Those folks who bother to worry about the war in Afghanistan--not a large slice of the population--had reason to fret on Wednesday morning when they picked up (or clicked on) the New York Times and read a front-page story noting that President Barack Obama is adopting a new "approach to Afghanistan that will put more emphasis on waging war than on development." The piece cited unnamed senior administration officials.

At a press briefing on Tuesday, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs had said that the administration was in the early stage of reevaluating Afghanistan policy. He had noted that Obama intended to meet with US Army General David McKiernan, the commander of the NATO-led forces in Afghanistan, to discuss the course ahead. It seemed as if no decisions had been rendered about Afghanistan.

Yet the Times indicated key calls have already been made:

Talk about generalizations!

In a front-page article on Saturday, the New York Times' Neela Banerjee examined Barack Obama's attempt to gather support among the Jewish electorate, "a cornerstone of the Democratic base." She reported that "in doing so," Obama is "navigating one of the more treacherous paths of Democratic politics."

To set up her piece, Banerjee wrote, "Winning the trust of Jewish Democratic voters is all the more difficult for Mr. Obama because of the tenuous relations between blacks and Jews." That's some declaration. She neither explains nor sources that assertion of fact. What blacks? Which Jews? She makes it seem like Jews and blacks fight more than Christians and blacks, or Latinos and Muslims. This sort of shortcut journalism simplifies a complex matter and lumps together all blacks and all Jews into enemy camps in a cultural war (or cold war). My hunch: a higher percentage of Jews have supported Obama in the Democratic primaries than white Southern Baptists. So maybe it's the white SBers who have "tenuous relations" with blacks?

Banerjee then goes on to make another error:

Other [Jewish-related] issues [Obama] faces arise from his newness to national politics. While his positions hew to mainstream Democratic views, some critics have expressed concerns that they are not heartfelt.

“His record is relatively sparse, so I want to look at the totality of influences that might bear on Senator Obama,” said Ed Lasky, news editor of the online magazine, American Thinker, whose criticisms of Mr. Obama for aligning himself with allegedly anti-Israel advocates have been widely circulated among Jewish voters.

Do you know who Ed Lasky is? Probably not. A quick Google search shows that he is a conservative and that his on-line magazine is conservative. Nothing wrong with that, right? But look at the article, he wrote in 2004 entitled Why American Jews must vote for Bush:

[T]he anachronistic tendency of American Jews to vote Democratic must end.

This is one tradition that Jews, a people united by their traditions, should put aside. They should refuse to vote for John Kerry for President. Bluntly speaking, his words and actions reveal a man who would imperil our community. Our concerns should not just be about Israel but for the future of the entire Jewish community. It is imperative that Jews understand that the hatred being promoted around the world is directed not just at Israel, but also at Jews as Jews.

Lasky is no honest broker trying to assess Obama. He's a fierce (and apparently religious) partisan who hopes to drive Jews from the Democratic Party into the GOP. He has an agenda--a stark one that obviously colors his approach to Obama. Yet the Times failed to note that. Instead, it cited Lasky as evidence that Obama may have a problem among Jewish Democrats. That would be like saying that McCain has a problem among Republican veterans because retired General Wesley Clark opposes him. Lasky wants to sink Obama because he wants to sink Democrats. His crusade against Obama says nothing about Obama's ability to attract Jewish Democrats.

All this goes to show that when it comes to covering the minefield of race, religion and politics, it's easy for the leading national newspaper to crash into the shoals.

In an earlier version, I referred to Neela Banerjee as a man. I'm told she's a she. My apologies.

Responding to The New York Times' article disclosing an all-too-cozy relationship between John McCain and Vicki Iseman, a lobbyist for telecom firms that had business before a Senate committee McCain chaired, the McCain campaign on Wednesday night zapped out an email to journalists in which Bob Bennett, a lawyer representing McCain, called the article a "smear job." Bennett had gone on Fox News to defend his client, and the email contained what campaign aides believed were the most powerful Bennett quotes. There was one problem: none of Bennett's statements refuted a single fact in the Times story. Not one. It was all rhetoric and bombast. To prove it, here are the Bennett remarks disseminated by the McCainiacs:

Bennett: "Senator McCain did not want a repeat of what occurred years ago in South Carolina, namely a real smear campaign and asked me to assist them and I have been assisting him. And this -- I'm just -- I think what the New York Times did here was shameless, just shameless. As you pointed out in the lead, it's almost entirely unsourced. You know, I'm in a pretty unique position to talk about John McCain. First, I should tell your listeners you know I'm a registered Democrat, so I'm not on his side of a lot of issues. But I investigated John McCain for a year and a half, at least, when I was special counsel to the Senate Ethics Committee in the Keating Five. Which, by the way, this New York Times article goes back to and discusses -- goes back years and years. And if there is one thing I am absolutely confident of is John McCain is an honest man. I recommended to the Senate Ethics Committee that he be cut out of the case, that there was no evidence against him, and I think for the New York Times to dig this up just shows that Senator McCain's public statement about this is correct. It's a smear job."

