The bias of The Chronicle-Herald, or, the job description of Canadian Press "Editor-in-Chief"

(UPDATE: Expanded since first posted. A chapter and part of the introduction from an over-long and long-overdue post which I'm far from finishing, in lieu of the rest of it. I'm afraid this can't be of much interest for a general readership, but it needs putting on the record.)

Obama and the 2009 NATO summit according to The Chronicle-Herald.

This was the solitary example offered by Scott White, the "Editor-in-Chief" of Canada's newswire monopoly, as proof that "virtually all" of the news in a little Chronicle-Herald Opinions page article of mine had "been reported", presumably by his Canadian Press or by the Associated Press in the United States, which is sluiced through the Canadian Press under an absolutely typical Canadian arrangement whereby an Upper Canadian outfit headquartered in Toronto is granted exclusive rights to distribute a superior American product to its captive market in the provincial hinterlands like Nova Scotia. They call it "Confederation".

Now, if you'll be good enough to bear with me, in my little op-ed I concerned myself with the coverage of Obama's first 100 days in The Chronicle-Herald specifically, which is why my very second sentence read, "If all a person knew of Barack Obama's first 100 days as president was what he read of them in this newspaper, it would seem to be a very charmed young presidency." In case that and the other references in the article weren't clear enough, I explained again in my reply to an accusatory e-mail from this Editor-in-Chief of Canada's newswire monopoly that "I read the paper every day. The paper I write for, The Chronicle-Herald. I know what it has reported on Obama and what it hasn't." And I was referring to points of scrutiny and skepticism, which is why the summation of my list in the article -- which I'd have thought was fairly obviously a list of points -- read, "Why should these points, and many more like them, have to be made by some obscure contributor to The Herald's Opinions section?" Again, if my little article wasn't clear enough, I continued in my reply to this man's e-mail, "Anyone who depended for their coverage of the Obama administration on that newspaper would have been oblivious to those points and many more."

Whereupon the Editor-in-Chief of Canada's newswire monopoly carried right on declaring that "virtually all of the stories" I cited "have been reported", period, and I was pronounced "wrong" -- only this time it was in print on The Herald's Opinions page. Now, I've had published negative feedback since a few months after I started writing little letters to the editor. Most of it angry, much of it nasty, and some of it personal. And not only letters, but quite lot of 800-word op-eds, too. I've always appreciated that it came with the territory, and after I finished reading The Herald that morning, I shrugged and had a fried bologna sandwich. But this demands revisiting. I know The Chronicle-Herald and have been meaning for some time to document some part of its near-daily abuses, in what its "News Director" and editors choose to print, and at least as much in what they determine their readers needn't be exposed to. Those conspicuous omissions -- the "sins of omission", as Matt Drudge has called them. And so I might as well start from what is for me the beginning. I've made a thorough search of the very useful Herald Archive for the period of Obama's first 100 days, and this is what I've turned up.
I made the points among the many in my little op-ed that Obama had failed in the object of his first NATO summit to rally the allies to muster their troops for Afghanistan, coming away from the Continent with commitments for more of the accustomed noncombat tokens as opposed to fighting forces, which are after all what is called for in a shooting war and which he and his party had claimed such support would have been forthcoming -- that some mythical European cavalry would have ridden over the hill to save the day -- if only the president of the United States had been less cowboy and more Continental, i.e., if only George W. Bush had been replaced by a president exactly like Barack Obama. Then I asked rhetorically why these points and many more like them had to be made on the Opinions page of The Chronicle-Herald. But according to the very Editor-in-Chief of the national newswire monopoly, all of this had apparently been made quite clear in the coverage which I had somehow overlooked at the time, and particularly in a Canadian Press dispatch from a correspondent who'd been sent specially to Strasbourg in France to cover the summit. 

(UPDATE: Ah ha. I uncovered with some effort a Canadian Press dispatch from the conclusion of the said NATO summit, uncarried in The Chronicle-Herald per The Herald's Archive and picked up in papers few and far between per my latter-day testing for it elsewhere. That report to its credit -- and I do credit it, sincerely -- made and if I say so myself vindicated half of one of the twelve points listed in my op-ed, that Obama had failed in the object of his first NATO summit to wring combat troops out of "our European allies", although I didn't see where that fine reporting carried on to observe as I did that Obama and his lot had sworn for years that a president with a "D" appearing after his name would've had those Continentals fighting and bleeding for our Afghan cause. So there it is: the report was out there, somewhere, making half of one of my dozen points admirably, only not in the only newspaper I'd concerned myself with.)

And lo and behold, there was in fact a Canadian Press dispatch datelined Strasbourg, in the April 4, 2009 edition of The Chronicle-Herald, under the Herald headline of "NATO faces new challenge; Afghan law which curbs women's rights makes mission tough sell".

I read the CP report elsewhere, and in fact it did get around to the only practical business of the NATO summit -- in paragraphs 26 and 27. Paragraph 26: "Several European countries made a show of announcing more support for the Afghan mission on Friday, but the numbers were small." A fine bit of reporting, even if it did come at paragraph 26. Better late than never. Only, that paragraph never appeared in The Chronicle-Herald.

Paragraph 27: "Britain said it would add 'mid to high hundreds' to the 8,000 troops it has in Afghanistan. France promised more police trainers and civilian aid, and Belgium said it will add 65 soldiers and two more F-16 fighter jets." Another fine bit of reporting, even if it never did get around to that other point in my little op-ed, that Obama and his party had sworn Europe would put up and pitch in if only the president were less like Bush and more like Obama. But half is better than none. Only, that paragraph never appeared in The Chronicle-Herald.

Again, that entire passage of two paragraphs never appeared in The Chronicle-Herald. The Herald version was abridged to 564 words. Of course, the Editor-in-Chief of Canada's newswire monopoly wouldn't have known that the dispatch of his man in Strasbourg hadn't made it in one piece to the readers of The Chronicle-Herald, and clearly he didn't heed the explanations in my article itself and in my reply to his e-mail, that I was referring to the coverage in The Chronicle-Herald specifically and that my concern was not so much stories covered as points made. But the Editor-in-Chief of Canada's newswire monopoly pronounced against some nobody contributor to the Opinions page of a Nova Scotia newspaper, by name and in print, and brandishing his fancy title and invoking his office, despite that the one bit of evidence he offered for his case never appeared in the newspaper in question, denying the plain meaning of that nobody's words, and despite that to this day, that nobody has declined out of professional courtesy and Christian decency to name him or his reporters in print, where more people than a few might actually read it.

Of course, there was more coverage of the NATO summit in The Chronicle-Herald than that Canadian Press dispatch. The Herald ran an Associated Press report datelined Strasbourg on everything you ever wanted to know about Anders Fogh Rasmussen, headlined "Dane chosen as new NATO boss". (NATO "boss"? Anyone who knew anything about the office of NATO secretary-general would never accuse him of being "boss" to very much more than his secretarial staff.) And The Herald devoted an entire news item to an AP report on the protests against the NATO summit, headlined "Police quell protesters' first try".

Finally the Herald Archive turned up an Associated Press story, also datelined Strasbourg and published on the same day as the aforementioned Canadian Press report, under the optimistic Herald headline, "Obama pitching for help today". In all the news sections of the Chronicle-Herald, in all the reports making any mention on the 2009 NATO summit, a single sentence in a single story was the closest The Herald came to reporting Obama's failure:

"But the European public has no stomach for more intense military involvement by their nations. So Obama is unlikely to get additional help in the way of either major combat troops or new deployments to the toughest areas of the fighting in southern and eastern Afghanistan." That's a good start at reporting, or at least it would have been. Beside the fact that this was not a report of what had been but a reporter's expectation of what would be, and was discountable as such -- Obama was still "pitching for help today", after all -- and beside the fact that the blame for Europe's resistance to throwing in with us was put on "the European public" -- acquitting Obama -- even that much was negated by the preceding paragraph, which was the most inexplicable Pollyanna-ism: "Obama seems likely to win fresh commitments at Saturday's 60th anniversary NATO summit. He can expect more civilian aid and small troop increases for training Afghan forces and providing security for upcoming elections." ("Obama seems likely to win fresh commitments"! Gimme an O! Gimme a B! ....)

And that was it. A single sentence in a single story, indicating only that Obama was "unlikely to get additional help", preceded by a preemptive acquittal of Obama for any shortcomings plus some cheerleading that Obama "seems likely to win fresh commitments" which gave precisely the contrary impression, under a Herald headline of "Obama pitching for help today" which gave no hint of Obama's imminent failure, and without recalling the claims of Obama and his party that it'd be different if only a man like Obama were in the White House. The question of combat troops for Afghanistan was the one and only story of any practical significance in the 2009 NATO summit. And this was the first NATO summit since the 9/11 attacks and the start of the Afghan mission at which the president of the United States was not George W. Bush. "NATO tells Obama 'no' on Afghanistan; New president, no 'change'" ought to have been the headline, the lead paragraph, and the bulk of the story.

Nowhere in the news sections of The Chronicle-Herald was there any final report that NATO had told Obama "no", and nowhere in The Herald's news sections was the point in my op-ed made, that Obama and his party had sworn for at least half a decade that "our European allies" would have been wading into the melee with us, to spill their blood and treasure by our side, and fight and die for our cause in Afghanistan, but for that "cowboy" Bush and his "unilateralism" which was "alienating our allies" and all the rest. Now the Continentals had their very dream candidate for president of the United States, and still they declined to fight. The 2009 NATO summit was the final repudiation of six years of theorizing and politicking by Obama himself, his party, and indeed also the international press. Is is remarkable that all that didn't warrant a mention somewhere in the news sections of The Chronicle-Herald, and was left to me over on the Opinions page.

But it was worse than that. The Herald carried an Associated Press report at about this time, unrelated to the NATO summit, which mentioned a new allied commitment for Afghanistan and positively went out of its way to credit Obama personally for it: "Australia plans to add 450 soldiers, increasing its force to about 1,550, Prime Minister Rudd announced Wednesday, saying Obama persuaded him to increase the deployment during discussions last week." Now, Australia is of course not a NATO member nation, it's certainly not one of "our European allies", and in fact it and New Zealand were the lone Western nations to stand with America in Vietnam, so this is something apart from the NATO summit story, but here was the AP in The Chronicle-Herald crediting Obama personally with an allied commitment of 450 troops, while there was no corresponding report in that same paper of Obama's corresponding failure of persuasion with those European allies who were the foot-draggers, and the ones in need of persuasion according to Obama and his crowd themselves.

