Drumbeats 2
The New York Times learns from its mistakes on Iraq:
With a different White House, we might dismiss this as posturing — or bank on sanity to carry the day, or the warnings of exhausted generals or a defense secretary more rational than his predecessor. Not this crowd.
Four years after his pointless invasion of Iraq, President Bush still confuses bullying with grand strategy. He refuses to do the hard work of diplomacy — or even acknowledge the disastrous costs of his actions. The Republican presidential candidates have apparently decided that the real commander in chief test is to see who can out-trash talk the White House on Iran.
Endless war.
It’s a Republican thing.
October 29, 2007 at 8:21 pm
From James Taranto:
The New York Times pioneered the journalistic technique known as dowdification, which consists of using ellipses to change the meaning of a quote. But there are other ways of misleading via quotation. One example appears in the lead editorial of today’s Times, infelicitously titled “Trash Talking World War III”:
“America’s allies and increasingly the American public are playing a ghoulish guessing game: Will President Bush manage to leave office without starting a war with Iran? Mr. Bush is eagerly feeding those anxieties. This month he raised the threat of “World War III” if Iran even figures out how to make a nuclear weapon.”
This is not false, but it is misleading. Here is what the president actually said:
“I believe that the Iranian–if Iran had a nuclear weapon, it would be a dangerous threat to world peace. But this–we got a leader in Iran who has announced that he wants to destroy Israel. So I’ve told people that if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon. I take the threat of Iran with a nuclear weapon very seriously.”
October 30, 2007 at 6:19 am
one thing that will never happen is Israel being wiped out! And I will tell you why? God said so!!! It may look grim and bad, but Israel never be wiped out.