Journal Fever
Gifford, Bill
Journal Fever U-turns, half-truths, philosophical pirouettes, and shoddy reporting: Is the Wall Street Journal editorial page shell shocked or simply out of its mind? BY BILL GIFFORD Two weeks...
...Weeks passed, but no pardon came down...
...Which the NEA did this spring, as it reviewed the grant application of the Hudson Review, a prestigious Manhattan quarterly...
...But her article mostly dwells upon the shoddy, dishonest enforcement of the Voting Rights Act by the Civil Rights Division under Reagan, where Bolick worked during 1986 and 1987...
...The Journal page uses the same facts-be-damned approach when it comes to political scandal...
...It's a silly display of huffing and puffing, more worthy of a found-on-the-floor college newspaper than a leading national daily...
...Bolick's characterization of her writings was about as authentic as Reagan's yarns—or liberals' selective reading of Bork's record...
...All of this might be excused as spirited intellectual horseplay, especially by those who hope the page can serve as a tart-tongued voice of opposition to the new administration...
...was the culmination of a long string of hit jobs on the Journal's perceived ideological foes, dating back even before its infamous 1982 attack on Raymond Bonner...
...Worse, Ellen had ignored three cut-it-out orders from the Army Corps, the first of which came in 1988, not 1989...
...Many of his central assertions—that Hill had been harassed by another employer, not Thomas...
...So the Journal requested Foster's picture under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)—another burdensome bit of congressional activism...
...All told, Ellen had filled or altered close to 1,000 acres, though the prosecution focused on areas that were indisputably wet...
...Bumpers didn't file the case, but was named as a defendant along with several other Arkansas elected officials...
...Normally vigilant against prosecutorial abuse when the target is a white Republican or business figure, the Journal said nothing...
...Senate has brazenly voted to have its taxpayer-funded legal counsel represent Sen...
...But occasionally the relationship between the news and editorial side looks downright combative, particularly when reporters decimate editorial-page heroes...
...Where editorialists at other papers content themselves with gumming over yesterday's headlines, the Journal's eager-beavers actually make phone calls, digging up stories on a range of subjects...
...Violating its own published rules of engagement, it has even developed a taste for borking...
...If it sometimes seems like a tired reciter of the conservative line—its obsessions with term limits and the capital gains tax are beyond tedious—remember that it helped to redraw that line...
...conduct...
...Diversity Quotas at NEA Skewer Magazine," shrieked the June 24 headline...
...For starters, the "sanctuary" was a hunting lodge...
...Once the sources are evaluated and the contradictory evidence is considered, Brock's arguments evaporate into an amorphous cloud of ill will," conclude Abramson and Mayer...
...Last May, a jury convicted the good guv'nah of the decidedly nonspiritual crime of converting campaign funds to personal use—such as buying himself a $4,000 riding mower...
...When he took the reins in 1972, Bartley transformed the editorial page from a sleepy purveyor of blue-chip conservatism into an aggressive, illustrious neoconser-vative forum...
...it has all but abandoned any pretense to participating in a rational argument...
...But to ever greater degrees, the Journal page steps past being obstreperous and into the realm of intellectual dishonesty...
...Their shrill, sweeping attacks on special prosecutors did not admit the possibility that another administration that might deserve such investigations would ever hold power...
...The piece is not even about Foster, but about the Clinton White House's purported "carelessness about following the law...
...Now, it survives as a gangrenous appendage of that dying beast, the daily newspaper...
...So the Journal promotes welfare reform as a way to help blacks out of poverty...
...Its shrill attacks on special prosecutors did not admit that another administration might deserve them...
...His own lack of formal economics training did not hinder him from winning a Pulitzer in 1980 for his supply-side commentary...
...The Journal also midwifed Star Wars, supply-side's military counterpart...
...Ellen hadn't violated some bureaucratic "manual," but the Clean Water Act of 1972...
...The page and its outside contributors were stalwart defenders of Robert Bork, Michael Milken, and the whole herd of Iran-contra defendants—every eighties villain, in fact, except Jim Wright...
...Nevertheless, FACA had one thing going for it: A federal judge was threatening to use it to pry open Hillary Clinton's health-care task force...
...He was convicted of filling some 86 acres of wetlands, including part of a tidal creek, something which has been illegal since the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1898...
...indeed, it turns out that the federal arts subsidizers had been doing their best to help the crusty, fusty Hudson Review uphold Western civilization...
