CRITICIZING BUSH

Several of you have emailed me to say that I was unfair to the New York Times. There was indeed a wave of criticism of Bush’s Middle East policy over the weekend and the previous week. And sure enough, there was – in the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, and andrewsullivan.com, for example. But that wasn’t the point of the Times piece. The point of the Times’s piece was that the criticism was aimed at Bush’s apparent stand-offishness and inattention to the problem. The implication was that Bush’s mistake was not to continue Clinton’s policy of constant hands-on meddling. But the criticism from the right has been precisely the opposite – that Cheney’s trip was too involved, that it was too defensive, that the administration was too equivocal in is support of Israel against terror, that it was micro-managing too much. All that makes the Times’ spin even more disingenous. At least it does to my mind.