(That AP report included the only reference I could turn up in the Herald Archive over Obama's first 100 days to Britain's disappearing-ink commitment of 700 extra troops, promised at the NATO summit, to be withdrawn again after a few months. But Britain is America's greatest ally and foul-weather friend, whose support was so taken for granted that it was discounted when the president was named Bush, so that's also in a different category from what is meant by "our European allies".)
Indeed, the AP dispatch reported "the United States and other NATO countries now have some 70,000 soldiers in Afghanistan -- a record level." Anyone would think from reading that AP report that the Obama ally-rallying was going swimmingly. But how much of the increase to 70,000 came from those "other NATO countries"? So far from reporting Obama's failure, that AP dispatch in The Herald actually left just the contrary impression.

And it was worse than even that. Not one month before the NATO summit, The Chronicle-Herald reproduced an Associated Press report, albeit left to The Herald's Metropolitan edition, which referred to "President Barack Obama's policy to bring more European allies on board to fight the Taliban-led insurgency," and added to that bit of fantasy this bit of editorializing: "Biden said the Obama administration will be keen to engage NATO allies in global security discussions, marking a departure from the last eight years when Washington often was on a go-it-alone course that upset its European allies."

So The Chronicle-Herald was quite happy to report that it was "Obama's policy to bring more European allies on board to fight the Taliban-led insurgency", but when, a matter of weeks later, that was shown to be less "policy" than "fantasy" -- or if it was a "policy" then it was shown to be a failed one -- The Herald declined to make the point. And The Herald was happy to pass off as matter-of-fact newswire copy that it was the Bush administration's alleged "go-it-alone course that upset its European allies", but when, just weeks later, it was finally proved that those "European allies" hadn't been "upset" so much as unwilling and unable, and it turned out that supposed presidential "go-it-alone-ism" hadn't entered into it, The Herald again declined to make the point.

Doctor Who and the British imperial impulse

Surely I can't be the first to make this point, but I'm not typically an appreciator of science-fiction and I managed to mostly avoid Doctor Who until a matter of months ago, and the question is screaming out at me: Is not Doctor Who in some part a science-fiction stand-in for the British Empire? If you strip away the science-fiction elements of it, are you not left with a fellow who seems very much like a typical Englishman, venturing far and wide, encountering all sorts of exotic tribes, and saving the world?

Sometime between the world wars, the Empire fell out of fashion with the British elite; after the second war, the progressives who were elected to erect Britain's dismal welfare state couldn't wait to evacuate the Empire, which incidentally led to a very predictable civil war between what became Pakistan and India; and by the 21st Century, any British elite calling himself "conflicted" about the Empire, instead of condemning it absolutely, would no doubt be suspected of crypto-imperialism and black-balled. As if a half-millennium of British history was all just a terrible mistake. Niall Ferguson, a few years back, advanced an apologetic sort of defense of the Empire, along the lines of, the Empire was redeemed in the end by the fact that Britain drained itself and its Empire defeating aggression and fascism in the world wars. But even that is a defensive argument, and a far cry from what was generally accepted until living memory, which is that the Empire was a mostly noble enterprise that made Britain great and elevated all Britain's possessions at the same time.

That is to say, the Empire is right out in Britain today, or at the very least it's out among the sort of people who make television shows for the BBC. And so I can't help thinking that Doctor Who is the sort of thing you'd wind up with if you were cut from the same cloth as Rudyard Kipling and Chinese Gordon and Cecil Rhodes -- you shared their impulse for adventurism and exoticism and world-saving -- but at the same time, you accepted every one of the nostrums of the 21st Century British elite, with all its political correctness and cultural relativism and pacifism and the rest of it.

(On that pacifism point: I suppose the sort of people who make television shows for the BBC couldn't very well arm The Doctor with some Time Lord equivalent to the Brown Bess or the Lee-Enfield Mk III, so they've given him a "sonic screwdriver" which conveniently does nearly anything he needs it to do in any given situation. They've created The Doctor as a pacifist of sorts, though apparently with some blood on his hands from the great and final Time War between his own race and the Daleks. One can't fault the makers of the show for keeping their hero's hands clean, and it is a family show, after all, but I have to say, it's easy to be a pacifist when the villains are imaginary and some ingenious and fantastical science-fiction story-writing can save the day.)

In the show, The Doctor has taken it upon himself to tirelessly and thanklessly patrol and save the universe; Rudyard Kipling called it "taking up the white man's burden". The Doctor encounters alien races and civilizations across time and space, some war-like and some peaceable, and all exotic and fascinating; so today it's the "Ood" or "Zocci", where in centuries past it might have been the Narragansetts or Hottentots of whom accounts were written and pictures drawn.

And for all the ecumenical effort in Doctor Who -- rendering the Earth as just one fairly inconsequential civilized planet in a universe full of them, preferring to treat all of humanity together rather than as individual nations or groups, etc. -- it is as parochial and England-centric (I use the terms affectionately) as any old imperialist ever was, rolling his cricket pitch someplace in India. The Doctor is the last of an alien race called Time Lords, and yet he seems uncannily like an Englishman, even unto the point of caricature in the current and excellent incarnation, played by Matt Smith, with his bow-tie and tweed jacket, and eating fried fish and custard. Take even the pairing in this current and excellent series: The Doctor a seeming Englishman in tweed with his plucky red-headed Scottish lieutenant, venturing far and wide and saving the universe. If anyone had proposed that as a formula for a story of the British Empire, it'd have been rejected as hackneyed.

The Doctor's time machine/space ship, the TARDIS, has assumed the form of the British blue police box, and if those blue police boxes were any more British, George Formby would have sung a song about them.

The only human enterprise capable of monitoring and combatting extra-terrestrial intervention in earthly affairs is called Torchwood, which is a covert agency of the British government -- established by Queen Victoria herself, it turns out. (And one can't help noticing that this Torchwood bears some resemblance to MI5 or MI6, or maybe Room 40 in the First World War or Bletchley Park in the Second.)

I expect I could go on, if I knew more about this show which is still new to me, but suffice it to say Doctor Who looks to me like it owes almost as much to Rudyard Kipling as to H. G. Wells. And so I can't help thinking, even after decades of institutionalized self-loathing and self-flagellating, the Empire's in 'em still.

Less a "historic victory" than a Pyrrhic one

President Obama and his Democratic Congress have made history, only not the kind they have in mind. They have become the only president and Congress to enact a leviathan social program altering the life of every American -- against the wishes of those American people, over the threatened opposition of three-fourths of the state legislatures, with not a solitary vote from the minority opposition, and by arcane parliamentary maneuver.
　
When it comes to pass that a Republican unknown wins the special election for U.S. Senate in religiously-Democratic Massachusetts, to replace Ted Kennedy, no less, and after vowing daily to be the 41st vote to kill the Democrats' health-care bills, then it may well and truly be said that the American people do not want this "comprehensive health-care reform."
　
A month after the Massachusetts comeuppance, the CNN poll found just 25 percent of Americans supported the Democrats' health-care bills, to 73 percent who wanted Congress to either start from scratch or quit health-care altogether. And yet within a month of that, House Democrats voted to make the 2,700-page Senate bill the law of the land, and passed a "reconciliation" bill which actually builds on the Senate monstrosity and annexes the entirety of the student loan system to the federal government while they're at it.
　
Three days before the House vote, Obama's job approval rating went net negative in the Gallup poll for the first time, and Congress' approval hit 16 percent, just two points up from the lowest recorded in 36 years of Gallup polling on the question. The day before the vote, the Rasmussen poll of likely voters put Obama's job approval rating at 43 percent; it took five years for George W. Bush to fall so low.

By the time the House vote was called, 38 of the 50 state legislatures had indicated an intent to challenge the new law. And on the day of the vote, the only bipartisanship was in opposition to the new law: 34 House Democrats joined every Republican in voting "nay."

That looks less like a "historic victory" than a Pyrrhic one.
　
The undeniable good that is done by this "reform" could have been written up in a relative few pages and passed with wide margins and popular support the best part of a year ago, and the legitimate, hard-case uninsured could have been accommodated for a fraction of the $1.2 trillion that Obama and his Congress blew on their worse-than-useless stimulus and omnibus bills alone, without upsetting the system for the 80 percent who call themselves satisfied with their health-care as-is. This "comprehensive health-care reform" is something quite apart from help for folks who've fallen through the cracks and a curbing of the odd insurance industry abuse.
　
Obama's own chief actuary for Medicare and Medicaid Services had to report that the Senate bill would raise the price of health-care in America by $234 billion in ten years, that its savings "may be unrealistic," and that there was "a very serious risk" of its new insurance scheme becoming "unsustainable."
　
The Congressional Budget Office ruled the Senate bill would drive the cost of health-insurance premiums "10 percent to 13 percent higher in 2016 than...under current law," that it would lead employers to dump 5 million Americans net from their current coverage, and that even a decade after passage, it would leave 16 million Americans uninsured still, plus 8 million uninsured illegals.
　
The new law includes something called the "individual mandate" -- a legal requirement to buy federally-approved, comprehensive health-insurance, enforceable by the IRS -- which is probably unconstitutional and certainly unpopular, and which Obama attacked Hillary Clinton for proposing in the Democratic presidential primaries.
　
The new law establishes 159 new bureaucracies of all sorts, and hires 16,500 new IRS agents to police the new regime of taxes, regulations, and mandates.
　
The new law is supposed to be paid for by something like $500 billion in new taxes over ten years, plus another $500 billion in cuts to Medicare. And the accounting of the bills is as fraudulent as Enron's. Over $200 billion in spending was moved out of the bills, to be passed separately in what is called the "doctor fix," so as not to be counted in the official Congressional Budget Office scorings, and ten years of tax increases and spending cuts are counted against six years of benefits.
　
And nowhere in those thousands of pages is there any attempt at the obvious, common-sense reforms like opening the health-insurance companies to competition from out of state, enabling bare-bones insurance policies, or restraining the tort lawyers who make practicing medicine in America a legal hazard.

House Democrats passed the Senate bill only on the understanding that their "reconciliation" bill would then be passed in the Senate by 50-percent-plus-one budget reconciliation, to circumvent the Senate's 60-percent threshold, which is without precedent for legislation of this nature and scale, and which is the sort of thing Obama and his party denounced as affront to American democracy until they came to see it as a neat trick for getting their way.
　
It's not until 2014 and later that the new law goes fully into effect; there will be national elections this November and in November of 2012. By having it all their own way, against the national will and around the legislative rules, Obama and his Congress have only hastened the day when a very different government sits in Washington. The Left in America may never be entrusted with such unchecked power again for a generation.

