Free Republic

While CBS News coverage of the State of the Union speech showcased the bombast of New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, the ABC News coverage was the most hostile to Bush and conservative policies with its analysis delivered through a liberal prism. Anchor Elizabeth Vargas began the evening by emphasizing Bush's low approval rating fueled by "an inept response to Hurricane Katrina, and the indictment of a high ranking White House official and, of course, growing dissatisfaction with the war in Iraq." She resurrected Watergate as she highlighted how Bush's 42 percent approval level "is the worst for a President...

President Bush said Tuesday that "I take responsibility" for failures in dealing with Hurricane Katrina and said the disaster raised broader questions about the government's ability to respond to natural disasters as well as terror attacks. "Katrina exposed serious problems in our response capability at all levels of government," Bush said at joint White House news conference with the president of Iraq. "To the extent the federal government didn't fully do it's job right, I take responsibility," Bush said. The president was asked whether people should be worried about the government's ability to handle another terrorist attack given failures in...

True, pro-Bush bloggers may have been more suspicious than those who think Bush spends his days leashed and curled at Karl Rove's feet -- but they were right, and that's what counted in the end. If partisanship made some unusually suspicious, might it also have made others unduly credulous? Naaah. There's no evidence the critics were right, you know. The CBS report can't bring itself, even now, to say the documents were unquestionably bogus. Rather himself told the investigating panel that "no one had provided persuasive evidence that the documents were not authentic." This is like floating in the North...

....I do not agree with readers who say the Globe should have held off writing about the CBS broadcast until it made its own verification. The Globe had no reason at that point to doubt the network's judgment. And newspapers routinely report important news generated by other media outlets as a way of keeping readers informed. That's their job. But I do think that in the week after the initial CBS broadcast, the paper could have better reflected the emerging doubts, either by publishing available wire service stories or, better yet, developing its own. The Globe has a history of...

Go to Google, enter "miserable failure", and click on the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button. I get the official page for President Bush at the White House site, http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html. I've gotten it over and over.

Paul Krugman, the New York Times' rabidly anti-Bush columnist was way off base in writing about the role then Governor George Bush played in an arrangement between Texas and the University of Texas Investment Management Co. (Utimco). Krugman, who once collected a cool $50,000 from Enron for doing nothing (they just wanted to capitalize on his ... er ... celebrated name, he claims), made a series of allegations in a July 17 Times column that "are not accurate" says William H. Cunningham former chancellor and former chairman of the board of regents of the University of Texas System. In a...