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Liberals wouldn't lift a finger to stop the torturing -- to the point of destroying -- unborn human life. But put a terrorist [or a baby seal, for that matter] in the block and watch them spring into sensitive-soul mode. Rosa Brooks epitomizes the mindset in her current LA Times column, "Torture: the new abortion." Her notion is that among Republicans, the new litmus test for presidential candidates is not opposition to abortion but support for U.S. officials who order the "torture of prisoners."

Feelin' lucky, punk? The 9-10 mentality is alive and well and living at the Los Angeles Times. In A really bad case of 'reality', house columnist Rosa Brooks approvingly cites unnamed "experts" thusly: [Al Qaeda] was little more than an obscure group of extremist thugs, well financed and intermittently lethal but relatively limited in their global and regional political pull. On 9/11, they got lucky — but despite the unexpected success of their attack on the U.S., they did not pose an imminent mortal threat to the nation. Brooks offers up that analysis in service of her theory that by...

THE MEDIA'S Stockholm syndrome finally seems to be wearing off. Like freed hostages who gradually cease to identify with their captors, mainstream media outlets seem to have been seized by a new spirit of liberation in their coverage of the Bush administration. Lately, we've seen a rash of astonished, outraged stories and editorials relating to the administration's recently discovered malfeasance. They go something like this: • President Bush commuted "Scooter" Libby's prison sentence! That's outrageous! Bush's own Justice Department routinely calls for some of the harshest sentences available under the federal sentencing guidelines! Why, Bush is a hypocrite! • Bush...

Does L.A. Times columnist Rosa Brooks think 9-11 was "fictional and entirely implausible"? I ask, because in the GOP's Torture Enthusiasts today, that's how she describes a similar scenario that Brit Hume sketched during this past Tuesday's GOP presidential debate. In inviting the candidates to discuss their views on interrogation during this past Tuesday's get together, debate moderator and Fox News DC Bureau managing editor Brit Hume said the following: The questions in this round will be premised on a fictional, but we think plausible scenario involving terrorism and the response to it. Here is the premise: Three shopping centers...

"24" is just a TV show. But in her Los Angeles Times column of today, America Tortures (yawn), Rosa Brooks cites the actions of the show's characters -- and the American public's reaction to them -- as evidence of the way in which we have become inured to U.S. government-sponsored torture. In doing so, Brooks unwittingly raises another, more interesting issue. Writes Brooks: "If you need any more evidence that the American public has gotten blasé about torture, consider the hit Fox action drama '24.' The show featured 67 torture scenes during its first five seasons, and most of...

In the course of her recent Los Angeles Times column, Rosa Brooks wrote this about the levels of electricity and oil production in Iraq: "Before the U.S. invasion, the . . . residents of Baghdad used 16 to 24 hours of electricity each day. Today, thanks to us, they thriftily make do with about six hours of electricity a day . . . Oil production is still well below prewar levels."Alarms went off for me when I read Brooks' claims. They were largely at odds with what I had learned when I interviewed in Baghdad in November the directors of...

Haven't the MSM been suggesting it's only Republicans who engage in mean-spirited tactics in the closing weeks of a campaign? Yet in her column this morning, the LA Times Rosa Brooks dug deep into the dreck, depicting W as a drunk. She writes: "When it comes to Iraq, being a citizen in George W. Bush's America is like being a passenger in a car driven by a drunk driver." Shades of the 2000 campaign, when just days before the election a decades-old Bush DUI surfaced, under circumstances giving reason to believe a Gore aide was behind the leak.Credit Brooks with...

by Mark Finkelstein October 21, 2006 - 18:42 Be it her politics - or perhaps her personality - one thing is clear. Some big-time MSM women columnists don't dig Hillary. Yesterday I described here how the LA Times Rosa Brooks described Hillary - in the context of her support for legislation authorizing torture in ticking-bomb type cases - as having "hit bottom"and "fallen as low as it's possible to go." Today Maureen Dowd weighs in - with a vengeance. The central thesis of the subscription-required Obama’s Project Runway is that the Illinois senator needs to decide whether he is content...