--A slightly earlier version of this published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia

More indulgence and incompetence of the Canadian Press Washington bureau (and Chronicle-Herald)

(There aren't enough hours in the day for my duties as self-appointed watchdog of the Canadian Press Washington bureau, so this post will have to be a shorter one.)

Any parody I could come up with could hardly be any more caricaturish than the actual dispatches of Lee-Anne Goodman, the lone American correspondent of the lone Canadian newswire service. March 9, top story, national news, Halifax Chronicle-Herald: "Palin's family sought medical care in Canada; Gosh darnit: Ex-governor's claim about 1960s prompts scrutiny, ridicule."

By the time that dispatch of the Canadian Press Washington bureau appeared in The Herald, it had long since been mooted thoroughly. The Associated Press had interviewed Sarah Palin's father for a report on the subject the day before, and explained everything: "There was no road out of there [Skagway, Alaska, where Palin lived at the time].... The ferry schedule was very erratic. ... The plane schedule was very erratic. ... We had no doctor in Skagway. ... We much preferred to use our facilities because my insurance didn't cover anything in Whitehorse. And even though they have socialized medicine, I still had to pay the bill, being an American citizen."

So the scandal was a faux-scandal and the story was a non-story, and had been demonstrated as such long before it got into print, in news and opinion outlets including the very Associated Press, which is sluiced through the Canadian Press under an absolutely typical Canadian scheme whereby the Upper Canadian monopoly headquartered in Toronto is granted exclusive rights to distribute the superior American product to its hostage market in the provincial hinterlands like Nova Scotia. But that AP report with the facts of the story from Palin's father never appeared in The Chronicle-Herald.

To print the Associated Press report would have been to repudiate not only the Canadian Press Washington bureau, but The Chronicle-Herald which promoted the CP story to the top of its national news and joined in on the sneering ("gosh darnit"), and whose editorial cartoonist rendered the junk as his latest anti-Palin cartoon the following day. The Canadian Press Washington bureau story was sustainable only in the absence of the facts. Palin had only related the anecdote to demonstrate her closeness to Canada, there was not the slightest hypocrisy in it, and to make a top-story scandal out of it necessitated an obliviousness to the facts, if not also a smugness, elite prejudice, and an inordinate and obsessive malice for Sarah Palin.

It's one of the features of the Canadian Press Washington bureau, documented here many times before, that it is typically familiar with only the leftist line on any given story, and quite oblivious to the other half of the story. So for instance, when the Left picks up on a hoax that a Palin rally attendee called out "Kill him" when the subject of Barack Obama was raised, the Canadian Press Washington bureau will credulously repeat that hoax, even seven months after it's been comprehensively debunked by the Secret Service. That's perfectly fine in a person who just doesn't much care to be confronted by conservatism, and a leftist does have the luxury in the 21st Century of passing her life without ever really being exposed to conservatism except as a caricature and object of scorn, while we conservatives are confronted by leftism when we go through our public schools and our universities, or every time we try to sign into our online e-mail accounts and are greeted with an unsolicited "In the News" box of selected "mainstream" headlines, or when we try to watch Comedy Central with its daily recitations of Democrat Party talking points delivered in the style of glib, too-cool-for-school, pop comics. But the obliviousness to the conservative side of the story does become a problem in a person who's elevated to the post of lone American correspondent for the lone Canadian newswire service, covering what is after all a profoundly conservative country.


The junk reporting on Sarah Palin came just four days after the latest Canadian Press Washington bureau effort in its service as defender of the president of the United States against unkindnesses. The March 5 dispatch was headlined in The Chronicle-Herald, "Senior Republican: Obama like The Joker." That "senior Republican" was some "finance director" of the Repulican National Committee whom I'd never heard of, and his supposed outrage was an internal RNC Powerpoint presentation which used the ubiquitous Obama-as-The-Joker photo.

That's news at the Washington bureau of the Canadian Press and in The Chronicle-Herald of Halifax, Nova Scotia, which counted the story as "World" news. But here is some of what was not counted as news -- a partial list of developments dominating American politics in the day or two before that report ran:

-Suspicion by even House Democrats that Obama's promise, and the Senate Democrats' assurance, that the Senate health-care bill would be "fixed" through budget reconciliation if it's passed as-is by the House, would become just another of Obama's broken promises, that he would simply sign the bill into law and declare victory, and the Senate Democrats would conveniently discover some compelling reason against reconciliation which somehow never occurred to them earlier.
-Suspicion that Obama's appointment of Scott Matheson to a federal appellate court was influenced by the fact that Matheson's brother Jim is a Democrat Congressman who voted "no" on the health-care bill in November, and who Obama was at that moment inviting to the White House to be persuaded to change his vote to "yes".
-The recalling of quotes by Candidate Obama and Senator Obama denouncing the sort of thing he's now proposing as president, to enact his health-care monstrosity against the will of the people by 50-percent-plus-one parliamentary device.
-Charlie Rangel, the Democrat Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, forced to surrender his chairmanship in light of Ethics Committee findings in its investigation of him for corruption; Democrat Congressman Pete Stark lasts just a day as replacement chairman, on account of his being a hateful, deranged radical, most recently famous for telling a conservative constituent at a town hall meeting that he wasn't "worth wasting the urine." (That incident also unreported in the CP and Herald.)
-Democrat Congressman Eric Massa announces his retirement after the Ethics Committee is informed of allegations he had "made unwanted advances toward a junior male staffer."
-Democrat Congressman Bill Delahunt becomes the lastest in a long parade of veteran Democrats announcing their retirement as of the end of this Congress, avoiding a re-election campaign in what promises to be a very unkind November for Democrats.

But none of that qualified as news at the Canadian Press Washington bureau or The Chronicle-Herald. Instead we were given a report scrutinizing some unknown finance director of the Republican National Committee for an internal committee Powerpoint presentation. All those serious stories, involving the governing party and government policies, in just the day or two before the Canadian Press Washington bureau passed them over for its unknown-Republican-functionary-calls-Obama-The-Joker story. The Eric Massa story exploded to a new order of magnitude on March 8 and was the biggest thing in American politics on the 8th and 9th, and has carried over into the 10th, but still the name "Eric Massa" appears nowhere in The Chronicle-Herald. The Massa story combines a Democrat sexual harassment scandal with Democrat allegations of abuse of power against fellow Democrats. And yet when some unknown back-bencher from the Republican minority opposition called out "You lie" during Obama's partisan, hectoring health-care address to a joint session of Congress, which was itself a gratuitous abuse of the office of president, The Herald ran half a dozen reports calling the powerless Republican nobody to task, one of them from the CP Washington bureau.

The dispatches of the Canadian Press Washington bureau ought to make the CP's "Editor-in-Chief" cringe. But he presides over a monopoly: there is no alternative newswire service in Canada, and the CP's network of client news outlets are a captive market that'll take what they're given. And the journalistic offenses of his Washington bureau only flatter the prejudices of a Toronto elite: all the junk reporting, all the scrutiny of the powerless and stroking of the powerful, all the conspicuous neglect of big stories and disproportionate elevation of trifles in their place, all the obliviousness to at least half the story -- the effect of it all is uniformly to scorn conservatives and congratulate leftists, so it must be very difficult indeed for any Toronto bigwig to see the problem in it. And anyway, if the Canadian Press truly were "serious about the news", it would never have posted a hysterically-partisan glorified gossip columnist to Washington as its sole American correspondent in the first place.

(Much more on the Canadian Press Washington bureau here, here, here, here, and here.)

The revolt against "remaking the nation"

"No peace in health reform; Obama vows to continue despite Republicans," a Chronicle-Herald headline read. But President Obama's problem isn't the Republican Party so much as the American people: Not two days before that Associated Press report ran, a CNN poll was released showing just 25 percent of Americans supported the Democrats' health-care bills, to 73 percent who wanted Congress to either start from scratch or quit health-care altogether.

And when it comes to pass that a Republican unknown wins the special election for U.S. Senate in religiously-Democratic Massachusetts, to replace Ted Kennedy, no less, and after vowing daily to be the 41st vote to kill the Democrats' health-care bills, then it may well and truly be said that the American people do not want this "comprehensive health-care reform," which was the centrepiece of Obama's project to "remake the nation."

Obama's problem isn't "misinformation," or "the venal tone of the arguments against reform," as the Canadian Press reported matter-of-factly in this newspaper. It isn't that "Republicans continue health care scare tactics," as the Herald headline on one Associated Press story had it. And the public outrage isn't "town hall nonsense," as another Herald headline editorialized on one of many contemptuous Canadian Press reports (like "U.S. racists direct hateful messages at Obama," painting the "teabagging protests" as crypto-racist) scrutinizing the powerless minority opposition, and the American people saying their piece in the town squares and town halls, instead of the unchecked president and his super-majorities.

Even after the health-care bills had been repudiated by Ted Kennedy's old voters, the Canadian Press in this paper persisted in describing them as "legislation that would have provided millions of Americans with health insurance," but surely if that was all there was to it, then the bills would have become law long since with wide margins and popular support. Obama's problem is that his "comprehensive health-care reform" is comprehensively abominable, and the people plain don't want it.

After the Massachusetts comeuppance, Obama himself briefly conceded, "some of the provisions that got snuck in might have violated that pledge" that "if you want to keep the health insurance you got, you can keep it, that you’re not going to have anybody getting in between you and your doctor in your decision making." So those "Republican scare tactics" weren't so "misinformed" after all.

The very "chief actuary" for Medicare and Medicaid Services had to report in December that the Senate bill would raise the price of health-care in America by $234 billion in ten years, that its supposed savings "may be unrealistic," and that there was "a very serious risk" of its proposed new insurance scheme becoming "unsustainable."

The health-care bills include something called the "individual mandate" -- a legal requirement to buy government-approved, comprehensive health insurance, enforceable by the IRS -- which is probably unconstitutional and certainly unpopular, and which Obama attacked Hillary Clinton for proposing in the Democratic presidential primaries.

The bills are supposed to be paid for by something like $500 billion in new taxes over ten years, plus another $500 billion in cuts to Medicare. And the accounting of the bills is as fraudulent as Enron's. Over $200 billion in spending was moved out of the bills, to be passed separately in what is called the "doctor fix," so as not to be counted in the official Congressional Budget Office scorings of the bills, and ten years of tax increases and spending cuts are counted against six years of benefits.

