A "Nudge" With A Grudge

While Glenn Greenwald continues to quite rightly beat up Joke Line for his unbelievably wretched FISA column (here), I suppose it falls upon your humble narrator to continue pillorying the New York Times.

Yes, I know it’s repetitive, but some truly wretched “journalism” is oozing out of the vicinity of 620 8th Avenue in The Big Apple, and those responsible must be called to account.

Here is today’s example from Steven Lee Meyers…

WASHINGTON, Nov. 26 — It might seem, after nearly seven years of deliberate detachment from Arab-Israeli peace negotiations, that President Bush has plunged into Middle Eastern diplomacy with Clintonesque energy.

…

In fact, Mr. Bush and his aides still deplore what they view as President Clinton’s disastrously hands-on involvement in the peace process in 2000. And they insist that Mr. Bush does not intend to negotiate personally the two-state peace he has pronounced as his vision, just as they insist that this is not an 11th-hour effort to forge a legacy other than the one left by the Iraq war.

“The United States cannot impose our vision,” Mr. Bush told the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, in the Oval Office on Monday, before saying, and sounding, again, Clintonesque, “but we can help facilitate.”

For all the pomp of the Annapolis gathering, the White House is not calling it a summit meeting or anything else suggestive of substantive progress. Mr. Bush’s vision is ambitious, but his strategy is cautious — he may be repeating Mr. Clinton’s role, yet he rejects what he sees as the meddlesome quality of it.

Such “reporting” by Meyers here is truly farcical. “Disastrous(ly) hands-on involvement” and “meddlesome quality” of Clinton’s 2000 Camp David summit between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat?

Sure, let’s write this in such a way that it looks like Dubya is doing something (the “nudge”?) but also nail his predecessor at the same time. How clever.

Just for the record, there were four principal obstacles to an agreement in 2000 according to this Wikipedia article:

Territory

Jerusalem and the Temple Mount

Refugees and the 'right of return'

Israeli security concerns

Is Dubya going to even begin to broach any of these topics? Do you really even need to ask that question (and you have to dig deep into the story to find the quote from Dennis Ross, the Middle East envoy for Bill Clinton and Poppy Bush, which basically says that a “broad vision” won’t work when discussing Middle East peace, which thus far has remained insoluble for all preceding Presidents of capable or greater intellect, as opposed to George W. Milhous Bush).

There is absolutely nothing “Clintonesque” about Dumbya; we know that, but apparently Meyers doesn’t (or willfully ignores that in his efforts to frame this story in as favorable a light for the preznit as possible).

Prof. Marcus left a great comment a couple of days ago about this whole Annapolis photo-op nonsense, and I think this is a good time to present it once more…

the palestinians definitely have as much or more blood on their hands as the israelis, but, nevertheless, i can't countenance punishing the entire population of gaza and turning it into a concentration camp... nobody on either side can convince me that state-sponsored terrorism, retaliatory violence, and driving both innocent and guilty to starvation, illness, and death is justified... the failure of the u.s. to condemn israel's actions in gaza is squarely in the same category as our supporting the wahhabist regime in saudi arabia, and turning a blind eye to the rule by decree and martial law in pakistan... by supporting such state-sponsored terrorism, we reveal ourselves to be sponsors as well... how the u.s. can presume to lead a "peace process" for israel and palestine is beyond absurd... and, if that wasn't sufficiently down the rabbit hole, the annapolis summit will be opened by a president who, over his seven years in office, has NEVER visited either israel OR palestine... the fact that this is happening on and is accepted as normal is truly beyond belief...

And finally, we are left with these cautionary words from Meyers’ story…

“If the conference fails, it doesn’t leave you in equipoise…It could put you in a worse position.”

Now you know Dubya is in trouble when John Bolton actually sounds like a moderate.

And oh yeah, speaking of the Klein/FISA fiasco, I should drag out this ad once more that was run on the pages of Time and ultimately led to the cancellation of our subscription; we'll get objectivity out of these people - sure we will.

Update 1: And why am I not surprised that Paul Craig Roberts has another great post relevant to the subject here?

Update 2: On Klein's fiasco, Rush Holt, one of the authors of the bill attacked by Klein, weighs in from HuffPo via Atrios here.

Update 3 11/28/07: Concerning Annapolis, BarbinMD at The Daily Kos explains it all here.