Salon: The Washington Post's creeping hawkishness

[kskiska]

Once it challenged Nixon. Now the supposedly liberal paper is attacking Kerry for not fully embracing Bush's Iraq war

By James P. Pinkerton

Remember the days when the Washington Post was the enemy of the Republican administration in the White House? Those days are gone. Today, the neoconservative voice of the Post's editorial page is one of President Bush's most valuable allies. It's possible, of course, to find more hawkish voices than that of the Post, but none have the same wide circulation or impact -- and none have the Post's liberal reputation. Which is a gift to the neocons, who can say, "Even the liberal Washington Post agrees with us!"

What a difference a few decades make. Back in 1971, the Post, along with the New York Times, began publishing the leaked Pentagon Papers, the documents that proved that America's entry into Vietnam in the previous decade had been predicated on lies. The Nixon administration took both newspapers all the way to the Supreme Court in an effort to squelch the publication of the documents -- and lost.

(snip)

That was then. Now the Post's editorial page is helping the current Republican president win reelection. To be sure, the Post rarely praises Bush, but it frequently pokes at John Kerry. Which amounts to the same difference.

Exhibit A is the Post's lead editorial on July 30, the morning after Kerry's acceptance speech to the Democratic National Convention, titled "A Missed Opportunity." The editorial takes Kerry to task for not embracing Bush's war in Iraq.

That nonembrace made Kerry's speech "a disappointment," according to the paper. The Post fretted that "Kerry last night elided the charged question of whether, as president, he would have gone to war in Iraq. He offered not a word to celebrate the freeing of Afghans from the Taliban, or Iraqis from Saddam Hussein, and not a word about helping either nation toward democracy." At a time when even conservatives such as William F. Buckley, Bill O'Reilly and Tucker Carlson have backed away from their once rock-solid support for the war, surely the Democratic nominee's waning enthusiasm for the war in Iraq is not a shock.

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http://salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/08/04/washington_post/index.html

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

1. Correct me if I am wrong:

Wasn't this Pinkerton guy all over the talkies, during the Clinton Imbroglio, coming across like a smarmy jerk?

[Zo Zig]

2. Your right, but

Pinkerton has done at least one hit piece on the chimp in the last few months maybe more. Interestingly, he has two voices the one on the Fox show and another in print. The shift to Slate seems to be telling however. Another example of this shift is Fine-ho and his blow up with Tweety "Sibel"(the many faces of eve) Matthews.
Remember when Pinky got back from Iraq, he wrote that the book he chose for the trip was Don Quixote. I thought that was an interesting choice, tilling at windmills?
Shift?
Will a new paper rise to the top in the liberal world, silly me!