The bills are as bad for what they don't do as for what they do. Nowhere in those 2,000-plus pages each do they institute the obvious, common-sense reforms like opening the health insurance companies to competition from out of state, enabling bare-bones insurance policies, or restraining the tort lawyers who make practicing medicine in America a legal hazard.

Not to mention that the "50 million uninsured" boil down to something closer to 15 million legitimate, hard cases, which could have been accommodated for a fraction of the $1.2 trillion that Obama and his Congress blew on their worse-than-useless stimulus and omnibus bills alone, without upsetting the system for the other 289 million Americans. Indeed, 80 percent of Americans in a September Gallup poll were satisfied with their health-care as-is, which makes a good start on explaining the resistance to any system-wide overhaul.

Democrats now propose to enact the 2,700-page Senate bill without putting it to a vote in the House, "deeming" it passed by "self-executing rule." It is absolutely without precedent for legislation of this scale, if not also an Article I, Section 7 violation of the Constitution. The understanding is that the monstrosity would then be "fixed" in the Senate by 50-percent-plus-one budget reconciliation, to circumvent the Senate's 60-percent threshold -- also without precedent for legislation of this scale. So to bring their Frankenstein's monster to life, Obama and his Congress are perfectly prepared not only to spurn the express will of the American people, but also to suspend the legislative process of American democracy.

Fourteen months into this "Age of Obama," Obama and his Congress have been reduced to "remaking the nation" by arcane parliamentary maneuver. It's been apparent for the better part of a year now, outside the alternative universe of the elite, monopolistic newswires and newspapers: Obama and his Congress are in collapse, and the American people are in revolt.

The indulgence and incompetence of the Canadian Press Washington bureau

It's been a while since anybody at Canada's newswire monopoly has tried to call the law down on me, wipe my little website from the internet in whole or part, or otherwise try to stifle some nobody who presumed to call them out on their abuses for once, so I thought I'd update my documentation of the abuses of the Canadian Press Washington bureau. (In this installment: "Selectivity and Sarah Palin", "Junk reporting and Tea Parties", "Sneering and Scott Brown", and "Incompetence and the filibuster")

Selectivity and Sarah Palin.
So. The Washington bureau of the Canadian Press can cite American polling after all. In just this past couple weeks it's reported on polls showing the unfitness for office of a conservative Republican, Sarah Palin, and the apparent wild popularity of a liberal Democrat government policy, to allow open homosexuality in the fighting forces. Judging by the Canadian Press Washington bureau, the American people must be repudiating conservatives and champing at the bit for their leftist government to "remake the nation", and this Age of Obama must be going swimmingly.

I almost thought, from the past half year or so, that it might be CP policy to never cite American polls. American polls have been unrelentingly bad news for the president and Congress of the United States, their governing party and nearly everything they hold dear, since sometime in the summer of '09, which might be the sort of thing a person would mention if she were, say, the sole American correspondent for the sole Canadian newswire service. And yet that half-year's worth of dismal news for the actual president and Congress, and their project to "remake the nation", seems scarcely to have made it into the dispatches of the Canadian Press Washington bureau. (I surveyed some of those poll findings as of August in a Chronicle-Herald Opinions piece that was a better predictor of the following half-year of American politics than anything that appeared in the Canadian Press or the Herald World News section in that time.)

The February 13 dispatch of the Canadian Press Washington bureau was built entirely around a poll: "Poll: Palin not viable 2012 contender." I could have told you as much, without the aid of any poll and long before February of 2010. In fact, I did, here. But if Sarah Palin is a complete no-hoper for president, and considering that she's never held national public office, then how does the Canadian Press Washington bureau justify devoting such an extraordinary, prolific body of reportage to scrutinizing her, even unto the point of abusing its position with an entire report scorning her powerless 18 year-old daughter? (I wrote on that piece here; it ought never have been published in the news sections of the newspapers of Canada, and might even have been grounds for reassignment at a more serious news agency than the Canadian Press under Scott White.)

Lee-Anne Goodman, February 13, 2010: "New polls suggest the majority of Americans -- including conservatives -- have no confidence she's got what it takes to make it to the Oval Office. A Washington Post/ABC News poll suggests only 37 per cent of Americans have a favorable impression of Palin -- an all-time low. Fifty-five per cent view her unfavourably -- an all-time high."

The lowest ever! The highest ever! The chapter-and-verse on the poor Palin numbers went on for several paragraphs. Incidentally, "all-time" may not be the best usage for polling history covering only the 18 months since Sarah Palin has been known beyond Alaska. And a low approval rating will often correspond with a high disapproval rating, so it's not some confluence of especially bad luck that an "all-time low" positive impression would coincide with an "all-time high" unfavorable one, as if those are two completely independent findings. In any case, all the Palin-polling in the world counts for nothing, because Sarah Palin holds no public office, has never held national office, and was never going to be Republican nominee for president anytime soon.

(UPDATE, Feb. 16: Now here's a poll on electability -- not for some office-less punching bag, but the actual, sitting president and Congress of the United States. CNN, February 16: "44 percent of registered voters say Obama deserves re-election, with 52 percent saying the president does not deserve a second term. ... 34 percent feel that current federal lawmakers deserve re-election. ... That's the lowest number ever recorded for that question in a CNN survey. ... 51 percent feel their member of Congress should be re-elected -- also an all-time low in CNN polling." And that usage of "all-time low" refers to a period of longer than 18 months, including the last two midterm election years when control of both houses of Congress changed hands. But that's not the sort of thing that qualifies for news at the Canadian Press Washington bureau, which reported in January that Diane Sawyer's questioning Obama on the prospect of a one-term presidency "seems a premature topic of conversation".)


The Canadian Press Washington bureau had only just invoked a Gallup poll a week and a half earlier, in aid of a report claiming, "U.S. military wants to lift ban on gay serving openly."

Lee-Anne Goodman, February 3, 2010: "A Gallup poll taken last spring suggest the vast majority of Americans are opposed to Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, even conservatives and weekly church-goers."

Now, that same Gallup poll in July of '09 found that Obama's job approval rating ranked "10th among the 12 post-World War II presidents at this point in their tenures," and he's been stuck at or near the bottom in the Gallup poll archives for the most part since. Considering that the Canadian Press Washington bureau could barely type "Bush" without gratuitously appending "wildly unpopular" or "one of the most unpopular presidents in U.S. history" (as it happens, Bush worked out to be 7th in overall job approval of the 11 completed presidencies so far in the the Gallup poll), anyone might have thought that half a year's worth of bottom-of-the-heap presidential polling would rate a mention at the Canadian Press Washington bureau. But no. Indeed, when the CP Washington bureau brought up the subject of Obama's polls in September, it was to report -- twice in the same article -- that he was still a hit in Canada, without a hint of how he was faring in the one country where a president's public approval actually counts for anything.

But the Canadian Press Washington bureau got around to that. As in a passing reference, developed no further, to Obama's "sagging approval ratings" -- in late January, after Obama's gal had already lost "Ted Kennedy's seat" in religiously-Democratic Massachusetts, two-and-a-half months after Obama's men had lost gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia, both of which Obama had carried exactly a year before, and six months after Gallup first reported that Obama was down to 10th of the 12 presidencies since the advent of the Gallup presidential job approval rating. And Obama's approval rating wasn't "sagging"; that's just more aping of hackneyed newswire cliches, and too euphemistic to be descriptive. Obama's approval was scraping the basement floor, and had been for half a year before that glancing admission in the direction of reality.

The CP took the same line as the AP had taken a day or two earlier, explaining away Obama's troubles as public upset over high unemployment and so on, don't you know. Then the Canadian Press Washington bureau added a specious claim that part of Obama's difficulty was his "escalation" of the Afghan War. But Afghanistan is at this time one of the few issues where Obama scores a net-positive approval rating, but you see, the CP Washington bureau reported back in its heady days of covering the ascension of Obama that he had "pledged to peacefully end America's two unpopular wars." Of course, by that point the Iraq War had been won and the American withdrawal agreed by the U.S. and Iraqi governments, and as for Afghanistan, what Obama had pledged was precisely to escalate the war. It may be Obama's lone kept promise. For now, anyway. (Incidentally, how on earth can a war be "peacefully ended"? Wars are won or lost, or very occasionally stalemated; there is no painless alternative of "peacefully ended".) So when the CP Washington bureau blames Afghanistan for Obama's troubles, it says much more about the CP Washington bureau and the leftist elite than about American public opinion. The day may come when Obama falls down on Afghanistan, but at this point it's one of the few areas where he's still above water. Anyway, the jobs line does make a good start on explaining Obama's troubles, but it's more excuse-making than reporting.

To that end, and lest anyone imagine that there might not have been anything else worth mentioning in the Gallup poll, I offer these shock findings from Gallup, released five days after the open-homosexuality-in-the-military story invoking the Gallup poll, and a week and a half after Obama's State of the Union address, with its attendant "bump" in presidential approval. Gallup, February 8, 2010:
-more Americans disapprove than approve of Obama on six issues out of nine
-approval on the deficit down to 32 percent, with 64 percent disapproving
-approval on the economy at 36 percent to 61 percent
-approval on health-care at 36 percent to 60 percent
-approval among independents down to 24 percent on the deficit, 29 percent on the economy, and 24 percent on health-care

And Gallup's sample is "all adults", which is typically the most sympathetic to the Left. So Obama was underwater on six issues of nine, just a year in, with every elite on earth sheltering and flattering him, in the most friendly polling sample, and just after his first official SOTU address commandeering American primetime television for an hour and a half. The high unemployment is just the start of it; Obama's bigger problem is that the American people don't much agree with him, though you'd never guess it from reading the Canadian Press Washington bureau.

But back to this latest entry in the isn't-Sarah-Palin-just-the-worst series of the Canadian Press Washington bureau. When I made the case last May that the CP Washington bureau was excessively and obsessively scrutinizing Sarah Palin, the very "Editor-in-Chief" of the national newswire monopoly involved himself and justified every bit of the coverage on the grounds that Palin had been "touted" as a presidential nominee. As I wrote at the time, I do not accept that being "touted" as a putative nominee for president of the United States in 2012 or 2016 or 2020 warrants regular and uniformly-critical coverage in the newpapers of Canada in 2009, but that is the publicly-stated Canadian Press rationale for its excessive and obsessive scrutiny of Sarah Palin, and now the very headline on a dispatch of the Canadian Press itself informs us that Palin is not a "viable contender". The Canadian Press has defeated its own only stated justification for its Sarah Palin vendetta.

