From the WSJ Opinion Archives

by JAMES TARANTO
Friday, June 30, 2006 4:05 P.M. EDT

Best of the Tube This Weekend
We'll be appearing this weekend, along with Melanie Kirkpatrick and Dan Henninger, on Fox News Channel's "The Journal Editorial Report." Topics are the Supreme Court's term, Warren Buffett's gigantic gift and why George Washington would love John Bolton. Plus Paul Gigot interviews former solicitor general Ted Olson.

Tune in tomorrow at 11 p.m. EDT or Sunday at 6 a.m. For a complete list of airtimes in the contiguous U.S., click the link atop this item.

The Migrant Workers of Park Ridge
CNN reports on a speech by New York's junior senator:

Appearing before a religious conference earlier this week, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-New York) told the audience that as a child attending Sunday school she would baby-sit the children of migrant workers so that their older siblings could join their parents at work.

"I was fortunate that at an early age, through my church, I was given the opportunity to expand my horizons," Clinton told the 600 adults and teenagers attending the Sojourners "Covenant for a New America" conference.

Mrs. Clinton grew up in Park Ridge, Ill., a tony Chicago suburb that as of 2000, according to census data, was 95.4% white, had a median family income of $87,795, and had a grand total of 174 families (1.7%) below the poverty level. How many migrant workers could there have been for her to baby-sit for?

A Swift Response
We've received many emails over the past week demanding to know what we think of the New York Times's, and The Wall Street Journal's, reporting of a classified program to monitor terrorist financing. On this we defer to the Journal editorial page, which explains today how the two papers' actions differed:

According to Tony Fratto, Treasury's Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, he first contacted the Times some two months ago. He had heard Times reporters were asking questions about the highly classified program involving Swift, an international banking consortium that has cooperated with the U.S. to follow the money making its way to the likes of al Qaeda or Hezbollah. Mr. Fratto went on to ask the Times not to publish such a story on grounds that it would damage this useful terror-tracking method.

Sometime later, Secretary John Snow invited Times Executive Editor Bill Keller to his Treasury office to deliver the same message. Later still, Mr. Fratto says, Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton, the leaders of the 9/11 Commission, made the same request of Mr. Keller. Democratic Congressman John Murtha and Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte also urged the newspaper not to publish the story.

The Times decided to publish anyway, letting Mr. Fratto know about its decision a week ago Wednesday. The Times agreed to delay publishing by a day to give Mr. Fratto a chance to bring the appropriate Treasury official home from overseas. Based on his own discussions with Times reporters and editors, Mr. Fratto says he believed "they had about 80% of the story, but they had about 30% of it wrong." So the Administration decided that, in the interest of telling a more complete and accurate story, they would declassify a series of talking points about the program. They discussed those with the Times the next day, June 22.

Around the same time, Treasury contacted Journal reporter Glenn Simpson to offer him the same declassified information. Mr. Simpson has been working the terror finance beat for some time, including asking questions about the operations of Swift, and it is a common practice in Washington for government officials to disclose a story that is going to become public anyway to more than one reporter. Our guess is that Treasury also felt Mr. Simpson would write a straighter story than the Times, which was pushing a violation-of-privacy angle; on our reading of the two June 23 stories, he did.

It's a long editorial, and worth reading in full.

We're rather amused by one argument the Times and its defenders have deployed against the paper's critics. Here's executive editor Bill Keller in a letter "sent to readers who have written to him" about the story and published in the paper Sunday:

Some of the incoming mail quotes the angry words of conservative bloggers and TV or radio pundits who say that drawing attention to the government's anti-terror measures is unpatriotic and dangerous. (I could ask, if that's the case, why they are drawing so much attention to the story themselves by yelling about it on the airwaves and the Internet.)

On the op-ed page today, Richard Clarke and Roger Cressey, erstwhile national security officials, echo the theme:

In the end, all the administration denunciations do is give the press accounts an even higher profile. If administration officials were truly concerned that terrorists might learn something from these reports, they would be wise not to give them further attention by repeatedly fulminating about them.

The obvious point here is that we don't remember anyone in the pages of the Times calling for the prosecution of Joe Wilson, David Corn, Josh Marshall, Paul Krugman or any of the other Angry Left loudmouths who drew so much attention to Valerie Plame's CIA employment by yelling and fulminating about her "outing."

The less obvious point is even more amusing. Keller and the two RCs are suggesting that it's not the New York Times but TV pundits, bloggers and administration officials who are, in Keller's words, "drawing so much attention to the story." If this argument isn't totally disingenuous--granted, that's an "if" the size of Texas and Oklahoma combined--then the implication is that hardly anyone pays attention to the Times.

Some of His Best Friends . . .
Jon Carroll, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, offers a rather imaginative defense of the New York Times:

The name of the New York Times contains the word "New York." Many members of the president's base consider "New York" to be a nifty code word for "Jewish." It is very nice for the president to be able to campaign against the Jews without (a) actually saying the word "Jew" and (b) without irritating the Israelis. A number of prominent Zionist groups think the New York Times is insufficiently anti-Palestinian, so they think the New York Times isn't Jewish enough.

So Carroll is sneering at "prominent Zionist groups" for being "anti-Palestinian" but he thinks President Bush is an anti-Semite because he criticizes a newspaper that has "New York" in its name. That's what we call chutzpah.