...indeed, the page regularly blasts similar laws as niggling congressional intrusions...
...Fax Checking No newspaper championed Robert Bork more loudly and more frequently than the Journal...
...If you'd read its outraged commentary, you might have thought the Journal would be above such intellectual sleaze...
...From their Liberty Street cloister, one wonders, how could the Journal's editors have known one way or the other...
...Their all-out defense of mediocre nominees left them no credible way to attack someone else's mediocre nominees...
...Although he's as close as the right-wing gets to a Ralph Nader, Bolick is somehow exempted from the page's regular denunciation of hyperactive litigators...
...that she had been fired by a Washington law firm...
...In attacking the prosecution and calling for a presidential pardon, the page repeated Weinberger's defense: "If there was a conspiracy, he wasn't part of it...
...The Journal's editorialists chimed in on February 26, 1992: "Notwithstanding the claque that seems to view endowment funding as a political 'right,' we think that a government agency that puts its money on the line has the right to make judgments about a work's value...
...The page takes intellectual guidance from a board of contributors gleaming with luminaries such as Paul Craig Roberts and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...
...The Clarence Thomas nomination also occasioned an intra-paper contretemps...
...No one is safe from an overzealous government enforcement campaign that treats all things wet as equal," the Journal declared...
...In one of many editorials it ran supporting a school-choice proposal for inner-city Milwaukee children, the page compared the leading voucher opponent, schools superintendent Herbert Grover, to Arkansas segregationist Orval Faubus...
...While Bartley's crew lionized Michael Milken as a financial superhero, for example, front-page editor James B. Stewart was proving beyond a reasonable doubt that Milken was a crook...
...From the Journal's unique perspective, the murder of abortion doctor David Gunn by a pro-life fanatic was the natural outcome of—get ready—the sixties...
...The rest of the piece recounted the editorial page's negotiations with administration officials, unwittingly illustrating its many Reagan-era complaints about harassment of government officials by the press...
...The Journal spent most of the last decade arguing, much more eloquently, for greater executive privilege—and against such laws as FACA and FOIA...
...Paper Cuts The Journalists no doubt have a lot more at stake in all these fights than other newspapers...
...And the page's reaction to Foster's suicide was equally hypocritical...
...The punchline to all this is found in a November 1992 editorial about the collapse of the October Surprise theory in which the Journal writers piously, and without a hint of irony, warned their colleagues in the press to "be skeptical of convenient partisan accusations...
...The basic rule of thumb is simple: defend Republicans, attack Democrats...
...that she had been fired by a Washington law firm...
...It called for an investigation of the death by a special counsel within Justice, a close cousin to the independent counsels it once raged against and abhorred...
...Not that the Journal had ever gone to bat for FACA in the past...
...He was immediately removed from office...
...Court of Appeals, that he certainly did know he was breaking the law...
...Many readers, even conservatives, are beginning to think that the Journal's page is good for entertainment only...
...Also rejected in that round of NEA funding were two equally august publications, Paris Review and Antaeus...
...For liberals, the Journal page is merely the object of horrified fascination...
...The page regularly advances his crusades, from the nomination of his close friend Clarence Thomas to pet legal matters, such as the Milwaukee school-voucher case...
...Many of his central assertions—that Hill had been harassed by another employer, not Thomas...
...Who is Vincent Foster...
...Kristol added, "Surely this is best left to individual initiative and private financing...
...The ideology finds the news...
...What's odd about June 17's "Who Is Vincent Foster...
...What were they trying to hide...
...But as for electoral politics, her voting-rights discussion emphasizes the need to avoid "legislative set-asides, color coded ballots, electoral quotas, or 'one black, two votes' remedies which some might argue are also justified...
...One reason why NEA has less money to disburse to small magazines, ironically, is the political heat brought to bear by the Journal and its allies...
...Parroting the U.S...
...Take their views—plural—on the subject of polygraphs...
...Help the downtrodden, especially minorities...
...Having caught the Clintonites in three minor legal slips, one of which it engineered by filing a ridiculous FOIA request, the Journal apparently felt it had ascended to the moral mountaintop...
...In the space of a few hundred words, Bolick cobbles together a handful of partial quotes from Guinier's turgid, lengthy law review articles, adding a few of his own broad-brush characterizations, to portray her as a "Quota Queen...
...Ditto, they might have added, for their own paper's editorials...
...its guru and godfather is Irving Kristol...
...After all, Reagan wasn't a dictator...