The Canadian Press Washington bureau devotes exquisite detail to those poor poll findings for Sarah Palin, but the Palin numbers are the irrelevant consolation of a leftist elite existing in denial of the historic collapse of Obama and his project to "remake the nation". Those Gallup numbers I sketched summarily above actually bear on the state and direction of American politics and government and on actual policies actually being pursued by the actual government of the United States, and they are positively calamitous for Obama and his agenda. They are also not even intimated anywhere in the dispatches of the lone Washington correspondent of the lone Canadian newswire service. How is anyone better off for their newspaper being turned upside down into an escape from reality? -- and worse, a denial of reality?

What do you call it when a writer cites those polls that affirm her own prejudices, and conspicuously ignores more than half a year of relentlessly contrary polling? Opinion journalism? Delusional? The Canadian Press calls it "the news".

Junk reporting and Tea Parties.

It was the same with the Tea Parties, which became the defining political movement of 2009. They began in February but when the Canadian Press Washington bureau treated them in May, it was only to sneer and to demonize, even declining to call them by their obvious and proper name, preferring instead to repeat the pornographic leftist taunt "teabagging protests".

To the Canadian Press Washington bureau, the defining movement of American politics in 2009 was just another clump of rednecks, only "ostensibly" concerned with policy, and in fact crypto-racist enemies of the state, to be demonized in the CP Washington bureau series on the theme. One of the early entries in the series was actually headlined "U.S. racists direct hateful messages at Obama". (I documented some of this at the time, here and here.) A single, serious report on the Tea Parties would have painted the most descriptive and predictive picture of American current events in 2009 and beyond, but the Canadian Press Washington bureau deals too much in the crudest caricatures of the average American to have been capable of understanding the Tea Partiers as anything other than latter-day lynch mobs, which is bad enough in any Canadian elite, but considerably more problematic in the sole Canadian newswire correspondent in America.

One of the reports in that Canadian Press Washington bureau series, supposedly uncovering murderous racism behind the opposition to Obama, repeated the claim -- found in a single book -- that death threats to the president had risen some "400 per cent" since Obama took office. What was that they taught in J-school about needing at least two sources for a claim? It turned out the claim was bogus. That "400 percent" was off by just about 400 percent.

The very Director of the Secret Service, Mark Sullivan, testified to Congress in December that "the threats right now ... is the same level as it has been for the previous two presidents at this point in their administrations. ... I have heard a number out there that the threat is up by 400 percent. ... I'm not sure where that number came from."

I know where it ended up, among other places: in my newspaper's World News, from the Canadian Press in Washington. Just more junk reporting from the Canadian Press Washington bureau, reproduced in the newspapers of Canada as fact, in aid of a storyline putting Obama up on the cross and turning the protesting American citizen into a suspect, and the record never corrected.

Earlier in its "Obama opposition nothing more than vicious, murderous racism" (not an actual headline, but it might as well have been) series, the Canadian Press Washington bureau reported on an imaginary death threat against Obama at a Sarah Palin rally -- seven months after it had been debunked by the Secret Service. (I documented the case at the time here.) Crap CP Washington bureau reporting, never corrected, repeated and amplified across Canada through the CP's monopoly network.

The implication in those Canadian Press Washington bureau reports was that the opposition to Barack Obama was illegitimate, and indeed, that is precisely the assumption of a 21st Century leftist elite. The assumption is that conservatism must necessarily be the result of ignorance, "intolerance" (in the political sense, not the dictionary sense), racial hatred, greed, stupidity, etc., while leftism in the same assumption isn't so much an ideology as the obvious conclusions of educated, intelligent people of good will. That is the worldview of a 21st Century leftist elite, and it is the worldview of the Canadian Press Washington bureau, which is a problem, because the worldview is bollocks, and because it precludes any possibility of impartiality, particularly in reporting on the Western world's most profoundly conservative and anti-elitist nation.

Sneering and Scott Brown.

The Canadian Press Washington bureau also reduced newly-elected Republican Senator Scott Brown to the sneer "onetime pin-up boy". Apropos of nothing. I suppose it wasn't absolutely necessary to mention Brown's 30 years' service in the National Guard or rank of Lieutenant Colonel, his three terms as a state senator or three terms as state rep, his law practice, etc., etc., and another CP Washington bureau report on the same general subject did at least acknowledge he'd been a state senator. But "pin-up boy" alludes to Brown's posing for an issue of Cosmopolitan magazine 28 years earlier -- at age 22. That's the sort of thing you get when you send a gossip columnist to cover Washington.

The gratuitous "pin-up boy" slight was common on the bitter Left, as in "pin-up boy for the teabaggers" (Huffington Post), and among the kind of people who write things like, "GOP Nazi Pin-Up Boy Exploits Voters' Frustration." The only instance of "pin-up boy" or "pinup boy" I could find anywhere in the Associated Press was in a quote from a bitter leftist who said she voted for the Democrat Coakley "to make sure the pinup boy doesn't get into office." At the Canadian Press Washington bureau, the bitter leftist is the one writing the newswire copy.

Incompetence and the filibuster.

And apart from the gross bias of the Canadian Press Washington bureau, there's the question of basic competence. Following is the CP Washington bureau's definition of the filibuster. I repeat, this is the definition of filibuster by the Washington bureau for Canada's newswire monopoly, and not a junior high social studies presentation: "The filibuster, a Senate rule that is a peculiarity of American politics, essentially gives the minority party the power to stop any legislation dead in its tracks".

That looks to me very much like a political science definition by someone with absolutely no aptitude for political science:
1. The filibuster is not peculiar to the United States. The U.S. Senate filibuster may be an extreme form of the phenomenon, but the filibuster is found in the Westminster systems including even the Ontario Legislative Assembly, which I was given to believe the Canadian Press Washington bureau was supposed to know something about.
2. The filibuster is not a "rule". It is pursuant to a Senate rule, and we even refer to the "filibuster rule", but the filibuster is a procedure or mechanism, or maneuver or tactic, not a "rule". Calling the filibuster a "rule" is subliterate.
3. It is not "the minority party" that is empowered by the filibuster, but any combination of senators totaling at least 41 percent. A couple weeks after that CP report ran, Senators Blanche Lincoln and Ben Nelson -- Democrats both -- joined Republicans in filibustering the confirmation of Obama's radical nominee for National Labor Relations Board.
4. And this business of "stopping any legislation dead in its tracks" could hardly be more crude. The filibuster blocks bills from being put to a vote. Before a bill can be voted on in the Senate, it must pass a cloture motion with at least 60 percent -- "cloture" referring to the closing of debate -- and that's where the filibuster comes in.

So if the Canadian Press wanted a one-line definition for the U.S. Senate filibuster which didn't look like it was written by an uninterested junior high schooler, it might have gone something like, "a parliamentary procedure whereby a minority of at least 41 percent can block legislation from coming to a vote." The CP's definition of filibuster is like defining a tank as "essentially a metal thingy that army men ride in", only not as accurate. That definition is an embarrassment, or it ought to be. Shouldn't a firm grounding in political science, not to mention war and economics, be a job requirement for anyone posted as the lone Washington correspondent for the lone Canadian newswire service? The average concerned citizen or letter-to-the-editor-writer could do at least as well, and very probably a sight better. Whatever credentials and cirricula vitae and contacts can these elites have that count for more than knowledge and accuracy and the capacity to present a complete story?

All of which is why Fox News -- which the Canadian Press Washington bureau has referred to as the "notoriously right-wing Fox News" -- recently became briefly the highest rated channel of any kind in all American cable television. Fox News is the antidote to the elite press that holds the American people in contempt, refuses to scrutinize the president and Congress so long as they are Democrats, and shuts out at least half the story. Fox News now has more viewers at 3 AM than CNN has in primetime. FNC's 3 AM ET comedy Red Eye -- which the press and government of Canada pathetically waged war against a year ago -- is now beating each of CNN's primetime heavyweights in the 25-54 demographic.

But that's just another telling snapshot of the nation that you'll never read in the Canadian Press Washington bureau, incapable as it is of reflecting reality in a conservative nation, and presenting instead a kind of delusional alternative universe of "the world as it ought to be" according to Canadian leftist elites. Anyone would be further ahead knowing nothing at all than reading the coverage of the Canadian Press Washington bureau and imagining it to bear any resemblance to reality. For over a year in this Age of Obama, the Canadian Press has been silent on the scandals of the Obama administration, the abuses of the Democratic Congress, the historic collapse of Obama and his Congress, and the tectonic shifts of the American people. Anyone depending for their coverage of American current events on the Canadian Press would have been oblivious to the great, relentless rightward realignment of the nation over the past year, and would have been nonplussed by the unthinkable Democratic defeats, which would have appeared to them to be quite without explanation. The Canadian Press Washington bureau belongs on the opinions pages or else not in the newspapers at all.

(Much more on the Canadian Press Washington bureau here, here, here, and here.)

The Chronicle-Herald editorial's Barack Obama problem

(UPDATE, Jan. 5, '10: Expanded.)

The Halifax Chronicle-Herald's editorial has been a more reliable rubber-stamp for the doings of the Obama Administration even than a lot of Congressional Democrats, and it's past time someone said peep about it. I've declined to write publicly on the Herald editorial in all these years because I'm barely acquainted with a fellow on the editorial board and because Herald editorials have in past been mostly fair and responsible, even when I haven't much agreed with them.

But The Herald is today a monopoly. Its unsigned editorials are the editorials of the largest newspaper in Canada's four Atlantic provinces, the sole province-wide paper in Nova Scotia, and now the only paper in the largest city north of Boston and east of Quebec City. And not long after The Herald saw off its only competition in Halifax, it fell head-over-heels in love with a man called Barack.

I suppose it was November when it was confirmed for me that the Herald editorial's Obama-boosting was something pathological. The occasion was the mad Obama decision to grant the rights and protections of an American citizen to the enemy leader responsible for the worst attack in American history. Of course the Herald editorial ruled emphatically that Obama had taken "the correct course", as if this was some long-overdue, desperately-needed, obvious measure, instead of a gratuitous prostration before the enemy, absolutely without precedent anywhere on earth, that came out of the clear blue sky one day and had never occurred to anyone before sometime in 2009. The editorial also dismissed the naysayers, who happen to be the great majority, with a fair bit of ignorance of the issue thrown in for good measure, as is typically the case when the Herald editorial wades into American affairs. But that much was all in a day's work for The Chronicle-Herald -- the least reliable outlet in the English-speaking world for news having anything at all to do with Barack Obama; it was the rest of the editorial that crossed into a demonstration of blindest love for Barack Obama.

