Me neither

Ann Coulter doesn't speak for me. It's not her views so much as her poor, disjointed writing and her chronic high dudgeon and incivility. I also don't understand the buzz about her being beautiful and glamorous. I've tried to read two of her books but they were so offputting that I couldn't finish. In her latest, she's just performing an old shtick that was tired 15 years ago.

Another case of bizarre commentary is this piece by Nick Kristof in which he states, "Historically, we in the press have done more damage to our nation by withholding secret information than by publishing it." How that excuses their latest support to the terrorists, I don't know, but it's probably true, if you take into account the selective reporting of FDR and JFK and other Democrats. Their policy about the "people's right to know" doesn't seem to have applied when the newsmakers were Democrats. During FDR's presidency, the public never knew that he was crippled by polio, nor did we learn until later what a hound JFK was, how he routinely dishonored his marital vows and exposed himself to potential blackmail. We now know that his health was cynically misrepresented. We were told repeatedly about his "vigor," never a mention of the amount of drugs he was taking or the serious infections affecting him. The press coverage of the Kennedy family is now as big a joke as the portrayal of his "Camelot" family life with Jackie and those beautiful children was a charade.

In the end, Watergate may have been more significant for its effect on the long-lived coverups by the media than for Nixon's clumsy attempts to hide his sins. Perhaps, it was the extraordinary hostility toward him throughout his careers contrasted with the whitewashing of Kennedy's personal life that drove him around the bend and caused him to surround himself with people he saw as tough, aggressive and practioners of hardball.

Still, there has never been a case of harm done to the nation by the press withholding secret information like that done by revealing details of our counter-terrorism programs. The Bay of Pigs example is small potatoes, and the "scandals" revealed by the Church Committee were more hype and gossip than examples of real harm. Least persuasive of all is his assertion that the Times' failure to reveal how little evidence their was of WMD in Iraq is just a wholesale rewriting of history, ignoring the beliefs and policies of the Clinton administration and Saddam's history of warfare and use of WMD against his own citizens. The claim that the Times covered up the truth is self-serving in retrospect and a distortion of the importance of that detail in the decision to overthrow this madman.

This whiny bit of misdirection is not just mealy-mouthed, to say the least, but it also attempts to jusify the Times' perfidy with a cheap attack on Fox News Channel. It reminds me of Joe McCarthy, with the exception that the Senator's charges actually had some basis in fact.