Inside Politics

Newsweek’s error

“Let’s do a thought experiment about the worst example of journalistic malfeasance in recent years — and considering the competition from Jayson Blair and Dan Rather, that’s saying a lot,” New York Post columnist John Podhoretz writes.

“Let’s say that the item that Newsweek magazine disavowed on Sunday and retracted [Monday] — the item by Michael Isikoff and John Barry that said an American interrogator of terrorists housed at Guantanamo Bay had flushed the Koran down the toilet — was actually true. It wasn’t. But let’s say it was.

“Would factual accuracy have justified publishing the item in Newsweek or anywhere else?” Mr. Podhoretz asked.

“That publication led to the furtherance of the notion, extraordinarily dangerous to Americans abroad, that our government is in the habit of desecrating the Muslim Holy Book — and to scores of people getting killed and hundreds getting injured in riots that extended from Afghanistan to Gaza.

“The answer seems obvious now, doesn’t it?

“Newsweek ran an incendiary item about an American official desecrating the Koran, and this incendiary item did what incendiary items are supposed to do. It blew up.

“Only it didn’t blow up the target it was intended to blow up. The intended target was in Washington. We’d have to know the identity of Newsweek’s supposedly ‘good and credible’ source to know precisely whom the source was trying to injure (and you can bet that, no matter what evil nonsense this supposedly ‘good’ source was peddling, Newsweek will protect his name forever).”

Liberal hysteria

“To Democrats, Janice Rogers Brown is the scariest nominee to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in the history of the republic,” Peter Kirsanow writes at National Review Online (www.nationalreview.com).

“Since her nomination nearly two years ago, she has been the subject of the most vitriolic and persistent attacks ever leveled against a nominee to the federal bench other than Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas,” said Mr. Kirsanow, who is a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

“The black sharecropper’s daughter, born in segregated Alabama, has been excoriated as a closet member of the Ku Klux Klan who, at least according to the Senate minority leader, would like nothing better than to return America to ‘Civil War days.’

“Left-leaning political cartoonists depict her as an Aunt Jemima on steroids, complete with exaggerated physical features typically found only in the racist literature distributed by hate groups. She’s been called insensitive to the rights of minorities, the plight of the poor, and the difficulties of the disabled. Her opponents warn that she is ‘the far right’s dream judge’ and that ‘she embodies Clarence Thomas’s ideological extremism and Antonin Scalia’s abrasiveness and right-wing activism.’

“And her opponents are plentiful, a who’s who of left-wing advocacy groups: Planned Parenthood, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, NAACP, NOW, People for the American Way, National Abortion Federation, Feminist Majority, and the American Association of University Women, just to name a few.

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