AP OutAPs the AP
AP analysis trips through looking glass:
By DAVID ESPO, AP Special Correspondent Sat Jul 21, 12:15 PM ET
WASHINGTON - Senate Republicans are growing increasingly nervous defending the war in Iraq, and Democrats more confident in their attempts to end it.
Apparently the special correspondent missed the outcome of last week’s sleepover.
Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, made that clear Friday when he dismissed any suggestion that it could be November before a verdict is possible on the effects of the administration’s current troop increase.
“September is the month we’re looking at,” he said unequivocally.
Contrary to some distortions, AP’s own reporting last week made it clear that goalpost has not been moved.
To further underscore increasing nervousness, Espo reaches deep into the week for a quote that the AP liked very much at that time, which was Sen. Chris Bond, R-Mo., with an acknowledgement that, prior to the surge of troops and introduction of Petraeus’ counterinsurgency plan … that would be last year … the United States was following an ineffective strategy.
“The strategy we had before was not the right strategy,” he told reporters at midweek. “We should have had a counterinsurgency strategy.”
By his remarks, Bond made it clear he meant the strategy was wrong from the time Saddam Hussein was deposed until this past January, when Gen. David Petraeus was installed as top military commander. That’s a span of nearly four years.
Asked who bore responsibility for the error, Bond said, “Ultimately, obviously, the president.”
Should any blame fall on Congress — under Republican control the entire time?
“Congress was not running the war,” Bond replied.
Aha! Disgruntlement detected! … But someone needs to tell AP that “gotcha” journalism loses considerable umph in the rearview mirror. Bond voted against Reid Wednesday morning.
Here’s another gotcha:
But focusing attention on al-Qaida raises familiar questions: Were terrorists present in Iraq before the 2003 invasion and what would happen if U.S. forces departed?
According to several officials, Sen. George Voinnovich, R-Ohio, and McCain engaged in a brief, impromptu debate touching on that point recently at a private meeting of the rank and file.
Voinovich said the Sunni and Shiites in Iraq would together drive al-Qaida from their country if the U.S. were not there.
Voinnovich also voted against Reid. Speaking of Reid, who suffered the latest of several humiliating defeats last week, how does he come off?
If Republicans struggling to regroup — with or without the president they have followed through four years of war — Democrats are on the march.
“Time and the American people are … on our side,” Sen. Harry Reid, the majority leader, said last week. The Nevada Democrat spoke in defeat, after Republicans — whatever their private misgivings — blocked a final vote on a troop withdrawal deadline.
You know, I can’t help but think that if it were George Bush who lost votes and suffered a defeat in the Senate last week, the Dems would hardly be presented as “struggling to regroup” nor Bush as “on the march.”
In closing, AP reaches back to the November election and quotes failed 2004 presidential candidate and backbencher John Kerry:
The public, it turned out, was more unhappy about the war than the Democratic strategists understood. Despite their tentativeness, Democrats won control of the House and Senate in an election in which Iraq played a large role.
“Now it’s the unified Democratic position,” Kerry correctly e-mailed his supporters last week.
“In May, Republicans were dismissing even tough questions about the escalation. Now, they’re falling all over themselves to distance themselves from the president.”
Typo alert! I think “incorrectly” is what the AP meant, when it took the unusual step of overtly endorsing a pol’s quote here. How else to explain defections in the House from both Democratic flanks? Unity in the Senate of course was achieved by Joe Lieberman’s astonishing exit from his party, and subsequent election as an independent. How else to explain the anti-war movement’s disgust with Congress and sainted Cindy Sheehan’s challenge of Nancy Pelosi? And about that mandate…*
The wishful thinking and willful ignorance make this a joke of an “analysis,” but no reason to toss it. It could still make a good earnest-amateur comment to a blog post. Maybe this one at Kos, for example, which is nonsensical enough to actually make this AP analysis look sober and incisive. AP as a news service was founded on the principle that it would deliver just the facts, the raw news that newspapers of all political stripes could use as they choose. AP, with a virtual monopoly, has chosen to use its bully pulpit to push an anti-war, anti-administration agenda. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do it very well.
* Congress is already on the sidewalk. Cruel Surber kicks it in the head:
Contempt of Congress is a crime? If so, then 250 million Americans must be criminals, because there is a deep and abiding contempt for the job the Democratic Congress has done in its 6 months in power.
