I’m back to daily delivery of the New York Times, so I get to digest it all at once, uninterrupted, over coffee on the couch, on dead tree. The editorial page today gives us small snippets of an entire world view. Just a sprinkling herewith. Here’s Kristof on American response to terror:
When the White House looks at Iraq, all it sees is hidden weaponry. It never notices the seething complexities in which we are about to embed our young men and women.
I’ll leave aside the notion that complexities can somehow “seethe.” Does Kristof actually believe that no-one in the administration has given any thought to the problems of governing a post-Saddam Iraq? Notice he doesn’t say they are under-estimating the problem. He says they never notice it. Only a New York Times writer is smart enough to see that. Then here’s the economic expert, Krugman, on the looming deficit:
[R]ight now the deficit, while huge in absolute terms, is only 2 – make that 3, O.K., maybe 4 – percent of G.D.P.
I take Krugman’s broader point about the deficit, and agree with it. But why such contemptuous sloppiness? There’s a critical difference between 2 and 4 percent of GNP. Isn’t there? Or take the lead op-ed, dripping with condescension toward people whose faith leads them to see some divine providence in human affairs. But it also includes more simple untruths:
So the White House and its backers can safely predict that the unpleasantness [of this war] will be over in a few weeks, with low casualties on both sides.
When has the White House said this? The piece doesn’t substantiate it because it can’t. What I’m getting at is not the validity of critiques of the administration. Or even turning the Times into a partisan platform. What’s dismaying is the sheer reckless condescension of the rhetoric, the assumption of Timesian omniscience, the contempt – not just disagreement – with which they view an administration grappling with some of the most difficult issues any administration has had to grapple with in recent times. It’s ugly and it’s cheap. And it’s getting uglier and cheaper all the time.
The Dish 