...a jury convicted Ellen, and he was sentenced to six months in jail...
...The degree to which the Journal has shaped public policy is even more impressive when you consider that since Hearst's day, the typical editorial page has withered to an impotent nub...
...This spring, an independent investigation confirmed that the El Mozote massacre had taken place, as Bonner and Alma Guillermoprieto of the Washington Post reported, and as the Journal—echoing its Reagan State Department sources—had denied...
...it touts NAFTA because free trade will help Mexicans...
...As pungently conservative as its peers are blandly liberal, as combative as they are gun-shy, the Journal harks back without shame to the age of a fiercely partisan press...
...By comparison, the Journal is a geyser...
...Foster was performing the same function for which the Journal lionized Oliver North during the Iran-Contra hearings of 1987: defending his president's penumbra of authority...
...Nonetheless, the borking of Lani Guinier began with an April 30 op-ed by conservative legal activist Clint Bolick, who is practically an adjunct Journal staffer...
...Since the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) controversy erupted, the paper has repeatedly questioned the need for any art subsidies—whether the subsidized art is "obscene" or not...
...Brock's evidence wasn't all new...
...How do we know he wasn't part of it...
...in light of subsequent events is that it is not particularly vicious or unbridled...
...So, to pick a random example, the plight of the Great Circus Bim Bom, a Russian troupe which chose to remain stranded and broke in the U.S...
...We have a similar problem with Vincent Foster," he or she wrote...
...On a good day, that's what it does...
...Why, the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA...
...But the editorial, in historical context, was pure sophism...
...BY BILL GIFFORD Two weeks and a day after becoming a lame duck, George Bush was flipping through the morning's Wall Street Journal when an editorial caught his eye...
...Given a choice of whom to trust in these fights, many readers seem to prefer the news side...
...The Journal saved its sharpest words for the Bork opponents' tactics, which it likened to Joe McCarthy's: their distortions of his record...
...Embassy, it must be said, is a much deeper tradition among foreign correspondents than leftist propagandizing is...
...In a confidential letter that the magazine evidently leaked, the NEA informed the editors that its panel felt "writers of color were significantly under-represented in the Hudson Review...
...In a New Yorker book review this year, Journal reporters Jill Abramson and Jane Mayer demolished, fact by fact, David Brock's The Real Anita Hill...
...Apparently there was no space to print rebutting letters from the prosecutor, Maryland U.S...
...Real Artists Don't Take Handouts" proclaimed the headline of a piece by Phillip Kauffman, a non-subsidized novelist...
...The paper's editorial page had practically set the table for the supply-side feast, and it remained a key forum for Republican policymakers and conservative intellectuals throughout Bush's term...
...editorial writer John Fund is an old friend...
...The Democratic National Convention that month, and its attendant chaos, inaugurated an era of hotheaded political fanaticism of the sort that led Michael Griffin to shoot Dr...
...and that her corroborating witnesses were either lying or not telling the whole truth—first saw print on the Journal's editorial page...
...Cost to taxpayer: one first-class postage stamp...
...series being only the most notorious example...
...The Clarence Thomas nomination also occasioned an intra-paper contretemps...
...crook...
...What Boyden Gray had quickly discovered was that the Journal's account of Ellen's case, apparently based on conversations with his lawyers, bore only the slightest resemblance to the truth...
...Brock's evidence wasn't all new...
...Since 1977, its editors have cashed NEA checks totalling $70,437...
...The act requires officials to respond within 10 business days," the Journal primly noted, but believe it or not, a month later the White House still hadn't answered...
...It was the designated free-fire zone where scores were settled and skirmishes provoked in thunderous copy that would traumatize today's fragile sensibilities...
...We do not have to wait for a new director of the NEA to know what direction support for the arts will take in the Clinton administration," Kimball wrote...
...Congress became "The Liberal Plantation," where massuhs Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden lash uppity black conservatives...
...Then, in 1989, the federal government, eager to implement President Bush's pledge of 'no net loss' of wetlands, issued a new manual redefining them...
...The problem is that the Journal and its contributors left themselves no wiggle room for when their political fortunes changed...
...But now more than ever, the world—especially the conservative world—could use an opposition forum that is both powerful and credible...
...Foster and associate White House counsel William Kennedy...
...It also insinuated that no "massacre" had taken place, and that Bonner had been duped by the Commies...
...Gunn...
...The sixties destroyed traditional notions of decency and rational discourse and reasonable disagreement, according to Henninger...