Good evening, Punditeers, Newsbusters. You’re up late. Never mind, come on in. I was just studying French. Getting ready for a little lightweight reading. Pondering the Seven Wonders, and wondering when his own people will finally peg this gutless one.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:35 am on Sunday, July 22, 2007
24 Responses to “AP OutAPs the AP”
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July 22nd, 2007 at 10:59 am
Maybe AP is using Kos to set their journalistic standards, eh?
July 22nd, 2007 at 11:09 am
Fake news and delusional “analysis” — they’re covering all the bases a really top notch news organization needs to.
July 22nd, 2007 at 11:53 am
Those writers over at Kos must be sending tip to Olbermann as well…
They are comparing the German’s failed final offensive in WWI (Dolchstosslegende) to Petreaus’ counterinsurgency strategy.
Why didn’t I see it?
and
Where can I buy my copy of “History for glue sniffing illiterates”.
July 22nd, 2007 at 12:11 pm
“Where can I buy my copy of “History for glue sniffing illiterates”.”
Try reading Jimmy Carters memoirs, I’m not sure if it is history for glue sniffing idiots or history for crackheads.
July 22nd, 2007 at 1:18 pm
[...] Jules Crittenden of the Bost Herald tears apart an AP analysis that contended Reid’s sleepover…. Yes, and Jon Lovitz’s hand hurt after smacking Andy Dick’s face into the bar five [...]
July 22nd, 2007 at 1:37 pm
They are comparing the German’s failed final offensive in WWI (Dolchstosslegende) to Petreaus’ counterinsurgency strategy.
This is why I can’t support the wholesale legalization of drugs — it would turn us into a society of retards.
July 22nd, 2007 at 1:51 pm
Can we start shooting yet?
July 22nd, 2007 at 1:52 pm
At least the tar and feathers? Please?
July 22nd, 2007 at 4:54 pm
Reid skillfully delayed the vote on next year’s Iraq War funding until September…after Petraeus reports to them.
That’s what all the fuss and feathers was about.
Mission Accomplished.
July 22nd, 2007 at 8:03 pm
I saw this strategy employed on PPV once…Michael Spinks skillfully pummelled Mike Tyson’s fists with his face for about 90 seconds and then lulled the panting madman into a false sense of security by collapsing to the canvas.
Al-phie pegs the tachometer again.
July 22nd, 2007 at 8:40 pm
Wretchard at The Belmont Club:
Wow. Just wow.
July 22nd, 2007 at 8:43 pm
So you’re comparing the Senate Republicans to Mike Tyson, Jeffy?
I think we both know those Chickenhawks would never get in the ring, but I do see the similarities between the Republicans and the Champ when it comes to spending habits.
and dating.
July 22nd, 2007 at 9:03 pm
Who’s still standing, who’s gotten his ass handed to him over and over? Who’s at 14% approval?
July 22nd, 2007 at 10:29 pm
Don’t tell me the rubes who want to continue a war that has the approval of only 23% of Americans are gonna start hiding behind polls now.
Too funny.
July 22nd, 2007 at 10:34 pm
I bring tidings of great joy
REBECCA IS OK
http://timblair.net/ee/index.php/weblog/comments/rebecca_is_ok/
July 22nd, 2007 at 10:34 pm
“Don’t tell me the rubes who want to continue a war that has the approval of only 23% of Americans are gonna start hiding behind polls now.
Too funny.”
Self-parody, alphie. That’s all we get from you. Ridicule the use of polling data in the same sentence that you use it? Self-parody. I’m starting to believe that you are just another version of the Chomskybot.
July 22nd, 2007 at 10:37 pm
Only time I will mention your name, other then this list I have put together that you are on the bottom of, alphie….if you hassle this lady when she returns…YOU will be ever so sorry. No threat, just fact…I don’t deal in threats…facts, yes.
July 22nd, 2007 at 10:50 pm
Don’t tell me the rubes who want to continue a war that has the approval of only 23% of Americans are gonna start hiding behind polls now.
I’m betting the other 77%, if asked if they seek defeat and failure for America (which no polls so far seem to have asked), will say they don’t. Those that do are of course the 20% or so hard core leftist dead-enders who haven’t gotten the news yet that communism is dead.
It is this method of push polling that will be the undoing of the democrats. The nutroots are already gearing up to force Nan and Harry into a corner demanding an impeachment. It will of course backfire spectacularly as did the Clinton impeachment. If the Sheehan wing forces the issue, I predict a wipeout for democrats in 08′. Loss of the congress and presidency.
