Two oddities leaped out at me this morning, reading the (much improved) New York Times. The first was the Machiavellian assertion that Donald Rumsfeld leaked his own memo. here’s the editorial:
Mr. Rumsfeld is a canny player who knows exactly what he is doing when he drafts internal memos and makes them public.
This would be big news. So what evidence does the NYT have for it? The original leak was to USA Today. Does the NYT know something about USA Today’s source? Or is this just made up? Then there was this nugget in Alessandra Stanley’s review of the pro-Stalin BBC miniseries romanticizing the treachery of various British Communist spies in the 1930s and after:
The script barely mentions what was really happening in Stalin’s Soviet Union at that time. (The one heads-up: the K.G.B. handler Otto is recalled to Moscow and lets Philby know it is a death sentence.) But given the fact that during the purges of the 1930’s neither they nor almost anyone else in the West really knew, or wanted to know, it is perhaps understandable.
This is absurd. Several honest reporters revealed the extent of Stalin’s butchery at the time; Walter Duranty knew about it but lied; the brilliant Cambridge traitors have no excuse whatever for supporting totalitarian despotism when it was right in front of their eyes. Stanley also has a throw-away line that awareness of the horrors of mass starvation, gulags and millions of deaths is somehow a function of mere “neocon indignation,” and that fashion now countenances anti-anti-Stalin nostalgia. The glibness is sickening. Can you imagine a New York Times reviewer being so sanguine about a movie that romanticized spies for Nazi Germany? Or explained horror at the Holocaust as a function of “neocon indignation”? How about human indignation? How about human horror?
The Dish 