At the same time as the Obama Administration decided to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four co-conspirators in civilian court like any American accused of a common crime, they also ruled that five much lesser terrorist figures be tried by the military commissions crafted by the Bush Administration and Democratic Congress, and approved by the very Supreme Court. Now, among those five sent to the military tribunals happened to be one Omar Khadr, who has some legalistic link to Canada and became an instant cause celebre among the entirety of the Canadian elite and left, if there's a distinction. In Canada Khadr is near-universally assumed to be a pitiful, blameless waif clutching a Mickey Mouse (literally), particularly among the kind of Canadians who are also head-over-heels for Barack Obama. So I just assumed the Herald editorial would at least register some polite complaint that the terror leader was being given the rights and protections of an American citizen, while the supposed Canadian innocent was busted down to military court. But no. The Herald editorial actually contorted itself to stalwartly defend both contradictory decisions -- to treat the enemy leader as a U.S. citizen, and to deny that same treatment to the pip-squeak kid believed by Canadians to have done nothing at all.

Now, there is no sensible way of reconciling those two extremes. It's as capricious a decision as has ever been made by any democratic government, and is the kind of arbitrariness one finds in rulers who claim a divine right. The Obama Administration's only given rationale was that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was responsible for an attack on civilians, so he was being tried in civilian court, while the others were alleged to be responsible for military attacks and so were being tried in the military system, but of course a civilian massacre is if anything many times worse than an attack on armed forces in a war zone, and anyway, Khalid Sheik Mohammed's 9/11 attacks were also against the Pentagon, the very headquarters of the United States Armed Forces. So that day, in that editorial of The Chronicle-Herald, it finally became beyond dispute that the sole organizing principle in Herald editorials concerning Barack Obama was their irrational allegiance to Obama, in absolutely all he does, all he says, and all that is done and said under the name of his administration.

And so when Obama announced his "surgelet" for Afghanistan, as when he has announced anything at all of any import, the only question was how obsequious the Herald editorial on the subject would be. Of course the editorial would take the view that Obama was responsible and wise, plotting just the right course in just the right measure. Well, where other observers found Obama to be hesitatingly hedging his bets in search of a third way between the hard realities, the Herald editorial pronounced him "courageous". Where other commentators found Obama's speech dispiriting when it needed to be rousing, the Herald editorial decided he was duly "sombre".

As if that weren't enough, a little later in another installment on the same subject, the Herald editorial went one better, actually going so far as to explicitly compare Obama to the greatest president of them all, the man who was prepared to rend the nation and precipitate the bloodiest war in its history, and spill the blood of 600,000 Americans to do what was right. These are the actual words of the December 13 Chronicle-Herald editorial: "Like Abraham Lincoln, President Obama is clearly among the latter. He serves the cause of world peace by using force against those who are bound to violence." Ugh. You see why I say the Herald editorial is in love. And it's always so unbecoming when comfortable middle-aged men fall head-over-heels. Of course, for anyone who has a clue about Lincoln as he was -- and not as he's conveniently recalled by a latter-day elite Canadian newspaper editorialist with his head in the clouds singing, "Obama: say it softly, it's almost like praying" -- the very fact that the Herald editorial glorifies Barack Obama unto the heavens is the first clue that Obama is no Lincoln. The Halifax elite of Lincoln's day were as anti-Lincoln as any Confederate raider; their inheritors today are the ones invoking Lincoln to justify the elite conventional wisdom of their time. If Obama were remotely like Lincoln, the Herald editorial would presently be denouncing him as a warmonger and shredder of civil liberties and "all international law".

If the case for the Herald editorial's Barack Obama problem hasn't been made sufficiently, the December 30 editorial on the attempted Christmas Day terror bombing may clear up any lingering doubt. The sole reference to Obama was in praise of him: "U.S. president Barack Obama has wisely asked for a thorough review...." Now, by December 30 there had accumulated a pile of indictments against Obama and his administration on this score, and yet the Herald editorial was actually applauding Obama for his "wisdom" in requesting a review.

That "wisely" really was gratuitous; even if the editorial found it necessary to document that Obama had requested a review, just how much "wisdom" does it take for a politician to do the most usual, unimaginitive, cheap, and reactive thing possible, ordering a "review" after his government has made a complete pig's breakfast of things? "Wisdom" would have been revoking the would-be bomber's visa and monitoring him after he became known to the U.S. government as a jihadi; not upholding the visa, letting the man onto a U.S.-bound flight with a bomb in his pants, then when the fuse misfired and the civilian passengers detained him, turning him over to domestic law enforcement and granting him a lawyer on the taxpayer's tab without pumping him for information on other planned attacks, while your administration assures the people that "the system worked."

It gets worse when one appreciates that even openly pro-Obama American newspaper editorials were absolutely scathing of Obama on this same point. From the same day and on the same subject as that Herald editorial, the editorial of the New York Daily News: "What the public was left with was a never-to-be-repeated case study in crisis management. It's time to get a grip, Mr. President. ... Obama's description of Abdumutallab as an 'isolated extremist' was remarkable and disturbing. The radicalized young Nigerian is nothing of the sort. ... In a similarly distant fashion, the President ordered up a 'review'...." Again, that was the editorial of a pro-Obama American paper, on the same day and subject as the Herald editorial blindly and pathetically claiming "wisdom" in Obama's handling of the attempted bombing.

Yes, blinder love hath no man than The Chronicle-Herald's editorial for Barack Obama. It's about to the point that if Obama announced his intention to destroy America's nuclear arsenal by detonating it over Halifax, the Herald editorial could be expected to applaud in its accustomed judicious tone that "this is the correct course". But what upset my stomach was a casual cynicism in defense of Obama in the editorial on Obama's Afghan surgelet. I determined there was no virtue in holding my fire any longer on an editorial board capable of that kind of rationalizing.

That Herald editorial of December 3 concocted an argument out of thinnest air, excusing Obama for his withdrawal date, which the same editorial acknowledged in the same paragraph was "wholly unrealistic". The editorial calls it "triangulation", which would be bad enough, but that's a misuse of the old Dick Morris term of art from the 1990s, which is a point that demands a greater understanding of American politics and history than is found in the average Canadian newspaper editorial board. In fact the editorial is clearly implying this is something worse than "triangulation": a lie.

The editorial calls Obama's withdrawal date "wholly unrealistic", then proceeds to argue that this unrealism is necessary to "give the war-weary American public something to look forward to." You can almost see the Herald editorialist patting the heads of those "war-weary American public". Give 'em "something to look forward to" -- something "wholly unrealistic". That'll hold 'em. What do you call it when something "wholly unrealistic" is promised, to give people "something to look forward to"? Not Dick Morris' "triangulation".

It is patronizing, skin-crawlingly cynical, and unworthy of an argument in defense of the war. If this anonymous Herald editorialist and his readers are so very clever as to plainly see that Obama's withdrawal date is "wholly unrealistic", then why shouldn't the American people be capable of seeing the very same thing? The implication is that the American people lack the editorialist's level of understanding, and can be told a little white lie to hold them for a while. And this is supposed to be in support of the war effort. Well, like the anonymous Herald editorial-writer, I am a supporter of the war, but apparently unlike that masked man, I also respect and revere the American people, and it does seem to me that if you mean to ask the American people to sustain a war effort, you owe it to them to tell them what you know to be true, as far as you can know it.

Following is the offending passage:

Anonymous Chronicle-Herald editorial-writer: "Where Mr. Obama was less
convincing was in imposing a strict timetable on the deployment, subject, of
course, to the situation on the ground at that time. The president envisions
U.S. troops beginning to withdraw by July 2011, which is even before Canada’s
firm pullout date of December 2011. At this rate, we could hitch a ride home
early.
"While the deadline is wholly unrealistic, it is the kind of triangulation Mr. Obama feels he must engage in. First, he must give the war-weary American public something to look forward to. Second, he must impose a benchmark for self-sufficiency on the corrupt Afghan government. Third, he must give his generals a sense of urgency."

Now take that last point, or rather that last imagining. That is both an unearned credit to Obama and an undeserved offense to the generals prosecuting Obama's war. The editorial of the largest newspaper on Canada's east coast is actually arguing that Obama offered a "wholly unrealistic" withdrawal date to "give his generals a sense of urgency". For a start, if it's plain even to Herald editorial-writer that Obama's deadline is "wholly unrealistic", then isn't it just possible that the generals would know that better than anyone? And I know all too well that The Chronicle-Herald guards its gates against news and opinion that may be upsetting to elite Canadian Obama-adulators, but surely even the Herald editorial board got the news that Obama took three months to order three-quarters of the reinforcements requested by his hand-picked general, in order to do the job Obama gave him in March. During which time, 116 American soldiers died in Afghanistan. It is Obama who's been lacking the "sense of urgency", not the generals on the ground who are daily prosecuting his war without the men they tell him they need for the job.

And if the anonymous editorial-writer wanted to come up with three rationales to justify this Obama withdrawal date which even the editorialist couldn't support, then how about the most obvious one, namely that Obama's own majority party is against his surgelet. If you're fishing for justifications for setting a withdrawal date just a year after your reinforcements get into place, why not that the majority party is against sending them at all, and may be more inclined to let it pass if there's reason to think it'll be reversed before long? That most obvious point was not made in the Herald editorial, while two cynical, patronizing, and frankly imaginary rationales did make it into the final draft.

Now, as one who's been reading Herald editorials for many years, I recall that the Herald editorial takes a very dim view of Rush Limbaugh, and as those people who take a dim view of Rush Limbaugh are invariably people who never listen to him, I'd bet good money that the Herald editorialist didn't hear Limbaugh's definitive argument against Obama's announced withdrawal date, so I will paraphrase it here.

The Limbaugh argument imagines that it had been an al Qaeda or Taliban leader speaking on Afghanistan, instead of Obama. The speech goes on at some length about the al Qaeda/Taliban plans for sending thousands of reinforcements into Afghanistan, the necessity of the mission, etc., etc. Then this al Qaeda/Taliban leader announces that after 18 months, they'll start their withdrawal. Now how do you suppose we would take that? Would we dwell on the first bit, or the bit about the withdrawal starting in 18 months? Of course, we'd take that as an admission of defeat, and buck ourselves up that if we can just hang on in there for another 18 months, we'll have seen the enemy off.