Bennett: "All of the matters that they allude to, I mean, they are not even very specific, we answered fully to the New York Times. We showed them that there was just nothing there. And, unfortunately, they have just obviously disregarded all of the hard evidence that we presented. Now, I'm not suggesting that the New York Times has an agenda here. I will let others conclude that. But they certainly have allowed themselves to be a vehicle for a repeat of what happened in South Carolina. And I suspect it's only because John McCain is winning so much, that we are even reading this story ... What I know is that the members of the staff who were there and dealt with this lobbyist and ran Senator McCain's office say no. They say there is nothing to it, and they provided that information to the New York Times, and it just apparently didn't have much of an impact on them ..."

Bennett: "Anybody who knows anything about Washington knows that if there is one senator who will not honor the requests of his friends when it comes to various pieces of legislation, it is John McCain. Some of the people that I know very well who are lobbyists -- Republican lobbyists -- will tell me and they'll tell anybody who asks, McCain calls it the way he sees it on the merits. You can be his friend for 25 years, and if he doesn't agree with it, he'll say no. ... After representing him the last few months, answering all the questions of the New York Times looking into the allegations they wanted us to respond to, I cannot find, nor can they, a single instance where John McCain did something contrary to his beliefs."

See? Nothing. He did not deny--as the newspaper reports--that McCain's top strategist at the time, John Weaver, met with Iseman after McCain aides in late 1999 had become worried about her relationship with McCain (whether it involved extramarital sex or not) and warned her to stay away from McCain, who was then running for president as a maverick reformer and the scourge of Washington lobbyists. I'm tempted to say one can draw a conclusion from Bennett's bluster-to-facts ratio.

The morning after the story hit, McCain denied that he had done any favors for Iseman as a senator and described Iseman as a friend. He said he was unaware of any meeting between Weaver and Iseman. "I intend to move on," he declared. Well, he can move on. But the issue is whether the story moves on--and more information emerges.

After being out of the country for a week, I come back to discover that--gasp!--little has changed in Iowa. Mitt and Mike are still at it--though the Huckabee meltdown on Monday was darn amusing. Ready for prime time? Not quite. And now Huckabee's off to do Jay Leno rather than spend the last days before Iowa in Iowa. That must really piss off Dems rooting for Huckabee. As for the Democratic contenders, there were no surprises in the final week of '07. Experience versus change versus fight. Politics as Seinfeld: yadda, yadda, yadda. But that's to be expected. You dance with the message that brung ya. So the only real news I encountered upon my return was the fact that neocon godfather Bill Kristol had been hired by The New York Times as a weekly columnist.

I know that left-of-center bloggers have been fuming over this, and I'm late to the party. But let me ask you, dear reader, to imagine the following: A liberal commentator writes a series of columns in 2000 saying that Islamic jihadism poses no threat to the United States. September 11 occurs. Would the Times then hire this pundit? Don't bother answering. Yet Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. has handed a perch to a person who was equally wrong regarding Iraq. It is bizarre. The Times has editorialized against the war from the start. Now it is providing a platform to one of the war's chief cheerleaders. Is ideological diversity more important than getting it right? And why doesn't the Wall Street Journal's editorial page behave in such a self-emasculating manner?

This Kristol news does have a deja vu feel to it, for exactly one year ago, I wrote a piece about Kristol's then-new gig at Time magazine. That article applies too well to the latest Kristol triumph. So as an environmentally sensitive blogger, I will recycle it below, and I wonder if Kristol will next be named Katie Couric's successor.

KRISTOL CLEAR AT TIME
www.thenation.com
01/02/2007

The market doesn't work -- not when it comes to conservative commentators.