...Ellen was an engineer working on the Eastern Shore spread of Paul Tudor Jones II, the Wall Street trading whiz...
...In 1987, Ellen began building a 100-acre "wildlife sanctuary" on Jones' property...
...On some level, that's a shame...
...In a New Yorker book review this year, Journal reporters Jill Abramson and Jane Mayer demolished, fact by fact, David Brock's The Real Anita Hill...
...Bolick's snippets from Guinier's 1989 Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review article make her seem like some sort of Black Panther...
...A miscarriage of justice...
...At a time when drug dealers and other criminals often escape with no jail time, this Vietnam combat veteran can't understand why he must go to prison over a bureaucrat's interpretation of an ambiguous congressional law...
...The Journal rode to the rescue...
...History is often rewritten on the editorial page...
...To remove a sitting governor because he accepted a few hundred dollars on occasion to promote spiritual values strikes us as absurd," harrumphed the Journal...
...In high dudgeon, the Journal tsk-tsked the White House for a "certain lack of seriousness—contempt in its most basic meaning—toward legal rulings...
...The offending panel had been selected by Bush appointees...
...So obsessed was it that when the stock market fell 91 points on the October day when Howell Heflin came out against Bork, the Journal's editorialists saw cause and effect, and dubbed it "The Bork Market...
...Disturbed by this Kafkaesque tale, Bush asked White House counsel C. Boy den Gray to review Ellen's case to see whether a pardon might be justified...
...Having made Webster Hubbell famous, it occured to us that we might have occasion to repeat the favor for other Rose partners, and requested photographs of Mr...
...As soon as Bonner's story appeared, the Journal struck back with a two-column piece, titled "The Media's War," that accused Bonner—along with nearly every other American foreign correspondent since John Reed—of parroting leftist propaganda...
...Ideo-logic The ideology seems to fluctuate between free-market libertarianism, the Republican platform, and a kind of neo-Victorian prudery (some of the funniest pieces deal with sex...
...Instead, Bartley and his colleagues undertook to defend the entire mouldering edifice of Reaganism...
...To open the Journal's "Review & Outlook" page is to enter a looking-glass world where everything is reversed: Clarence Thomas is a nimble jurist and William Brennan a dangerous buffoon...
...Headlined "EPA's Most Wanted," it was about a man named Bill Ellen "who is about to go to prison for violating the federal government's wetlands policy...
...The editors later claimed that they hadn't checked the fax machine...
...Imagine Ayn Rand as a GOP operative and you get the picture...
...Jones pled guilty to filling wetlands, and paid $2 million in fines and restitution...
...What law, you ask...
...When Clarence Thomas was named to the federal bench, it dubbed his upcoming confirmation fight "The Next Lynching...
...Nothing is too trivial or obscure, if it can be properly spun to fit the Journal's worldview...
...The Journal's errors and clumsy philosophical pirouettes made it a reliable source of unintended comedy this year, until Vincent Foster had to go and ruin it for everybody...
...It's probably the only newspaper in America that would urge a new president to "bomb Congress...
...Democrats had controlled the House for four times as long as he occupied the White House...
...the new wetlands definition wasn't even an issue...
...And why was Vince Foster debauching those handmaidens of democracy, FOIA and FACA...
...Bartley, who started at the Journal as a bureau reporter, also helped invent a new genre, the reported editorial...
...It was a catchy label, echoing Reagan's legendary welfare queens, and it stuck...
...its all-out defense of mediocre nominees left it no way to attack somebody else's mediocre nominees...
...Edwin Meese is a pillar of integrity and Lawrence Walsh a lowlife sleaze...
...Foster doesn't appear until almost halfway through the piece, and only then because the anonymous writer drags him in...
...Their "problem" with Foster, in other words, was simply that he wouldn't cough up a photo for a hatchet job...
...Although the White House ultimately faxed Foster's photo the night before the editorial was published, the piece was illustrated by a silhouette with a question mark inside...
...Since the sanctuary was to be built on wetlands, Ellen, according to the Journal, "was careful to work with officials from the Soil Conservation Service and the Army Corps of Engineers and secured 38 permits for the work...
...Guinier did suggest judicial-appointment quotas—specifically, that "the Judiciary committee should begin evaluating federal judicial nominations with reference to specific goals for increasing non-white nominees...
...If I read another line-item veto editorial, or another term limits editorial...
...Then Bush went, Clinton came, and Bill Ellen sat in jail...
