Our Sordid Newspaper

We talked about this on the NARN broadcast Saturday. Captain Ed and Powerline both wrote about it - that's the tough thing about sharing an Alliance with a bunch of guys who are always writing.

But I digress, because the real subject here is the continuing embarassment that is the Minneapolis Star/Tribune; it's so bad there's room for a thousand screeds, and that embarassment was in fullest bloom in Saturday's editorial on Norm Coleman, Norm Coleman, the evil that is the common blogger, Norm Coleman and...oh, yeah, that Annan guy.

The editorial is entitled Going after Annan/A sordid move by Coleman, which is a fascinating choice; not often would an ostensibly-responsible organization choose to show how completely disconnected it is, not only from morality but from the simplest facets of telling the complete story above the lede.

Good old Norm; it appears there's nothing he won't do for a headline, or for his GOP masters.

Yeah. Like his job on the Senate Subcommittee for Investigations.

Perhaps we need to forgive the Strib; they're not used to Minnesota Senators doing their jobs: We had 12 years of Paul Wellstone's gleeful grandstanding, and we've gotten through four more of Mark Dayton's almost-scary incoherence, sure, but if you don't remember Rod Grams, you really have no concept of Minnesota Senators actually doing the jobs they were sent to Washington to do.

The nerve of that Coleman.

Minnesota's junior senator made quite a splash this week with his call for the resignation of U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, a splendid public servant whom the city Sen. Norm Coleman once governed has considered a semi-native son since his years at Macalester College. Even if he had never set foot in St. Paul, Annan would deserve far better than the stuff Coleman is dishing out.

John Dillinger, Al Capone and Ma Barker also lived in Saint Paul. Does the Strib think they should have gotten a break? Damn that sordid J. Edgar Hoover, picking on ex-short-time-St. Paulites!

Annan attended MacAlester as an exchange student. So what?

Is Nick Coleman writing this tripe?

The ostensible reason for seeking Annan's resignation? It was on his watch that Saddam Hussein diverted billions from the U.N.-run oil-for-food program designed to relieve the humanitarian burden on Iraqis suffering as a consequence of U.N. sanctions.

Note that no one has the slightest whiff of proof that Annan knew about, condoned or profited from this scandal.

"Ostensible" reason.

Love that word. Especially tied to the - words fail me - idiotic notion that Annan's ignorance (much as it beggars the imagination to think Annan wouldn't have known that his son was on the take. But just for those of you who take the Strib seriously; yes, there is a "slight whiff" of evidence that Kofi Annan was involved; per Claudia Rosett:

Oil-for-Food was run out of the U.N. Secretariat, reporting directly to Annan, who regularly signed off on the six-month phases of the program. Without his approval, the contracts would not have gone forward.

Even if we assume that everyone on the U.N.'s Oil-for-Food staff, as well as Kofi Annan himself, was indeed ignorant of Kojo Annan's involvement with Cotecna, it is hard to buy the argument that Kofi, while signing off regularly on the program's workings, was simply oblivious to the details. Not only was Kofi Annan the boss, but he was directly involved from the beginning. Kofi Annan's official U.N. biography notes that shortly before his promotion to Secretary-General "he led the first United Nations team negotiating with Iraq on the sale of oil to fund purchases of humanitarian aid."

It was Annan, who in October 1997 brought in as Oil-for-Food's executive director Benon Sevan, reporting directly to the Secretary-General, to consolidate Oil-for-Food's operations into the Office of Iraq Program. And it was shortly after Sevan took charge that Oil-for-Food, set up by Kofi Annan's predecessor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, with at least some transparency on individual deals, began treating as confidential such vital information as the names of specific contractors, quantities of goods, and prices paid.

Slight whiff? We're into "overwhelming stench" territory here.

Furthermore, when the scandal surfaced, Annan appointed former Fed chairman and man of impeccable honor Paul Volcker to thoroughly investigate the matter. Volcker's report, which both he and Annan have promised will be made public, is still a work in progress.

Unmentioned by the Strib; Volcker's investigation has no power to subpoena. It has no power to coerce anything from anyone at the UN. The impeccably honorable Volcker's report will be "in progress" until hell freezes over, if it's substantive investigation you're looking for.

Norm Coleman has no such constraint. That's gotta bug the Strib.

So why is Coleman so exercised, aside from the prospect of juicy publicity? Well, he says, Annan isn't cooperating very well with Coleman's Senate subcommittee, which also seeks to investigate the matter. The United Nations hasn't provided documents the subcommittee needs.

The sanctions were imposed by the U.N. Security Council, the food-for-oil program was initiated by the Security Council, and Annan works for the Security Council. He does not work for the U.S. Senate.

Indeed, he does not work "for" anyone. He's above the law in pretty much every sense of the term. And this should nauseate Americans in general, above and beyond the travesty that is the Oil for Food scandal.

And it should scare the bejeebers out of you; it's to the UN that the likes of John Kerry and the Strib want the US to defer on matters of foreign policy.

