Bird DogThat won't help either. Have you seen Doonesbury lately ?
Posted on 05/28/2003 9:24:40 AM PDT by RippleFire
In the town where I live, you can turn in a criminal by calling (800) 898-TIPS. The New York Times now offers a similar service to its readers. They can finger crooked stories by sending an E-mail to The Times at retrace@nytimes.com. Jayson Blair is the proximate cause of this humiliating hotline. But some of the TIPS coming into The Times aren't about Blair. Nobody knows exactly who's under investigation. Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Rick Bragg was suspended last week for letting an uncredited intern do his reporting. He's quitting. And at least one other internal review is taking place. It concerns Pulitzer Prize columnist Maureen Dowd. I'm not a certified Timesologist, but I can't say I'm shocked by what's happening at the Newspaper of Record. I've been expecting a blowup since August, when The Times ran a front-page story misrepresenting Henry Kissinger's views on war with Iraq. A newspaper willing to lie so boldly in pursuit of its editorial agenda is a newspaper out of control. In fact, after the Kissinger incident, I stopped reading The Times' news section. But because I'm in the column-writing business, I continued looking at the editorial and op-ed pages. It was there, this month, that I came across an article by Dowd titled "Osama's Offspring." Dowd famously dislikes President Bush. She often calls him names and says mean things about him. This time, she accused him of flimflamming the country. Two bombs had just gone off in Saudi Arabia and Morocco, presumably detonated by Al Qaeda. According to Dowd, this gave the lie to the President's assertion, delivered in a speech in Little Rock, Ark., that Al Qaeda was "spent." Here's what she wrote: "'Al Qaeda is on the run,' President Bush said last week. 'That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly but surely being decimated ... they're not a problem anymore.'" Here's what Bush actually said: "Al Qaeda is on the run. That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly but surely being decimated. Right now, about half of all the top Al Qaeda operatives are either jailed or dead. In either case, they're not a problem anymore." The words in italics were replaced in Dowd's column by three little dots. Those dots say to the reader: Trust me, I'm abbreviating here, but what I'm leaving out doesn't change the meaning. But the dots did change the meaning. In fact, they turned it upside down. Far from declaring Al Qaeda "spent," Bush was warning the country against complacency. The only terrorists the President declared "no longer a problem" were the ones already jailed or dead. New York Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis says the paper is "looking into" the column. If Dowd intentionally misrepresented the President's words, she is guilty of a journalistic offense much worse than Bragg's intern problem, or even Blair's fantasies. Blair is a kid, after all, who made things up for fun and profit. Dowd is a major figure at The Times, a role model. A syndicated role model. Other journalists, including Andrew Sullivan and Greg Pierce of The Washington Times, have noted Dowd's dot trick. But as far as I know, I'm the first to turn her in to the TIPS hotline. If The Times finds her guilty, it can send my reward money to the Home for Wayward Columnists. And it should send Dowd there, too.
Bird DogI copied yout idea and forwarded a note to the Slime re: Miss Dowd.
I'll have to bookmark retrace@nytimes.com.
Dowd's lies are being sent to retrace@nytimes.com on a regular basis.
Her latest column carries no indication of past omissions but just so happens to contain the complete Bush quote.
Can't say I know how to find the infamous ...quote, anyone else?
I gave it up a couple of years ago. It used to be liberal but funny. Now it's just liberal.
LOL, that's how I read it too.
Maybe you'll get an auto-reply.
Well yeah, I just meant the original Times URL link as proof that the ...has been removed, or changed.
It sounds like there was some confusion, she restated this in a different op-Ed and quoted it correctly, but in the past she hadn't. I don't know which one in the past they are referring to, and I can't bring myself to read through all her collumns if I don't have to.
(Working with the same quote)
"Al Qaeda ... run... our country...(R)ight now. "
Well, that's normally the way editorials run. The only paper that routinely runs a rebuttal alongside the editorial is McPaper (USA Today), which runs a counterpoint to the (usually liberal) eds. it runs on the front page. That's probably because running a front-page editorial is unusual in US journalism (I mean an overt, admitted, editorial, not a puff-piece on a favourite Democrat or a slam on the NRA or something).
