The Weekly Treasure

I continue to enjoy reading the Weekly Standard, and note with pleasure that several national TV shows gave credit to Stephen Hays for his excellent report on the Benghazi  talking point memos. If you have trouble following the “revisions” visually on TV or audibly, and prefer to see it in print, then his encapsulation is point on.

But it is more than just one or two articles a week in The Weekly Standard, it is many. Last week in enjoyed an excellent article on Italian politics, a book review and a movie review that I liked even though I have not seen a movie in decades and have no interest in the subject of the book.

The writing alone makes the reading worthwhile. It is crisp, in the mode of the old National Review of William F. Buckley days, and the writers know how to turn a phrase.

“Letta has won himself some breathing room. But he has merely replaced Monti’s strategy (solving economic problems by creating political ones) with something equally risky (solving political problems by creating economic ones.)”

That was written by Christopher Caldwell, who was my 2012 winner of the Best Quote of the Year: “There is not enough money because the production of rights and benefits has outstripped the production of wealth.”

It is not just the articles, and the writing, but even the ads. Gary Bauer, who is not nearly so visible as he once was, has a one-page ad quoting President Obama: “we lave nobody behind,” in the middle of the page “Sadly, Mr. President, your administration DID leave someone behind… and at the bottom, “Stevens” “Doherty” “Woods” and “Smith”

Tough ad. Absolutely deserved.

The Weekly Standard also introduces me to significant quotes about which I am unfamiliar, such as this from Winston Churchill about the Middle East: “The Middle East is one of the hardest-hearted areas in the world. It has always been fought over, and peace has reigned only when a major power has established firm influence and shown it will maintain its will. It’s friends must be supported with every vigour and if necessary they must be avenged. Force, or perhaps force and bribery, are the only things that will be respected. It is sad, but we had all better understand it. At present our friendship is not valued, and our enmity is not feared.”

I knew I loved Churchill.

(In fact, a friend who had previously loaned me Churchill’s two-volume desk-size memoirs “The Second World War”, has now given them to me.)

Guess Whose Ox Was Just Gored?

The Obama administration just stepped on their crank.

You can mislead the American public on Benghazi because the press will limit the damage to the administration.

You can attack Tea Party using the IRS, and the press will try to mitigate the damage

But if you attack the press, as the administration just did in seizing several months of the records of the Associated Press, then not only will the compliant press strongly react but they are just likely to look deeper into Benghazi, and the IRS, and the Justice Department, they just might look at other things like Fast and Furious.

There are even more that they’re press knows about that their editors are soft-peddling that just might come to light.

The AP story is interesting in that the target is not the AP but the government official(s) who leaked the story of a Yemeni terror plan that included the fact that a CIA mole was in the terrorist system, or the Stuxnet “virus” program.  It is not illegal to receive these “leaks” but it is to give such information, and it may well not be in the nations best interest to give foreign nations, like Iran, such information.

There has always been an on-going debate among news outlets as to whom they owe allegiance. Some years ago there was an ongoing debate as CNN declared itself an international as opposed to an American corporation, and reporters debated if they would have published the date, time and place of the Normandy Invasion.

In effect, many reporters believe they owe allegiance to the news, and not to America.

The New York Times is known for publishing government secrets.

The question remains how to staunch the secret flow, whether it can be done at both ends of the conversation or only on the government end. The AP contends that this is a case of government overreaching.

That is an argument the press would not have previously recognized, until its ox was gored.