Monday, March 30, 2009

Biden's NYT Front Page Flopper and Back Pages Reality

The NYT used to be the newspaper of record, but Pinch Sulzberger is running the family legacy into bankruptcy. As a demonstration of the schizodementia that the "Gray Lady" has fallen into, check this para on Sunday's front page, above the fold:
Officials involved in the deliberations said Mr. Biden had been influential in Mr. Obama’s development of a new approach to Afghanistan, announced Friday, arguing for a relatively limited increase of military, diplomatic and economic involvement.

Then flash BACKWARD to Saturday, March 29th, for the reality behind the Potemkin Village the Sunday Times constructed around the Veep:
Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. warned against getting into a political and military quagmire, while military advisers argued that the Afghanistan war effort could be imperiled without even more troops.....The commanders in the field wanted a firmer and long-term commitment of more combat troops beyond the 17,000 that Mr. Obama had already promised to send, and a pledge that billions of dollars would be found to significantly expand the number of Afghan security forces....Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, pressed for an additional 4,000 troops to be sent to Afghanistan — but only to serve as trainers.....During the debate, the senior administration officials said, Mr. Biden sought to put strict parameters on the size of the additional force deployed to Afghanistan and to ensure there was a specific mission for them. Mr. Biden also cast the debate in terms of what was achievable in Mr. Obama’s first term, administration officials said. Mr. Biden, White House officials said, was heavily influenced by the trip he took to Afghanistan and Pakistan just before the inauguration in January. He observed to Mr. Obama that if you asked 10 people on the ground what American objectives were, he would get 10 different answers. That observation, aides said, carried weight with Mr. Obama and helped to lead to his decision to narrow the American goal in Afghanistan.

The result of all of this haute politique strategizing? Guess who was left with his foreign reputation after 30 years on the SenFornRelCte in apparent disregard?
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Richard C. Holbrooke, the president’s top aide on Afghanistan and Pakistan, favored wide-ranging coordinated efforts which would concentrate on corruption in Afghanistan as well as focus on training local officials and transforming agriculture in the country away from the notorious poppy fields that have been used to fuel the Taliban insurgency....

Of course, to anyone who understands foreign policy strategy making, it appears that Clinton/Holbrooke/Gates won with the broadest committment on the table being accepted by Obama. But of course, the NYT gets and gives the opposite conclusion:
That observation, aides said, carried weight with Mr. Obama and helped to lead to his decision to narrow the American goal in Afghanistan....

And this is proved by the fact that instead of the Veep, who would have stressed the limits, Obama:
is dispatching Admiral Mullen and Mr. Holbrooke to Afghanistan, Pakistan and India next week to explain his new strategy to leaders there.

The NYT knew its pablum-piece of puffery on Biden was going to be on the front page Sunday, so its Saturday edition had to obfuscate the defeat of Biden by the Clinton/Gates junta with sheer flimflammery and misleading BS.

I suppose going on with the NYT's extolling Biden in Sunday's pathetic puff-piece on Joe with his fight on drugs:
In public, Mr. Biden is by turns self-deprecating and self-aggrandizing. “Please sit down, I’m only the vice president,” he said, pooh-poohing a standing ovation before a recent ceremony in which he introduced the new White House drug czar. He then detailed his extensive background in drug prevention. “I wrote what used to be called the Biden Crime Bill back in the ’90s,” he said.

Almost simultaneously, his pathetic daughter was having a video of her snorting cocaine at a recent party [since this buffoon's Veep inauguration] shopped around to & attempting to be buried a la John Edwards' love trysts by the "respectable" media.

Ben Franklin said it best about specimens like Biden: "There's no fool like an old fool."
UPDATE Gateway Pundit confirms the degeneration, nay, devolution of the New York Times into a pretentious version of The National Inquirer, without the TNI's fearless disregard of the consequences of publishing the truth. The tabloid NYT spiked a story in October that demonstrated that the Obama compaign was operating in close coordination with ACORN, a RICO type gang of political racketeers. Now these nutjob gangsters are doing a rent-a-mob land office business using muscle mobbing homes with residents threatened with eviction. Obama seems oblivous of the rule of law, and his time as a "constitutional law professor" appears trumped by his agitprop clientele's hold on his political loyalty.