I experienced an eerie sense of déjà vu this morning while reading an AP article entitled "Iran Blames U.S. for N. Korea Nuke Test." I could swear that I had already read this same blame-America analysis somewhere else. That sent me scrambling back to my report on the piece by LA Times columnist Rosa Brooks, "A Good Week for the Axis of Evil" contained in my NB item of yesterday [but please don't read just yet]. And sure enough, I find language there that closely tracked the statement from Tehran.So, let's have a little fun. I'll set the two statements...

You remember Rosa Brooks. She's the LA Times columnist who vehemently denied hating George Bush. To judge by her column of today, she has an odd way of proving it. In A Good Week for the Axis of Evil, Brooks lumps Pres. Bush in with the most evil dictators from around the globe, past and present.After arguing that it's been a good week for "Dear Leader Kim Jong Il," Saddam Hussein and the leaders of Iran and Al-Qaeda, Brooks claims "this week's news was a humiliating setback for the United States' homegrown authoritarians — a.k.a. the Bush administration."Just in case...

by Mark Finkelstein October 6, 2006 - 11:10 Do you favor tax cuts? If so, you're no better than a congressman wanting to slip the pants off a page. Worse, for that matter. That's the reasoning of Rosa Brooks, L.A. Times columnist. In Grand Old Party of Child Endangerment, Brooks argues that: "Foley's acts may have damaged the handful of boys unfortunate enough to have attracted his attention, but the damage to children caused by his abuse of power is still far, far less than the damage to American children caused by this Congress' disastrous mismanagement of the American economy."...

by Mark Finkelstein September 29, 2006 - 09:59 Last week I posted an item, Bush-hating Rosa Brooks No Dissent, critiquing a column by Rosa Brooks of the LA Times. Brooks has fired back with another column today, I'm No Bush Hater, ostensibly seeking to refute my criticism. Though Brooks doesn't deign to mention me by name or link to my column so her readers could judge for themselves, it's clear whom she has in mind when writing that "one right-wing blogger . . . not only mischaracterized what I said but referred to me as "Bush hating," "blinded" by "virulent"...

by Mark Finkelstein September 22, 2006 - 07:08 The bio of Los Angeles Times columnist Rosa Brooks couldn't be much more impressive in terms of conventional credentials: Harvard, Oxford, Yale. Adviser to State Department. Kennedy School Fellow. But despite having her ticket prestigiously punched time and again, her column of today reveals that nowhere has she learned much in the way of nuance or common sense. Her opposition to President Bush's efforts to clarify interrogation rules so as to allow some more forceful technqiues is absolute and implacable, utterly failing to acknowledge the realities of terrorism on a scale unimaginable...

by Mark Finkelstein July 21, 2006 - 06:38 Compare and contrast these two passages from today's Bush's Burned Bridges by LA Times columnist Rosa Brooks: "Things fell apart so quickly. At the beginning of this millennium, the Cold War was over, the prosperous United States was the sole remaining superpower and global opinion was largely sympathetic to U.S. aims. In the wake of brutal ethnic wars in Central Europe and Africa, the international community had forged a new determination to prevent conflict and atrocities. The volatile Middle East was quiet, and the world seemed headed toward stability rather than chaos."...

The latest op-ed piece by liberal Los Angeles Times columnist Rosa Brooks is called, "When crass is called for" (Friday, February 10, 2006). It begins with the eye-opening line, "It's time to take a stand against civility, decency and appropriateness." The rest of the column is essentially a defense of the tasteless remarks by Rev. Joseph Lowery and former President Jimmy Carter at the funeral of Coretta Scott King on Tuesday. At one point of her piece, Brooks unbelievably declares, "I saw nothing uncivil about the remarks made by Lowery and Carter."And in her concluding paragraph, Brooks shrugs (emphasis mine),...