The only other paper I ever read with Page 1 Editorials was Pravda -- when it was the organ of State Communism.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
It's still on this page
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/14/opinion/14DOWD.html?ex=1054267200&en=158caf9f277bf396&ei=5070
May 14, 2003 Osama's Offspring
By MAUREEN DOWDWASHINGTON
We've had our regime change in the Middle East. Now Qaeda terrorists want theirs.
Even before Al Qaeda claimed credit for the explosions ripping through Riyadh on Monday night, the Saudi princes were frightened and seeking American help. They were scared that Al Qaeda, which they once used to deflect resentment away from their own corruption, had succeeded in infiltrating various levels of society, including the government.
The problem with Saudi Arabia is that it is such an opaque society, you can never be sure what's going on there from the outside — and apparently it's not spectacularly transparent from the inside, either.
U.S. intelligence analysts warned the Saudis that an attack on American interests in the kingdom was coming. The Saudis reacted the way they typically do, defensively. The anti-American chatter had become such a din in the last two weeks that the State Department had warned Americans not to travel there.
The Saudi princes reluctantly began an investigation into the possible Qaeda plot. But even in such a repressed and repressive state, Saudi security forces couldn't stop the terrorists. They tried to seize an Islamic militant cell with links to radical clerics last Tuesday. The authorities found 800 pounds of explosives, but all 19 cell members — 17 Saudis, one Iraqi and one Yemeni — escaped.
So, with a new Qaeda spokesman warning that "an attack against America is inevitable" and that "future missions have been entrusted" to a "new team . . . well protected against U.S. intelligence services," now we have to worry about 19 slippery Islamic terrorists coming at us from Saudi Arabia?
Talk about a sickening sense of déjà vu.
Busy chasing off Saddam, the president and vice president had told us that Al Qaeda was spent. "Al Qaeda is on the run," President Bush said last week. "That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly but surely being decimated. . . . They're not a problem anymore."
Members of the U.S. intelligence community bragged to reporters that the terrorist band was crippled, noting that it hadn't attacked during the assault on Iraq.
"This was the big game for them — you put up or shut up, and they have failed," Cofer Black, who heads the State Department's counterterrorism office, told The Washington Post last week.
Of course, the other way of looking at it is that Al Qaeda works at its own pace and knows how to conduct operations on the run.
Al Qaeda has been weakened by the arrest of leaders like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. But Osama, in recent taped messages, has exhorted his followers to launch suicide attacks against the invaders of Iraq. And as one ambassador from an Arab country noted, the pictures of American-made tanks in both Iraq and the West Bank of Israel certainly attracted new recruits to Osama.
The administration's lulling triumphalism about Al Qaeda exploded on Monday in Riyadh, when well-planned and coordinated suicide strikes with car bombs and small-arms fire killed dozens in three housing complexes favored by Westerners, including seven Americans.
The attack was timed to coincide with Colin Powell's visit to the kingdom, and clearly meant to hurt both America and Saudi Arabia. Even though Rummy announced two weeks ago in Riyadh that he was pulling the U.S. troops Osama hated so much from Saudi Arabia, Qaeda leaders still want to undermine the Saudi monarchy that has been so receptive to infidel U.S. presidents.
Buried in the rubble of Riyadh are some of the Bush administration's basic assumptions: that Al Qaeda was finished, that invading Iraq would bring regional stability and that a show of American superpower against Saddam would cow terrorists.
Bob Graham, the Florida senator running for president, said at the Capitol yesterday that Iraq had been a diversion: "We essentially ended the war on terror about a year ago. And since that time, Al Qaeda has been allowed to regenerate."
Doing a buddy routine with Rummy yesterday in Washington, as the defense secretary accepted an award, Vice President Dick Cheney was as implacable as ever. "The only way to deal with this threat ultimately is to destroy it," he said.
So destroy it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/14/opinion/14DOWD.html?ex=1054267200&en=158caf9f277bf396&ei=5070
Osama's Offspring (May 14, 2003)
See post 57, above, for the text from the column.
NO, I would say that Maureen Dowd's problem is a hatred of men. This is what actuates her at every level. She is not above favoring some man....as long as he serves her ultimate agenda of ridiculing masculinity wherever she sees it. Her marxism and feminism is simply a manifestation of the psychological hatred and envy which, I say, drives her efforts.
This probably seems over the top at first blush, since I never met her but only have tried to read her op-ed column after having read her news reporting. On that basis alone, however, I think I am correct because her personal writing style --often stream of consciousness-- is revealing to those who can see it.
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