Friday, July 17, 2009

Legal & Necessary

The New York Times has an op-ed today titled, "Illegal, and Pointless." In the course of pushing the same old left-wing cry about investigations into supposed "abuses" under the Bush administration, the Times makes the usual assertions that the BDS crowd pretends everyone should just take for granted. It starts with the first line.

We’ve known for years that the Bush administration ignored and broke the law repeatedly in the name of national security.
Actually, we know no such thing. There is no unmistakable evidence that the Bush administration broke the law at all, let alone repeatedly. Everything it did had an arguably legal justification. Take the CIA assassination program, 
what is overwhelmingly clear is that there was no legal or rational justification for Vice President Dick Cheney’s order to conceal the program from Congress.
This is not just wrong, it's a flat-out lie. The statute indicates that briefing Congress was a judgment call. There was nothing illegal about Cheney's order, and the Times knows this. It's deliberately lying for partisan reasons. Then there is this whopper,
it’s hard to imagine Congress balking at killing terrorists.
Yeah right. It's just so hard to imagine terrorist-rights supporters who hate the CIA -- pretty much every liberal Democrat in Congress -- balking at a CIA assassination program. And there were all kinds of reasons not to brief Congress, among them not having secret information appear in the New York Times -- which has proven repeatedly that it could care less about damaging national security by publishing leaked documents.

The entire op-ed is a pile of garbage that could have appeared in pretty much any BDS-infected left-wing blog. The Times pretends that the Bush administration not only might have broken the law or gone over the line, it just assumes that it did so deliberately over and over again. Naturally it also takes a convenient hindsight view that everything could easily have been done differently. The article is an example of partisan hackery at its finest.

2 comments:

  1. Rock on UNRR. I've stopped reading the Times because of their inserted short, little diatribes in their articles stated as facts that the Bush administration was a. stupid b. evil c. wrong into their front page and general news stories. I'm like, 'what a minute, that's an opinion stated as fact and its on the front page.' It's bad when a newspaper prints such views as your aforementioned article on their editorial page, but its much worse when they let it seep into their front pages. Here's an example - check out RCP Blog Friday 'CBO disappears'

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  2. I read it because it's a news leader and covers a wide range of stories. But yeah, their editorial stance has grown increasingly shrill and partisan. I don't mind left-wing ranting from a columnist like Paul Krugman, but it would be nice if the editorial board would at least keep up the pretense of professional journalism.

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