making Bush the winner over Al Gore: This will long
be remembered as an election decided by a conservative Supreme Court in favor of
a conservative candidate while the ballots that could have brought a different
outcome went uncounted in Florida.
The Times also ignored the
fact that those punch-card voting machines that are now such a threat to voting
rights apparently worked well enough to reelect Democrat Gov. Gray Davis last
fall, without any concern about mass disenfranchisement being expressed on the
Times editorial pages.
For the rest of the Times editorial on the
California recall,
click here.
George
Bush, Fascist?
Saturdays Arts & Ideas story by Alexander Stille
(with the long subhed: Fascist, Once Hitler Or Mussolini, Has Become So
Elastic That Its Used Today For bin Laden or Bush.) is on the surface an
examination of the use and overuse of the word fascist. But the article ends
up giving a lot of liberal history professors room to all but call George Bush
one.
Heres a quote from Robert
Paxton, a history professor at Columbia University: Whenever people start
locking up enemies because of national security without much legal care, you are
coming close.
Sheldon Wolin, who Stille
calls a professor emeritus of political thought at Princeton University, who
has compared Mr. Bush's military-minded foreign policy to the expansionism of
fascist regimes in the 1930's, says: We are facing forms of domination that
exceed the old vocabulary and so we have to try to find language that
corresponds to this condition.
Stille also notes: Abbott
Gleason, a historian at Brown University and the author of a book on
totalitarianism, admits that he has used the analogy with the Fascist era out of
a desire to provoke. The word fascist is so overloaded that it's a bad term for
any aspect of contemporary reality, he said. But he continued, I am worried
that we are going through a kind of anti-liberal revolt, belief in a very strong
state, a contempt for pluralism, for a `soft' welfare state and a sense that we
cannot afford certain freedoms.
Victoria De Grazia of
Columbia University lumps Bush and Italys prime minister Silvio Berlusconi with
Osama bin Laden: I think the problem is that we are dealing with all sorts of
new, strange political phenomena-Osama bin Laden, Hindu nationalism in India,
the Le Pen phenomenon in France, Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, Bush's doctrine of
pre-emptive force-and we don't have the right words to describe these things."
For the rest of Alexander Stilles story on George
Bush, fascist,
click here.