...In another, Irving Kristol inveighed against the idea that "taxpayers' money should discover and encourage something called 'creativity' in the arts...
...Perhaps real art journals do need handouts, after all...
...by harassing White House staffers about Foster's picture...
...Beginning in the mid-1970s, the Journal's Jude Wanniski published column after column on supply-side theory, transforming Arthur Laffer's odd little curve from a joke of the economics world into official policy—a feat to rival William Randolph Hearst's instigation of the Spanish-American War in 1898...
...It's just this sort of thing that's coming back to haunt Bartley, now that the '90s Journal regularly commits the very same sins for which the '80s Journal castigated liberals...
...So it leapt to the defense of Alabama Governor Guy Hunt, under investigation in 1991 for a slew of ethical irregularities—including his rather colorful practice of flying around the South in a state plane collecting monetary "love offerings" at Primitive Baptist revivals...
...More and more, the page now traffics in unseemly nastiness backed by flimsy reasoning, the "Who is Vincent Foster...
...The Senate Counsel merely dispatched a two-page reply to the court stating that Bumpers had no interest in the outcome of the case...
...A variation on this is name-switching...
...rather than return home, permitted the page to take a dig at Gorbachev (in mid-1990): "We guess this means that even zero dollars are still worth more than perestroika's rubles...
...Almost all outside contributors share the basic views of Bartley and his youthful staff...
...Dale Bumpers in a suit to overturn Arkansas' term limit...
...The problem was not political correctness but lack of funds...
...Today the page serves as the right's exclusive bulletin board...
...That convinced a jury, and the Fourth Circuit U.S...
...The Journal had spent three years condemning the arts-funding-is-a-right "claque," only to turn around and join it...
...Almost daily, during the fall of 1987, the paper countered Bork's often hysterical opposition...
...The writer added, "Lie detector tests are so unreliable they are rarely allowed as evidence in court...
...In the thick of the Clarence Thomas confirmation battle, Anita Hill took and passed a lie detector test...
...Once again, as in the case of Bill Ellen, one of the nation's best-selling newspapers—1.8 million readers a day—had been snookered by a source...
...Furthermore, this was no rogue prosecution, but one that had been approved at the highest levels of Justice...
...It's remarkable that the Journal would end the Reagan-Bush years on such an ignominious note...
...Clinton's Quota Queens," which ran the day after Clinton nominated Guinier as assistant attorney general for civil rights, is a masterpiece of borking...
...And rather than red-bait its ideological opponents, the Journal sticks them with leftism's favorite epithets...
...When the ideologues can't "find the news," the ideologues sometimes make it up, ignoring facts whenever convenient and contradicting past pronouncements whenever necessary...
...Almost as astonishing was the Journal's recent U-turn on the subject of federal funding for the arts...
...Never mind the energetic whupping the Journal dishes out to black liberals...
...What do liberals want to do...
...Welfare fans and NAFTA foes, it implies, are racist...
...Even Jude Wanniski, Bartley's protege, thinks it's lost its relevance...
...Contrast that silence with the rancor inspired by Democratic Senator Dale Bumpers, who, the Journal charged, was wasting our money: "The U.S...
...The Journal greeted the news with silence...
...In the next day's editorial, pre-sciently titled "Credibility Gulch," the Journal quoted prior statements by Ted Kennedy, Howard Metzenbaum, and Paul Simon doubting the validity of polygraphs...
...It's ironic that the folks who brought us "No Guardrails" lack the basic sense of fairness that is required even of partisan scribes: respect for the truth, a willingness to see that every story has two sides, and the ability to admit that one is, on occasion, dead wrong...
...What will those monsters dream up next...
...quoting him out of context...
...No doubt '68 was some kind of watershed, but only the Journal could turn that year into a well-spring of 1993's anti-abortion violence...
...Back then, the editorial page embodied and expressed a newspaper's soul...
...Its energetic scribes, many plucked from conservative college rags like The Dartmouth Review, will leave no sacred liberal cow ungored...
...As a New York Times reporter, Bonner was led by guerillas to the site of an apparent massacre at El Mozote, El Salvador, that had been committed by U.S.-trained Salvadoran troops...
...extrapolating" his views...
...November 1993/The Washington Monthly 43...
...The feds later indicted Ellen and Jones...
...The writer could have checked out the story with a single phone call...
...Perhaps, but Clinton had nothing to do with this particular PC travesty...
...Armed with the new definition, the Corps declared Ellen's project a wetland and ordered him to stop work—which he did, according to the Journal, in February 1989...
