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The Wall Street Journal is a joke.

A. Lincoln: A house divided cannot stand.

Neither can a paper at war with itself.

World to WSJ you cannot have it both ways.

Cut out the good cop bad cop crap.

The Journal has more business sense the NYT this is p r and damage control which means they have heard from subscribers and are rightly scared.

Only in a world given to moral relativism can the WSJ signficantly distance itself from the NYT on this issue.

"A. Lincoln: A house divided cannot stand."

It seems that history is repeating itself here, with the obvious differences of time and place. Lincoln waged a furious war on a press which he believed to be undermining the war effort. The list of Newspapers either shut down or swayed to change is numerous. I'm surprised Bush and the House Republicans waited this long to do the same. The question is: How many papers will they go after? It's obvious that the Times is not the only paper that defies the govt.

I read the WSJ regularly. Every now and again one of their staff reporters writes an article that would be best placed in the Boston Globe or NYT, but on the whole I have no problem with their news reporting which tends to be far more objective and factual than the rest of the MSM. Finally, they tend to be unconflicted and explicit about the position they take.

The writing is excellent.

I have subscribed to the WSJ for many years too because of work. I was shocked when they came out with the same story on the same day as the NYT. Feeling betrayed, I shot off a nasty letter to the WSJ telling them essentially that they were no better than the politically motivated and agenda driven NYT rag !! I also told them that after many years I would no longer be subscribing to the WSJ.

I was really surprised when I got the following email back from them -

Dear Reader:
We take national security considerations related to our reporting with the utmost seriousness. That is why, in the past, we have withheld certain information from articles after government officials asked us to and explained how the information, if published, might put at risk American lives. In the case of Friday's article "Treasury Tracks Financial Data in Secret Program," however, government officials made no such request. In fact, they cooperated with our reporting.
You can be assured that if the government asked us to withhold publication, we would consider such a request very seriously.
Thank you for contacting us and giving us an opportunity to address your concerns, and thank you for your readership.
Sincerely,
Paul E. Steiger
Managing Editor
The Wall Street Journal.

I was so insulted when I got that response that I fired off another email back to the WSJ. In my response I basically said WHAT ?? How could you not have understood the dynamics going on with the NYT and the Treasury. How could you not have known the NYT disclosure was the result of a leak. How could you not have recognized the agenda the NYT had against the Bush administration and the Iraq war !! How could you not have known the sensitive nature of the SWIFT program.

I also told them, that in their own article, they had indicated, how the Treasury called the disclosure "regrettable" and referred to the program as an "essential tool" for fighting terrorism. So therefore, why were they insulting my intelligence by trying to tell me otherwise, now. Anyway, I ended my long winded email by telling them ......NOT BUYING, THE EXCUSE OR THE WSJ !!

So the bottom line here is ...... I was really surprised to see the editorial this morning. After reading the editorial, I think I half forgive them and can believe that maybe the administration did seek them out to correct the 30% that the NYT was going to get wrong and to someway ruin the thunder of the NYT.

If anyone is wondering why it took the WSJ a week to respond ....well maybe it took that long to realize how irate their readers really were. And perhaps it took them a week to read their email and get their story straight !! Their story straight ...after getting a feel for the backlash and outrage against the NYT of which they didn't want any part of !!