Before the Iraq war, rightwing (and middle-of-the-road) pundits claimed Saddam Hussein was a dire WMD threat, that he was in cahoots with al Qaeda, that the war was necessary. The neoconservative cheerleaders for war also argued that an invasion of Iraq would bring democracy to that nation and throughout the region. They were wrong. But they have paid no price for their errors. They did not have to serve in Iraq. None, as far as I can tell, have had sons or daughters harmed or killed in the fighting there. They did not have to bear higher taxes, because George W. Bush has charged the costs of this military enterprise to the national credit card. Though they miscalled the number-one issue of the post-9/11 period, they did not lose their influential perches in the commentariat. Charles Krauthammer, Richard Perle, Robert Kagan, Gary Schmitt, Danielle Pletka and others (including non-neocon Thomas Friedman) who blew it on Iraq still regularly appear on op-ed pages and television news shows, pitching their latest notions about Iraq, Iran or other matters.

Foremost among this band is William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard and former chief of staff for Vice President Dan Quayle. Kristol, a Fox News regular, has not seen his standing as a go-to conservative pundit suffered. Moreover, he has been rewarded with a plum posting. Time magazine's new managing editor, Richard Stengel, has invited Kristol to become what Stengel calls a "star" columnist for the magazine.

Both Kristol and Stengel are likable fellows. I usually enjoy debating Kristol on television or radio. He's no hater, and he's no autopilot partisan. Stengel is a thoughtful and cerebral person who once was a senior adviser to cerebral Senator Bill Bradley, a Democrat. So there's nothing personal when I ask, why in the hell does Stengel believe that what America needs now is more Bill Kristol? (Slate media cop Jack Shafer criticized Stengel's pick of Kristol by noting that "Kristol isn't much of a deviation from Charles Krauthammer, an occasional Time 'Essay' writer." Friendship declared: Shafer is a pal of mine.)

It's too late to affect Stengel's decision, but let's take this occasion to review Kristol's record on Iraq, courtesy of a rather cursory Nexis search. It holds no surprises.

On September 11, 2002, as the Bush administration began its sales campaign for the coming war, Kristol suggested that Saddam Hussein could do more harm to the United States than al Qaeda had: "we cannot afford to let Saddam Hussein inflict a worse 9/11 on us in the future."

On September 15, 2002, he claimed that inspection and containment could not work with Saddam: "No one believes the inspections can work." Actually, UN inspectors believed they could work. So, too, did about half of congressional Democrats. They were right.

On September 18, 2002, Kristol opined that a war in Iraq "could have terrifically good effects throughout the Middle East."

On September 19, 2002, he once again pooh-poohed inspections: "We should not fool ourselves by believing that inspections could make any difference at all." During a debate with me on Fox News Channel, after I noted that the goal of inspections was to prevent Saddam from reaching "the finish line" in developing nuclear weapons, Kristol exclaimed, "He's past that finish line. He's past the finish line."

On November 21, 2002, he maintained, "we can remove Saddam because that could start a chain reaction in the Arab world that would be very healthy."

On February 2, 2003, he claimed that Secretary of State Colin Powell at an upcoming UN speech would "show that there are loaded guns throughout Iraq" regarding weapons of mass destruction. As it turned out, everything in Powell's speech was wrong. Kristol was uncritically echoing misleading information handed him by friends and allies within the Bush administration.

On February 20, 2003, he summed up the argument for war against Saddam: "He's got weapons of mass destruction. At some point he will use them or give them to a terrorist group to use...Look, if we free the people of Iraq we will be respected in the Arab world....France and Germany don't have the courage to face up to the situation. That's too bad. Most of Europe is with us. And I think we will be respected around the world for helping the people of Iraq to be liberated."

On March 1, 2003, Kristol dismissed concerns that sectarian conflict might arise following a US invasion of Iraq: "We talk here about Shiites and Sunnis as if they've never lived together. Most Arab countries have Shiites and Sunnis, and a lot of them live perfectly well together." He also said, "Very few wars in American history were prepared better or more thoroughly than this one by this president." And he maintained that the war would be a bargain at $100 to $200 billion. The running tab is now nearing half a trillion dollars.

On March 5, 2003, Kristol said, "I think we'll be vindicated when we discover the weapons of mass destruction and when we liberate the people of Iraq."

Such vindication never came. Kristol was mistaken about the justification for the war, the costs of the war, the planning for the war, and the consequences of the war. That's a lot for a pundit to miss. In his columns and statements about Iraq, Kristol displayed little judgment or expertise. He was not informing the public; he was whipping it. He turned his wishes into pronouncements and helped move the country to a mismanaged and misguided war that has claimed the lives of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians. That's not journalism.

In an effectively functioning market of opinion-trading, Kristol's views would be relegated to the bargain basement. And he ought to be doing penance, not penning columns for Time. But -- fortunate for him -- the world of punditry is a rather imperfect marketplace.