...Barely eight months later, as Lawrence Walsh prepared to indict former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, the Journal changed its mind (and earned itself a "Dart" from the Columbia Journalism Review...
...Weinberger has taken and passed a lie detector test on the matter," the Journal wrote...
...That's what editorials are," Bartley told a newly hired Jude Wanniski in 1972, according to Sidney Blumenthal in The Rise of the Counter-Establishment...
...We think it is possible to identify the date when the U.S., or more precisely when many people within it, began to tip off the emotional tracks," he wrote: August 1968...
...On January 15, the Journal revisited the matter in a lead editorial titled "The Ellen Pardon," a guns-blazing broadside against federal wetlands law—all of it...
...and that her corroborating witnesses were either lying or not telling the whole truth—first saw print on the Journal's editorial page...
...When an NEA panel failed to recommend the Review for a grant, the Journal published a scathing oped by Roger Kimball, managing editor of The New Criterion and a frequent Journal contributor...
...And the "diversity quotas"—the NEA's standard grant guidelines, which encourage "inclusion of women and writers from racially and culturally diverse backgrounds"—were written and approved by Bushies, too...
...Having softened the beaches for the supply-side revolution, Bartley and friends now find themselves defending their historical legacy...
...Not exactly...
...The Journal editorialists would be ignored as a kind of F Troop in the war of ideas if their random, fumbling gun-play wounded less...
...What we've got instead is a page that alternates between stupefying, dogmatic pronouncements and borderline paranoia leavened with factual sloppiness...
...The Journal published a handful of letters supporting Ellen and expressing outrage at the government's Bill Gifford is an associate editor of Washington City Paper...
...But a couple of days later, he allowed two truckloads of dirt to be dumped in a "duck pond...
...That wasn't quite true...
...According to one company source, the page's readership has declined from more than 60 percent of the paper's circulation to less than a third...
...The logical course, once it became clear that the revolution didn't work, would have been to blame the Democrats for screwing things up...
...Taking full advantage of their anonymity, they regularly drub liberals, errant and otherwise...
...regular liberal columnists Alexander Cockburn, Hodding Carter III, and Michael Kinsley were phased out in 1991...
...They staked their own credibility on the success or failure of Reaganism, and, well, the negative evidence is mounting...
...Supervising this Journalistic Delta House is Robert Bartley, who for 21 years has held the title of Editor, editing a page and a half of commentary plus another of arts...
...calling him names...
...Anyway, they were wrong...
...Many Journal reporters think of the editorial page as the North Korea of the Dow Jones world: dogmatic, bizarre, and blessedly isolated...
...Attorney Breckenridge Willcox, or his successor, Richard Bennett...
...Within a week after Kimball's piece ran, they were on the phone to the NEA, seeking assistance with next year's grant application...
...Bartley's principal innovation is to adopt the techniques of lefty agitprop, which he then trains upon the left, a tactic rather like fighting Amazon tribesmen with curare-tipped darts...
...The best of these pieces were written by then-assistant editor Gordon Crovitz, whose thoughtful exegeses of Bork's words and deeds, particularly his civil rights record, parried Ted Kennedy's claim that Bork would "turn back the clock to the days of segregated lunch counters...
...The editorial pages of even the greatest papers in the land are little more than repositories of conventional wisdom, grindstones for dull axes...
...Attorney failed to unearth a single indictable deed but managed to set back Birmingham race relations 20 years...
...Last March, in an amazing screed headlined "No Guardrails," deputy editor Dan Henninger blamed the peace and love decade for Gunn's murder...
...Meanwhile, it ignored a clear case of prosecutorial overreaching in Alabama: the years-long "investigation" of Birmingham Mayor Richard Arrington, a black Democrat, in which the Republican U.S...
...They've gotten to be hobby horses, and you can fill up space by writing those editorials again and again and again...
...The Journal left itself no wiggle room for when its political fortunes changed...
...The paper called on Bush to pardon Ellen...
...Their rejection of the very idea of "elitist" art subsidies makes them look silly when a frequent outside contributor uses the page to special-plead for an elite literary magazine...
...They continue to insist, for example, that tax cuts do not impair the government's ability to raise revenue...
...Damage control seems to be the motive behind Bartley's latest book, The Seven Fat Years, in which he eloquently insists that things aren't as bad as they seem, and if they are, it's not Reagan's fault...
Vol. 25 • January 1993 • No. 11
