Low Earth Orbit

[Senator Bob] KERREY: Why didn’t we swat that fly?

[Condoleezza] RICE: I believe that there’s a question of whether or not you respond in a tactical sense or whether you respond in a strategic sense; whether or not you decide that you’re going to respond to every attack with minimal use of military force and go after every — on a kind of tit-for-tat basis.

By the way, in that memo, Dick Clarke talks about not doing this tit-for-tat, doing this on the time of our choosing.

RICE: I’m aware, Mr. Kerrey, of a speech that you gave at that time that said that perhaps the best thing that we could do to respond to the Cole and to the memories was to do something about the threat of Saddam Hussein.

That’s a strategic view…

Adam Nagourney and Carl Hulse […] ]their New York Times’ account of the political implications of the fighting in Iraq is lousy reporting and writing. The Timesmen pass lightly over Kerry’s many incoherent statements from his NPR and CNN interviews yesterday —statements that should sound alarms among any serious observers of the war on terror. Kerry is uttering nonsense, and there is no way to disguise it, so the freindlies aren’t reporting it. Rather than treat the readers of the world’s most influential newspaper to Kerry’s strange commentary on al-Sadr, the reporters actually bother to devote two paragraphs to quoting a Pat Buchanan column, as well as take-aways from Bill O’Reilly and Newt Gingrich. Did the editors take a day off? John Kerry is the Democratic nominee and he is mouthing inanities on the most pressing issue of the day, and the New York Times isn’t mentioning the key excerpts much less quoting them at length?

The Washington Times did a better job of covering Kerry, and though its account buried the Kerry comments on al-Sadr, at least the quote is there for the curious to find. Incredibly, the Washington Post ignores the two interviews Kerry gave on Iraq and devoted a huge amount of ink to his “plan” for the economy. The Los Angeles Times also skipped Kerry’s war analysis. The LA Times runs a story on the impact of the news of the Marine combat deaths on the community of Camp Pendleton, but doesn’t tell its readers what John Kerry thinks of the conduct of the war that obliges such sacrifices to occur? The hometown Globe of course skips over Kerry’s remarks.

This election is about the war. Yesterday Kerry said a lot of things about the war, some outrageous, some incoherent, some contradicting other statements he has made. Voters have a right to hear or read Kerry on the crucial subject, even if pro-Kerry reporters and editors suspect that these quotes may not go down well with the public. The Kerry interviews were not hard to come by. I had them and had transcribed and posted the key excerpts by 2:30 PM Pacific time yesterday. No wonder Americans don’t trust the media. A combination of terrible news judgment, laziness, and bias has infected the coverage of the election, and there’s no excusing this failure on the part of the “objective press.”