We'll come back to that. This next is hilarious:

Readers also should know that this isn't a new issue, and it has very little to do with the oil-for-food program. For months before the election, the right-wing constellation of blogs and talk radio was alive with incendiary rhetoric about Annan and the oil-for-food scandal, not to mention accusations that the mainstream media were soft-peddling it to protect Annan. This is really all about Annan's refusal to toe the Bush line on Iraq and the administration's generally unilateral approach to foreign affairs. The right-wingers hate Annan and saw in the food-for-oil program a possible chink in his armor. They went after it with a venomous fury. Coleman seems only too eager to aid their cause.

In this paragraph - one lousy paragraph! - we see a virtual shopping mall of intellectual and moral bankruptcies, a sort of DSM-4 of the symptomology of the Strib's moral and intellectual retardation; the mind reels at trying to catalog all of them.

• Isn't it always about "hate", to us conservatives? No matter what evidence we gather - and Claudia Rosett has gathered it, make no mistake about it - to the Strib's editorial board, anything we say or do is always about hate. Or at least that's what they tell their dwindling readership. It's the foolish, not-too-bright coward's way out of argument he/she is factually and intellectually unable to win.
• Of course we are angry; The UN betrayed us. The United States won a war against Hussein 13 years ago - only stopping with the liberation of Kuwait at the behest of the UN, by the way - and spent the whole time since then holding up vastly more than its end of the bargain. Now we see that the UN was actively complicit with the French, Germans, Russians, and Hussein himself in rendering our compliance irrelevant, indeed foolish.
• Due to the UN's complicity - including alleged payoffs of the UN weapons inspectors that the left once and still holds up as the solution to the Iraq WMD program - the blood and treasure that the US sacrificed in the 13 years since the first Gulf War has been rendered not only irrelevant, but in fact shown to have been the guileless work of a nation played for a collective sucker.
• "Constellation of Bloggers and talk radio", huh? Well, it's nice to have graduated from pajama-clad hate-drenched howler monkey, I guess. But you'd have to be someone who relies on the mainstream media for all your information, or a complacent idiot (pardon the redundancy) to not know that the "constellation" has more than enough evidence for a thinking person to conclude that it's not rhetoric, but incendiary facts.
• Annan's refusal to "toe the line" on Iraq? Bollocks. It's the UN's complicity in rendering "the line" completely meaningless", and - this was Captain Ed's point yesterday on the show - making sure that there was no non-military means of getting at the truth about the scandal!
• "Generally unilateral"
• "Venomous fury?" Indeed. Americans should be furious. We, as a nation, have been played for morons. In the case of those of you who believe the Strib's pronouncements at face value - or, sorry to say, the 48% of you who voted for the candidate who would have the UN, the body that has mocked us for the past 13 years, "globally test" our foreign policy - that diagnosis seems unfortunately accurate.

Back to the editorial:

Numerous Star Tribune readers have pointed out -- appropriately, in our view -- that if Coleman wants to investigate scandal, he need not go as far afield as the United Nations. He could start with those really nice contracts that Vice President Dick Cheney's former firm, Halliburton, got in Iraq. He could move on to the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

But he's not. Other people are investigating those allegations (and, it would seem, coming up with squat). Coleman has his job to do, and - standing on the shoulders of the likes of Duelfer and Rosett - is doing it well.

Which is, I suspect, is what's gotten the Strib and those "numberous readers" so exercised.

There is so much from the last four years that Coleman could find to keep himself busy. Just about every aspect of the Iraq misadventure smells to the high heavens. But of course investigating those things would be unpleasant for those Coleman so fawningly seeks to please. What an embarrassment.

Is there really "so much" to investigate, Strib editors?

Isn't that your job?

Of course it is. And you keep trying to do it, supposedly. And it's always, as you say, an embarassment. Indeed, most of your (collective) "investigations" into all the ingredients of the "misadventure" indeed "stink to high heaven"; the four-year obsession with Bush's Air Guard record ended with forged documents, a disgraced news division, and a bunch of mere bloggers walking on air. Weeks-long attempts to pin Abu Ghraib on senior officials came to naught. Missing explosives? Not missing at all. Quagmire? Pfffft - 70% of Iraq is in fine shape; Kurdistan is more peaceful than Minneapolis itself.

In the meantime, when presented with a real scandal, underscored by real evidence, where's the Strib?

Where indeed?

The editorial board of the Minneapolis Star/Tribune is a true communal embarassment to Minnesota. They preside over a local media and polling machine that is more demonstrably in the bag for the Democrats than any media operation in the United States. They act in the most bald-faced fashion as de facto hatchet men for Democrat candidates - remember Rod Grams? When they've crossed paths with the lowly bloggers of the Northern Alliance - the Powerguys and Captain Ed - they have consistently come across like ill-informed, petulant, snarling teenagers who've been caught fibbing about their homework.

They are the sordid embarassment.

But it's worse than that. They are not journalists - not in the sense of the word I was taught, way back when, by people who actually took the word seriously. They are PR flaks - by omission or commission, it matters not which - for an agenda.

That, truly, is sordid. And deeply embarrassing.

Posted by Mitch at December 6, 2004 04:49 AM | TrackBack