July 22nd, 2007 at 10:56 pm
It’s what that 23% doesn’t say that has the Donks soiling their BVDs, al-Phie.
July 23rd, 2007 at 2:42 am
Jeffersonian—
Amazing quote from Wretchard at the Belmont.
You may appreciate…
Liberal writer Paul Berman (and Iraq war supporter) has been writing on revolutions and totalitarianism for the better part of his life. His book “Terror and Liberalism” is IMHO a masterpiece.
Part of his hypothesis is that the left is pathologically incapable of recognizing totalitarian movements dedicated to mass slaughter.
The left will even naively assists these movements as in the case of the French Socialists in WWII. The French Socialists had factions. One lead by Leon Blum recognized Hitler as evil and the other led by Paul Faure disagreed. The “Fauristes” were mostly anti-war leftists who thought the greatest danger was not Hitler, but warmongers and war profiteers. The anti-war “Fauristes” began to rationalize Hitler’s views and demonize Blum. They eagerly took jobs in the Vichy Govt. Blum was sent to Dachau.
“The belief underlying those anti-war arguments was, in short, an unyielding faith universal rationality. It was the old-fashioned liberal naïveté of the nineteenth century—the simple minded optimism that had blown up in the First World War but that, even so, indestructible, had lingered into the twentieth century imagination. That belief was the other side of liberalism—not liberalism as the advocacy of freedom, rationality, progress, and the acceptance of uncertainty, but liberalism as blind faith in a predetermined future, liberalism as a fantasy of a strictly rational world, liberalism as denial. That was the philosophical doctrine with the anti-war imagination in France.”
Berman makes the brilliant assertion that this war has been going on for 80+ years, since the end of the First World War.
Osama Bin Laden makes reference to ‘80 years of shame’ for Islam in his one of his first post 9/11 videos.
In 1924, the ruler of Turkey Kemal Ataturk dissolved the Caliphate of the Ottoman Empire.
The end of the First World War also launched multiple totalitarian movements. Some initially focused on saving a country or race (Fascism), others wanted to save the planet (Communism). Both forms of totalitarianism wanted “to declare the old liberal projects of nineteenth century a lie—a gigantic deception foisted on mankind in the interest of plunder, devastation, conspiracy, and ruin. Those were the years when “vanguards” of self-sacrificing militants tried to lead mankind out of the corruptions and horrors of liberal civilization into a new kind of life—granite, solid, unified, the new age of the resurrected empire of yore, the age of purity and eternity.”
That these mass movements took slightly different paths to ‘lead mankind to utopias of unity, of equality, and purity’ they all ended up as totalitarian cults of death.
Islamism also began as ultra pious and charitable movements dedicated to ‘equality, unity, and purity’ and it too has descended into a totalitarian cult of death.
Islamism has it’s own “vanguards” of self-sacrificing militants to lead mankind out of the corruptions and horrors of liberal civilization…
July 23rd, 2007 at 3:51 am
The same folks who think that they can socially engineer the human population to suit their utopian ideals always end up descending into death and destruction when actual thinking human beings refuse to be engineered. Rousseau was the genesis, and advocated the real flow of blood to install his elites. Kant supplied the methodology when he destroyed objective reality, replaced it with rank subjectivism; defined Reason out of existence by switching the “what” of Reason with the “how”, which resulted in collectivist politics that has drenched us in blood ever since. Reason without reality is a fantasy. The laws of nature don’t allow survival by fantasy (it’s called Justice) and the Everest of corpses built by the collectivist mobs is the proof.
July 23rd, 2007 at 6:24 am
Oh, dear, salty,
Does this mean Bush can’t borrow the money to pay for his social experiment in Iraq from the Chinese Commies?
July 23rd, 2007 at 12:17 pm
Many thanks, 4IF. I read Berman’s lengthy piece on Ayaan Hirsi Ali in TNR and was very impressed with his analysis. The Left’s tendency to countenance mass slaughter has always baffled and disgusted me. I’ll be ordering that book you cited; it looks excellent.
Now back to our regularly-scheduled yapping troll.
July 23rd, 2007 at 3:48 pm
[...] media has done its part as well to undermine Petraeus’ coming report. Jules Crittenden noted how the AP spun Harry’s all nighter into a dramatic momentum for losing as quickly as possible in [...]