Never, Ever Travel Without a Book

 
Intrepid commenter Wally Ballou sends this primary source material from his trip to…to somewhere on the East Coast:

Hey - I read the NYT on the train today (it was a 4-hour trip, and it was the only paper they had). I'm sure you'll be as shocked as I was that they had some really bad journalism right on the front page.

One of their gloating articles about the hapless Bush, and about how all the Republicans were abandoning him - the 3rd paragraph on the front page caught my eye:

But it accelerated even before the Dubai ports deal was derailed by members of his own party, and before an unexpected uprising began among some neo-conservatives, who are now arguing that Iraq, while a noble effort, has turned into a failed mission that must be abandoned.

Hmm… Wally’s ears perk up:

Neo-cons against the war? My interest was piqued. Surely the gray harlot wouldn't make a statement like that without substantiation. [She wouldn’t? -- ed.]

The story was carried over to page leventy-seven and droned on and on.

Eventually, we got to the smoking gun:

paragraphs 24 and 25 --

When Mr. Bush gave a set of speeches on Iraq in December, the calls to pull out were mostly from the left. Now, a rising chorus of neo-conservatives, who urged Mr. Bush to topple Mr. Hussein, say that, having liberated Iraq, the rest is up to the Iraqis.

"The administration has, now, to cope with failure," William F. Buckley Jr. wrote in February. "The kernel here is the acknowledgment of defeat."

Wally harrumphs on this bit of disinformation and adds:

William F Buckley is a great man but hardly a chorus - and if he is a "neo-conservative" my dictionary must be broken. And the article they are referring to he most definitely did not issue a call to "pull out" but rather to rethink our strategies for victory in the knowledge that our original strategies rested on flawed postulates and have failed to achieve the expected results.

So the support for the groundswell of neo-con defeatism that only the NYT can discern? One non-neocon did not say what they allege a "rising chorus" of neo-cons is saying.

You know, this really isn't a very ethical newspaper. Also, this just in - fire is hot.

Wally Ballou is a man of wisdom and principle. I hope he washed his hands after he put that harlot in her proper place. And, heavens, I surely do pray he didn't leave her around for innocents abroad to pick up and read. He and Shrinkwrapped may have a strong enough mental constitution to handle this kind of claptrap, but think of the children.