Greenhouse Gas
Linda Greenhouse, who covers the Supreme Court for the New York Times, is in a state of bliss over yesterday's decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which struck down the Pentagon's system for trying terrorists at Guantanamo Bay:

The decision was such a sweeping and categorical defeat for the administration that it left human rights lawyers who have pressed this and other cases on behalf of Guantánamo detainees almost speechless with surprise and delight, using words like "fantastic," "amazing" and "remarkable." . . .

The courtroom was, surprisingly, not full, but among those in attendance there was no doubt they were witnessing a historic event, a defining moment in the ever-shifting balance of power among branches of government that ranked with the court's order to President Richard M. Nixon in 1974 to turn over the Watergate tapes. . . .

In the courtroom on Thursday, the chief justice sat silently in his center chair as Justice Stevens, sitting to his immediate right as the senior associate justice, read from the majority opinion. It made for a striking tableau on the final day of the first term of the Roberts court: the young chief justice, observing his work of just a year earlier taken apart point by point by the tenacious 86-year-old Justice Stevens, winner of a Bronze Star for his service as a Navy officer in World War II.

This is so over the top that it defies even our satirical ability.

Reuters, the Tyrant's Stenographer
"Mariela Castro is leading a Cuban revolution less well-known than her Uncle Fidel's--one in favor of sexual tolerance within the island's macho society," Reuters "reports" from Havana:

Castro, 43, is leading the charge from her government-funded National Center for Sex Education, based in an old Havana mansion. . . .

Mariela Castro says she isn't a leader, but simply part of a movement for greater tolerance.

Nevertheless, she admits her access to the two most powerful figures in the country has helped her cause.

Castro says she has the support of her 75-year-old father, who is second in charge of the all-powerful Communist party and as first vice president in line to succeed Fidel.

"Of course, I talk with my father whenever I have the chance. He is one of those in the party that supports our work. He thinks it is useful, good, just," she said.

It's a bit reminiscent of the dispatches from Baghdad in 2002, in which Reuters "reported" on Saddam Hussein's "election" (100% of the vote, 100% turnout) as if it were an actual election.

The First-Person Singular 'Some'
"The flooding that swallowed up communities along the Susquehanna and Delaware Rivers this week was not merely the result of what meteorologists call a striking rain event, three to five inches of rain across large areas in just a few hours. It was also caused by all the rain leading up to the deluge, saturating the ground. The storm, which set records in some areas for both rainfall totals and flood levels, was the third in as many years to cause extensive damage in the two river basins, prompting some to wonder whether the extreme weather patterns that scientists say accompany global warming have already arrived."--New York Times, June 30

'I Have a Dream'
"Rich Folks Get More Sleep--Blacks and Men Get Less"--headline, Reuters, June 29

On What Planet?
"World Cup Viewers May Top 30 Billion"--headline, Hollywood Reporter, June 29

An Unlikely Investment Strategy Pans Out
"Military Claims Gains on Iraqi Terrorists"--headline, Associated Press, June 29

Better Late Than Never

"Dave Matthews Band Blamed for Human Waste"--headline, WBBM-TV Web site (Chicago), Aug. 24, 2004

"Dave Matthews Band 'Offsetting' Its Tour Pollution"--headline, Reuters, June 29, 2006

Have Some More French Fries, Barbie
"Weighted Toys May Help Burn Calories"--headline, Associated Press, June 29

If It's Such a Secret, Why Are They Drawing Attention to It?
"The Secret to Living Past 80: Make It to 65"--headline, LiveScience.com, June 29

Bottom Stories of the Day

  • "N.M. Courthouse Workers Endure Pigeon Poo"--headline, Associated Press, June 29

  • "Rare Birds Feed, Nest on Rte. 207"--headline, Times Herald-Record (Middletown, N.Y.), June 30

Keep Your Laws Off My Bunny!
"The likely world-record hammerhead shark caught in May weighed 1,280 pounds because it was pregnant with 55 pups--the most scientists have ever seen," reports the Associated Press:

"Although we are thankful that the fisherman gave this unique specimen to Mote, and we are learning a lot about this species from this large female shark, we were saddened to see so many unborn pups inside her so close to birth," said Dr. Robert Hueter, director of Mote's Center for Shark Research.

"Unborn pups"? What kind of antichoice extremist is this Dr. Hueter? Everyone knows they're just piscine fetuses, clumps of cells and nothing more.

Along similar lines, check out this recent Seattle Times story:

Feral rabbits continue to run amok in Woodland and Green Lake parks after a failed attempt to relocate them to a new home. . . .

The first relocation attempt, which was to have begun Jan. 15, proved to be too expensive to complete. . . . Another problem was warm spring weather. It's best to capture rabbits in colder months when they mate less. But an early spring heat wave meant many rabbits were pregnant when captured.

The program required sterilizing the captured rabbits, which would have meant terminating the pregnancies. Although a handful of rabbits were born, the Parks Department thought it best to postpone the roundup until this fall, when the weather is cooler.

Such disregard for leporine reproductive rights is enough to make our hare stand on end. Just because they're rabbits doesn't mean they should be expected to breed like rabbits. There's an animal rights movement and an abortion rights movement, but it's a scandal how few people take animal abortion rights seriously.

(Carol Muller helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Cheryl Sturm, Samuel Walker, Scot Silverstein, Jared Silverman, Tom Wasiak, Craig Greiner, Brian O'Rourke, C.E. Dobkin, George Struve, Patrick Charles, Andrew Robinson, Jeff Dobbs, Roger Love, John Forsberg, Steve Karass, John Long, Kyle Kyllan, Monica Muron, Rodney Sutton and Edward Groenthal. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)

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