IF THE HISSY-FITS, BEWARE IT

I’m just now catching up to Saturday’s lead editorial in the Boston Herald, which, I note with glee and horror, actually jeers a supporter of John Kerry’s presidential campaign for ... endorsing John Kerry for president!

The editorial begins:

“Now here's a real political shocker for you. Joseph Wilson, the former diplomat who threw a hissy-fit when his CIA-employed wife was outed in a Robert Novak column, has officially endorsed Sen. John Kerry for president.

“Oh, stop the presses!”

An odd stance to take, considering that the Herald was among the newspapers running such an article. But the editorial writers have another cunning point to make:

“Wilson also acknowledged that he has been advising Kerry on foreign policy for about five months. Yes, that would put it BEFORE Wilson started criticizing President Bush for the line in his State of the Union message about Iraq seeking uranium from Niger for use in Saddam Hussein's nuclear program. (Wilson was the one sent to Niger by the CIA to investigate the charge, but insists he found no evidence of same.)”

Again odd, this time concerning the phrasing of that last sentence, since no one has found such evidence. Or, to quote then-spokesman for the White House Ari Fleischer in the July 8, 2003, New York Times, “We’ve long acknowledged (the information) did, indeed, turn out to be incorrect.”

Even more funny, and I can only hope that’s what the editorial writers were trying to be, was the charge that Wilson’s “righteous indignation” is suspect, and his endorsement somehow questionable, because he’s been advising Kerry for several months. In other words, he’d been advising Kerry since June, while his public chiding of the Bush administration for misusing his report took place in July. But his trip to Niger to track down the uranium sale took place in 2002, and the speech George Bush gave incorrectly using Wilson’s information took place in January.

The Herald’s more strident cousin, The Washington Times, had a similarly odd point to make on Oct. 2. In pointing out that “Wilson, wife have tight ties to Democrats,” the Times’ Rowan Scarborough cleverly notes Wilson’s duplicity in having told ABC in November that Iraqis “would use a biological weapon in a battle that we might have,” although, Scarborough writes, “he now criticizes Mr. Bush for relying on the same intelligence.”

Wilson, of course, had nothing to do with biological weapons and wouldn’t necessarily have known anything about them, especially in November. In a fine point that eludes the Times, Wilson investigated a specific allegation of a purchase of uranium -- a material popular in nuclear warfare -- not general allegations of biological weaponry. So he didn’t necessarily have any intelligence on biological weapons, although Bush sure did.

Well, whatever.

WILSON: CONSISTENT

While Republicans have been inconsistent on Wilson, who was a hawk during the first Gulf War, Wilson has not been inconsistent on Iraq. He’s been quite prescient, in fact, and diplomatic, attempting to warn against a dangerous policy in Iraq while not blowing the whistle on the Bush administration’s deceit or incompetence (your choice) in regard to his own intelligence gathering. The proof is in the transcript of “The World Today” episode of March 13, months before his New York Times piece, in which Wilson tells Eleanor Hall:

“I have no doubt whatsoever that the United States is going to win the battle for Baghdad. We will go in, there may be some surprises, there may be some real nasty surprises, but we will succeed in our objective of throwing out the regime of Saddam Hussein and occupying Baghdad. But that is only the first battle. The success or failure of this operation won't be known until after we have effectively withdrawn from Iraq.”

“(The United States) is taking a terribly large gamble, and I’m not sure it’s a necessary gamble for the purposes of assuring our national security. I think, on the contrary, that if the photos coming out of Baghdad after we implement our strategy or anything like the military has described it, it may in fact become a wonderful recruiting tool for Osama bin Laden and others like him.

“We need to assume that after a brief period, when we’re perceived as liberators, we will come to be seen as occupiers. That will then have the effect, I think, of alienating a broader swath of the Arab and Muslim world, from Indonesia to Mauritania.”

THE HERALD: CONSISTENTLY NUTTY

Herald editorials are frequently as silly as the Wilson item. The writers trot after liberal issues, hopping indignantly in a Limbaughesque kind of sputtering rage, with the same lapses of fairness and logic. It’s always seemed harmless enough, mostly because no one at the newspaper tends to take the editorials very seriously -- just as something to put up with, like the junior high punctuation of the Inside Track gossip column or cheesecake shots linked winkingly to “news” (Here’s another giant photo of Miss Massachusetts in a bikini, because she’s competing in another beauty pageant, and here’s a giant photo of Jennifer Lopez in a wet, white bikini because she’s ... without Ben Affleck).

But there was one piece I hung onto, because it was so deliciously absurd.

“At the start of every academic year, the Young America’s Foundation calls attention to the idiocies of political correctness on campus in a little guide called ‘The Dirty Dozen.’ It’s an eye-opener,” ran an Aug. 26, 2001, editorial. “Conservative scholars such as Nobel-prize winner Milton Friedman and historian Paul Johnson are virtually ignored in college curricula (and) Karl Marx and his successors are widely favored in assigned reading.”

In fact, the piece said, “You would be as hard-pressed to find a course at a major university that treats capitalism sympathetically as you would be to locate one that examines feminism, Marxism or multiculturalism critically.”

This floored me, as, just within a several-mile radius around the Herald offices were, and are, the Harvard Business School, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, Babson College’s MBA program, the Carroll School of Management at Boston College ... well, think of a school with a business program, which is where capitalism would be a main topic, and there you will find programs that are not only “sympathetic” to capitalism, but focused on wringing every advantage out of it.

Unlike The Washington Times, the Herald reserves most of its bosh for the editorial page and flags it as such with melodramatic rhetoric (hissy-fits, I’d call them). The Herald has a way to go before it’s spinning as fast as the No-Spin Zone is or tilted as far to the right as the Fair and Balanced.

But, lord, it’s in there trying. At least it’s trying.