The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal’s “Best of the Web” at WSJ written by the editor, James Taranto.
Question and Answer—II
- “Is Jogging Healthy for Bill Clinton?”—headline, Bulletin (Bend, Ore.), Jan. 28, 1993
- “Letter: Bill Clinton Should Be Allowed to Run Again”—headline, Chicago Tribune, April 16
Breaking News From 1992
“Clinton Headed to New Hampshire”—headline, TheHill, April 16
One Man’s ‘Militant’
Here’s a bizarre Reuters report from Islamabad, Pakistan:
Men claiming to be Islamic militants shot and wounded an American woman in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi on Thursday, leaving leaflets in her car naming her and saying they had targeted her because she was American, police said.
Gunmen on motorbikes shot Debra Lobo in the face and the hand as she drove home from the dental college where she worked as a vice principal.
Police said it was unclear if the attack had actually been carried out by militants, or by men posing as militants.
Does Reuters mean to suggest that pacifists are running around Pakistan shooting people while pretending to be militants? No, the distinction is between “militant groups and criminal gangs,” with the former presumably having political motivations.
Here’s the police quote that Reuters paraphrases above:
“Pamphlets claiming the attack have been found in the car, giving impression that some banned (militant) outfit carried out the attack,” deputy police superintendent Nasir Lodhi told Reuters.
The parentheses indicate that “militant” was not Lodhi’s word but Reuters’. He probably said “terrorist” and Reuters replaced it with its own euphemism.
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.”