Well, then, now we have some idea of how the enemy will have taken Obama's Afghanistan address, with its talk of withdrawals in 18 months. It took Rush Limbaugh to make that point, but Herald editorialists would not be so abased as to hear so "boorish" an observer.

What's more, I think the Herald editorial has the wrong end of the stick altogether on Obama's withdrawal date. The editorial assumes he's just saying it; that Obama has set this date purely for public consumption, knowing full well it's unrealistic, and will push on after that time if that's what's called for. That kind of deliberate dishonesty would be a scandal of the first order, but it assumes Obama will prosecute this war come hell or high water. I suppose we won't know for sure until we get there, but what possible reason has Obama given for assuming such a thing? If Obama is as committed to this fight as the Herald editorial imagines him to be, then why is he sending 30,000 reinforcements when he was asked for 40,000, and why did it take him three months to sign off on even that many?

Obama has been a true-believing leftist all his life, as far to the left as any man who's even gotten onto a major-party presidential ticket in the United States. His associations are all far-left. His voting record in his brief time as U.S. senator earned him the "most liberal" ranking of the 100 senators -- one of whom is a self-described "socialist". His entire candidacy in the Democratic primaries was built on his being the least unelectable of the anti-war radicals. He talks even now of nuclear disarmament, referring not to Iran, but the United States. And in this very Afghanistan address in which he used "I" some 45 times, he uttered the word "victory" not once.

If America is going to win this Afghan War, it won't be made easier by half-measures -- sending 30,000 reinforcements when the generals ask for 40,000, restricting the rules of engagement, taking three months to order reinforcements, then announcing they'll be withdrawn starting one year after they've arrived, etc. My prayer is that American troops are allowed and enabled to do their job in Afghanistan, that the Pakistani government sees our common enemy as an urgent threat to itself and fully does its part in the war against them, and that the casualties are held down not only to spare the lives of good men, but to hold off the majority Democrats in their natural retreat, until the American people have the chance to turf them out of office and give power to the men with the stomachs to win wars.

It does seem to me that the editorial board of The Chronicle-Herald, like the rest of Canada's elite, fell head-over-heels for Barack Obama at some point in 2008, and hasn't seen him clearly since. They imagine him to be everything and anything they wish for him to be, and freely ascribe to him rationales and intents and characteristics that can only be divined by smitten adulators. And they take it as their purpose to defend and advocate for whatever contorted, convoluted decree happens to be arrived at by any functionary coming under the banner of Obama's administration. When Germany's Der Spiegel produces the most comprehensive and damning indictment of Obama's Afghan War policy, while the Herald editorial persists in its love affair, even unto the point of inventing imaginary rationales to justify what it acknowledges is "wholly unrealistic" and making Obama out to be the Lincoln of our times, then Joseph Howe must be turning in his grave.

I can only hope for the day when The Chronicle-Herald's editorial becomes capable of any dissention from Barack Obama's every deed and utterance, or The Herald's monopoly over us is broken. Nothing was ever improved by becoming a monopoly, and since it became last man standing in the newspaper business, The Herald has gone too far along the way to a miserable wad of glorified toilet paper.

Obama's mad Mohammed decision

The 9/11 attacks killed 2,973 innocents, and were intended to kill many times more. Those two quarter-mile-high World Trade Center towers during working hours amounted to the densest concentration of humanity anywhere on earth -- 50,000 people stacked in two buildings just a couple hundred feet per side each. The third plane which smashed into the Pentagon was meant to decapitate the United States military, and the fourth plane which was crashed by its passengers was bound for either the White House or the Capitol, to decapitate the United States government.

It takes a special kind of madness to extend the rights and protections of American citizens to the enemy leader who planned those attacks, more murderous than even the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and the worst in American history.

Within days of the Obama Administration's decision to bring the professed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, to a New York City civilian courtroom for "his day in court," a CNN poll found the American people were against it, 64 percent to 34 percent. The pollster called the decision "universally unpopular -- even a majority of Democrats and liberals say that he should be tried by military authorities." Then Obama's job approval rating fell below the 50-percent waterline for the first time in the Quinnipiac and Gallup polls.

Those real people from the real world understand the fundamental thing, that the 9/11 attacks were no "crime." A "crime" is smashing a storefront window, or mugging and stabbing a passerby who takes a wrong turn down a dark alley. The 9/11 attacks were an act of war and a terror atrocity.

And though you'd never guess it from the Mohammed decision, the Obama Administration does occasionally show signs they know there's a war on. This same Obama Administration has if anything increased the unmanned aerial strikes on enemy targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan. If information comes over the transom that some worthwhile enemy is holed up in an open spot, then a drone gets airborne, locates the target, and unceremoniously drops a Hellfire missile or a JDAM on his head.

Those enemy belligerents are not arrested and read their rights under the Constitution and laws of the United States, then flown to New York for their taxpayer-funded legal representation and their day in court. They're summarily blown to kingdom come, along with any poor innocent souls unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, because this is war, not some law enforcement operation. And in war, when an enemy is captured and given trial, there is a centuries-old mechanism for dealing with him: military tribunal.

All the way back in 2001, the Bush Administration created a system of military commissions precisely to deal with the likes of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, but the commissions were immediately challenged in court by leftist legal activists who've never met an enemy of the United States they didn't like. The activists managed to obstruct the commissions in their good work until 2008, when after two Supreme Court rulings, the Bush Administration and the Democratic Congress finalized a military commissions system which passed muster with the Supreme Court and the notions of the decadent 21st Century.

The Obama Administration and its hardier water-carriers who imagine that civilian trials for the likes of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed are only right and proper, insist that of course Mohammed will be found guilty and put to death, and on the off-chance he isn't, why, we'll just re-arrest him on the spot, come up with some new charge, and try, try again until we get the verdict we want. But if this trial is so predetermined, and the system may simply be gamed until we have our way, then why on earth can we not dispense with the pretense and leave Mohammed's case with the special military commissions, where he was on course to plead guilty and have his "martyrdom" by execution until Obama suspended the process?

How might American civilian law have to be compromised in order for this Mohammed case to be heard at all in a civilian courtroom? Until now, it never occurred to U.S. agents to treat Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as they would an American citizen accused of a cooking up illicit whiskey or some such thing: he wasn't read his rights, for a start, and he happens to have been the primary subject of that practice called waterboarding. Unless some exception is made, those kinds of things would be grounds for tossing the case out in the civilian system. And how might national security be compromised if and when Mohammed demands discovery -- placing the raw military intelligence to do with his case in his hands?

Of course the United States can defend its greatest city against terror attacks made more likely by a high-profile trial of the 9/11 mastermind just blocks from Ground Zero, but why should it have to? Why should New Yorkers be given new reason to fear? Why should the Armed Forces and law enforcement be given a new threat to defend against? Why should the American taxpayer have to put up $75 million for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's "day in court," and endure his harangues for however long it takes to come to the end of this ghastly process?

This is not the will of the American people. There's a reckoning coming, and Obama's mad Mohammed decision is just another milestone along the road to it.

The war they can't get right

I made the mistake of watching James David Robenalt's presentation on his new book The Harding Affair -- Love and Espionage During the Great War, carried on C-SPAN's Book TV, and it was problematic enough to prompt this post.

Now, for my sins, I am an obsessive student of the First World War. The gateway drug of the Second World War having become too mild for me, I moved onto the harder stuff. Garand M-1s wouldn't do it for me anymore, so I graduated to water-cooled Vickers-Maxim heavy machine guns. And it is the bane of anyone who knows anything at all about the First World War that it is very probably the war most freely pronounced-upon by people who are so far out of their depth on the subject, they wouldn't know a pikelhaube from a piccolo if they sat on one.

Unless the work is by the likes of Hew Strachan or Paul Johnson, or John Keegan or Victor Davis Hanson, it's a good policy to avoid 21st Century perspectives on the First World War. They're too often worse than useless. Your typical History Channel "In the Classrom" early-morning documentary which bears on the First World War will make some blithe assertion like that the generals thought trench warfare was a fine idea, and would make a great plan for winning the war. That's the kind of I-think-it-therefore-it-must-be-so-and-there's-no-need-of-checking-it that gets written up, passed through a layer or two of editors, and then passed off as a TV documentary on the First World War.

(That example is legitimate, by the way, though to save my life I couldn't think of the title of the thing. And in case you're wondering, the trenches were nowhere in the plans for the First World War; trench warfare was what happened when the lines stopped moving, and there was nowhere to hide from anti-personnel artillery shelling, long-range, high-powered rifle fire, and sweeping machine gun fire. The trenches weren't some general's idea for winning the war, they were a desperate resort to keep men alive. They weren't planned at all, they just happened when men were faced with the choice of digging a hole or not seeing the next sunrise.)

So I should have known better than to see what this James David Robenalt had to say on the subject. But I'm a sucker for C-SPAN's Book TV, so I watched a bit and promptly had my instincts confirmed by this novel piece of reasoning:

James David Robenalt: "When [then-President] Woodrow Wilson asked for
war, he says it's a war to make the world safe for democracy. And the
reason he says that is he believes democracies are inherently more stable
and less likely to go to war. [So far, so good.]

"[Then-Senator Warren G.] Harding disagrees. He thinks --
and how's this for a modern theme? -- he says, and you can find his
speech on the Senate floor, 'It's none of our business, to go tell somebody
else what government they should have. We should take care
of ourselves, and we really shouldn't be involved in regime change.'
[I take it that wasn't Harding's exact phraseology, which apparently
can be found somewhere on the Senate floor.]

"Now, who was right in that debate? History will tell
you. But I can tell you this: Russia became a democracy, for
about six months, and Wilson recognized them immediately, and he was
joyful. And six months later the Bolsheviks take over. [So
"Russia became a democracy", and the next thing you know, "the Bolsheviks take
over". And it's all the fault of that darn Wilson and his darn
democracy.] And you have Lenin and Stalin, and you know, what
happened in Russia.

"The Kaiser eventually abdicates. Germany becomes a democracy.
But they weren't ready for it. It was a weak democracy: the Weimar
Republic. Naziism comes about, Hitler comes about. [Another
straight line: "Germany becomes a democracy" then "Hitler comes about".]

"So it's a great debate about who was right in that debate about
regime-change. But it's a modern theme. I mean, it's the issue of
Iraq, revisited." [Just in case you hadn't worked out that he was talking about Iraq all along.]

