The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
Out on a Limb
“Syria May Miss First Deadline in U.S.-Russia Chemical Arms Deal”–headline, Los Angeles Times, Sept. 19
Land of Confusion
The Huffington Post reports on what at first glance sounds like–Avast!–left-wing conspiracy, a recent secret meeting President Obama organized with Andrew Rosenthal, editorial page editor of the New York Times:
On Aug. 29, the president . . . sat down for an off-the-record discussion with Rosenthal and some members of the editorial board, according to sources familiar with the meeting. Times opinion columnists David Brooks, Gail Collins and Ross Douthat also attended, but editors for the paper’s news pages did not.
The meeting came amid the White House’s push for military intervention in Syria, one of the topics discussed that day. The Times editorial board hadn’t explicitly come out for or against a strike on Syrian President Bashar Assad before the meeting, and soon after the paper still expressed concerns about the administration taking action without congressional approval and broad international support.
Actually, though, if you read on you find that the Times’s editorial positions on Syria were confused and conflicted both before the meeting and after the meeting. Which raises a chicken-and-egg question: Did Obama cause the Times’s confusion, or the other way around?
Meanwhile, yesterday in a blog post Rosenthal faulted the Russian president for what the headline calls “Putin’s Dubious Opinion”–which was published, as you may recall, on the op-ed page of the Times:
President Vladimir Putin of Russia said in an Op-Ed article that we published last week that “there is every reason to believe” that the chemical weapons attack in Syria on Aug. 21 was carried out by the rebel forces in a crafty plan to provoke the United States into bombing Syria and unleashing all kinds of mayhem.
In an article that contained many lines that irritated our readers, that sentence was perhaps the most annoying. . . .
This information, of course, has not altered the Russians’ public position. They’ve been putting out a wacky tale of a rebel mole who infiltrated the Republican Guard to fire off the weapons, and putting out tweets pointing to discredited YouTube videos that claim to show that the government did not launch the attack.
It’s pretty amazing, by the way, that Kremlin propagandists use Twitter and cite YouTube videos.
Not to mention New York Times op-eds!
For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for the “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists.