So there you have it. The history of the 20th Century, according to James David Robenalt. Or, James David Robenalt's entry for most buffoonish argument ever made having to do with the First World War and its aftermath, being that it was democracy that gave us the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

According to this line of reasoning, Germany wasn't "ready for democracy" in 1919, though it demonstrably was ready for democracy in 1945, and if only we hadn't insisted on democracy for Germany 26 years "too soon", there'd have been no Hitler and no Second World War. Of course, several generations now, from the 1930s on, have blamed Hitler and the war on the less-than-total victory in the First World War, the ruinous, humiliating, and impossible reparations in the Treaty of Versailles, and the war costs and economic collapse. But James David Robenalt has a different idea: it was the democracy that did it.

And, according to this line, those Communists who'd been attempting revolution in Russia for decades before 1917 and finally had the complete societal collapse they needed to seize power, only managed it because Russia had "become a democracy" for "about six months" in 1917. I have to say, this Russia point looks to me like it goes beyond mere specious argument, to inventing an alternate history which may more conveniently be shoehorned into a potshot against the democracy project of the Iraq War. At what point in the First World War, and in what conceivable sense, did Russia "become a democracy"? That could only refer to what is called the Russian "Provisional Government" of 1917, but the the whole business was chaos from start to finish, the Provisional Government never did get around to holding the national elections which were its principal raison d'etre, and when finally those elections did come to pass, after the October Revolution, Lenin's Bolsheviks wound up the runners-up and without the electoral mandate or legislative votes for their Soviet totalitarianism, so Lenin dissolved the Constituent Assembly after all of one day, and the rest is history. 

And even if Russia had "become a democracy", the argument here goes that, if only the czar had stayed on and showed 'em who's the master, and Wilson hadn't got his "democracy", those Bolshies would never have gotten their little experiment off the ground. Just think, the Robenalt argument goes: no Soviet Union, no Stalin, no Cold War, if only Russia hadn't "become a democracy" for "about six months" in 1917.

Again, since just about the time of the Russian Revolution, it has been understood that the imposition of Communism in that country had everything to do with the mass national revulsion against the old system which had brought the nation to utter ruin, even unto starvation. The strain of the war brought things to breaking point, and the situation was seized on by the Communist faction called the Bolsheviks. And by "old system" I refer to the czarist regime of decades and centuries previous, not some half-imaginary six-month "democracy" in 1917.

I would dearly love to see Christopher Hitchens, who happens to be an authority also of the Bolshevik Revolution, take his rapier to that it-was-all-democracy's-fault line of historical argument.

Now I am no head-shrinker, but I don't think head-shrinking credentials are requisite in order to diagnose the condition of which that argument is a symptom. I'd reckon that it would never have occurred to James David Robenalt to argue that democracy caused the Soviet Empire and Third Reich, before the Iraq War. And I'd reckon that James David Robenalt altogether despises that war and the arguments for it -- particularly the argument that the democratizaion of Iraq sets the model for reform in the region which is our only hope for settling this business once and for all, and that democractization turns enemy to ally -- or if not an affirmative ally then at least a mostly-decent state not routinely invading some neighbor or gassing some unloved domestic minority or fostering hostile alliances or building up unconventional arsenals for the next big dust-up.

I'm just old enough, in fact, to remember a time when that kind or argument was much more likely to be found on the Left than on the Right. But then came 9/11, and the man whom history handed the decision of what was to be done about it happened to be George W. Bush. In what may be the sole deviation of President Bush from Candidate Bush, George W. Bush became arguably the greatest practicing believer in the democracy-makes-peace argument since 1919, and inarguably since 1945. I had my own Road-to-Damascus at about the same time, and became a zealous convert myself, at least for the duration of this war. And for a naive moment I assumed that the elite and the Left, if there's a distinction, would at the very least not oppose that democratization cause. But no. Because democratization necessarily meant war and occupation, and because it had become U.S. policy, and not only that but Bush Administration policy, the elite and the Left turned in one motion to positively demonizing democratization -- condemning it in such terms that anyone might have thought Bush wasn't trying to democratize Iraq but reinstitute slavery -- as if democratization were some grievous historic sin.

And after several years of that, the likes of James David Robenalt comes along and concocts the novel argument that Iraq-style democratization brought the Nazis in Germany and the Soviets in Russia, and all that followed. Funny that no-one thought to make that argument in the 90-odd years since the end of the First World War. And it's hardly as if the rise of Naziism and the rise of Bolshevism haven't been much speculated on in that time.

This book of James David Robenalt is supposed to be about a love affair involving Warren G. Harding, which ought to win some award for wringing 416 pages out of possibly the world's least-interesting historical love affair. But anti-Iraq-War-ism radicalizes, drives to extremes of argument, and infects even the driest historical romance. I won't pronounce on the rest of the book -- though I have to say I got a distinct whiff of German-sympathizing off this Robenalt -- because there's no way I'd look at 416 pages of this, much less pay to look at it.

Still more problems with the Canadian Press Washington bureau

The way Obama's Afghan policy is being reported, anyone might think this was September of 2008 rather than September '09, when Barack Obama was Candidate Obama rather than President Obama, and an observer and critic of U.S. war policy rather than the commander-in-chief who ordered it.

The Chronicle-Herald's top World News story for September 17 was from the Canadian Press Washington bureau and credulously headlined "Obama: U.S. needs clear strategy for Afghan mission."

Lee-Anne Goodman: "President Barack Obama said Thursday the U.S. has yet to decide on the best strategy for the ongoing conflict and won't send any more soldiers there until it does."

That is undoubtedly what Obama said in September. But he had said something else entirely just a month earlier, on August 17.

Obama, August 2009: "I announced a new, comprehensive strategy in March. ... This strategy acknowledges that military power alone will not win this war."

"Our new strategy has a clear mission and defined goals: to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda and its extremist allies."

"In the months since, we have begun to put this comprehensive strategy into action."

So Obama announced a new Afghan War "strategy", ordered 21,000 new troops to Afghanistan in aid of that strategy, and things got worse than they've yet been. Obama then pretended the current failing strategy wasn't his and that he'd never order troops into battle without a proper plan, and hoped no-one would notice. And sure enough, no-one at the Canadian Press Washington bureau or The Chronicle-Herald did notice.

The Canadian Press Washington bureau repeated Obama's claims credulously, without so much as a hint that they were belied by Obama's own words of just weeks before, on that "new strategy" of his, with its "clear mission" and "defined goals", and which had been "put into action" "in the months since" March.

Obama, September 2009, quoted in the Canadian Press: "'We have lacked as clear of a strategy and a mission as is necessary in order to meet our overriding objective, which is to dismantle and disrupt and destroy al-Qaida,' Obama said."

"'There is no immediate decision pending on resources, because one of the things I'm absolutely clear about is you have to get the strategy right and then make determinations about resources,' he said.

'You don't make determinations about sending young men and women into battle without having absolute clarity about what the strategy is going to be.'"

And this was fully half a year after Obama had proclaimed, "Today, I am announcing a comprehensive, new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. This marks the conclusion of a careful policy review that I ordered as soon as I took office."

Lee-Anne Goodman: "The original goal of the mission - to seek out and destroy the forces behind the 9-11 attacks eight years ago - is all but a distant memory, thanks in part to the absence of a clear course of action, Obama suggested."

If that's the case, then who, pray tell, may be responsible for this "absence of a clear course of action," considering again that Obama was only the month before championing his "clear mission" and "defined goals" which had been "put into action" "in the months since" March?

The Canadian Press Washington bureau worked in two references to Obama's popularity -- in Canada.

Lee-Anne Goodman: "a president who remains wildly popular in Canada" and "a president who enjoys unprecedented popularity in Canada."

No doubt. But then, Canadians don't live under Obama's administration and Congress, and don't get a vote on them. So two unquantified assertions of Obama's great popularity in Canada, and not one mention of his standing in the only country where that matters. (In case you're wondering, it's not good. The September Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found Obama falling to 41% job approval among independents.)

The people cannot afford a press whose object is to flatter Obama and taunt his opponents, oblivious to his actual policies and their actual consequences, happily obliging of his political tricks, and enabling him to say and do as he pleases without the fear of being called to account to keep him honest.

The press is now colluding with Obama in his shrugging off of responsibility for his very war policy, pretending with him that his policies aren't his if they aren't working, and allowing him a license and blamelessness.

When it comes to the current president of the United States and his Congressional supermajorities, The Chronicle-Herald and the Canadian Press aren't so much news outlets as a kind of support group for leftist elites -- an imaginary "world as it ought to be" according to leftist elites, where they play make-believe that the "good guys" can do no wrong and everything's OK.

Reality is at least beginning to intrude among some of the more serious on the Left. By September 22, the leftist Guardian newspaper in England was running an opinion piece headlined "Obama the impotent," and the leftist New Republic magazine in the States published an important piece titled "Job One: The only way Obama can pull his presidency back from the brink."

But reality was still safely at bay in The Chronicle-Herald and the Canadian Press. On that same day, the top of The Herald's World News read "Obama a talk show pro." Another dispatch of the Canadian Press Washington bureau, featuring a large color photo of Obama laughing it up with David Letterman. As even two of the most pro-Obama outlets in America and Britain were worrying aloud about Obama's collapse, The Herald and the CP were still running the most unserious, frivolous fluff as if the honeymoon had never ended, oblivious to the disaster gathering all around.

(The Canadian Press Washington bureau in that piece identified Fox News as "notoriously right-wing." Well, then, America must like its cable news "notoriously right-wing": As of September, Fox News was drawing nearly twice as many viewers as CNN and MSNBC combined. All 10 of the top 10 shows on cable news, and 13 of the top 15, were Fox News shows. Even FNC's 3 AM Eastern "Red Eye" drew more viewers than MSNBC's breakfast show. Fox News is "notorious" and "right-wing" to Canadian leftist elites; to the American people, it's the last outpost of the Fourth Estate in television news.)

Further down on that same September 22 World News page, The Herald did manage to scrutinize the president of the United States -- the last one -- and a now-canceled U.S. policy: "Study: CIA's harsh methods counterproductive," an Associated Press story on a "paper which scrutinizes the techniques used by the CIA under the Bush administration through the lens of neurobiology."

On or about that same day, the same Associated Press which came up with the "neurobiological study" story put up a couple pieces allowing some of the bad news reality into its Obama coverage -- "SPIN METER: $2 trillion in health savings? Where?" and "Tough political realities quiet youth 'Obamamania'" -- but for some reason those never made it into The Chronicle-Herald.

Not Herald News section material, really. There's scarcely any less news to be had on the Opinions page, and there's a sight more honesty there.

(Much more on the Canadian Press Washington bureau here, here, and here.)