The lead editorial in today's New York Times discusses the dispute over who won the presidential election. "There has been frustration, but no real sense of national crisis," the Times editorial claims.
On the facing page of the Times, an opinion piece by Leonard Garment says, "Consider the country's two most serious recent political crises, Watergate and the Clinton impeachment. . . . We are in something of a similar crisis at the moment."
The Times editorialists may be of the opinion that a sense of crisis is not justified by the reality of the situation. But for them to assert that there is "no real sense of national crisis" is to assert something that is plainly contradicted by Mr. Garment's article and by dozens of others that have appeared in the Times since Election Day. What is the Times editorial trying to suggest, exactly? That Mr. Garment's sense of a national crisis is not "real" but phony?
Sanctions on Burma: The second editorial in today's Times calls for international and American economic sanctions against Burma, which the editorial calls Myanmar. "A good start would be restricting trade and investment in areas of the economy that profit from forced labor," the Times writes in its editorial. "Washington too should consider additional steps like encouraging disinvestment by American companies."
This is priceless coming from the Times, which led the cheerleading effort for the Clinton administration's abandonment of the linkage between human rights and trade with China. China's human rights abuses are of a greater scale than those of Burma, yet the Times wants sanctions on Burma but not on China. When the AFL-CIO, which has a glorious history of fighting for freedom by backing anti-Communist labor unions in Poland and elsewhere, including in Burma, raised its voice against unconditional trade with China and against unconditional trade with Africa, the American labor federation was scorned by the Times and by its foreign affairs columnist, Thomas Friedman, as isolationist. "Shame on them," Mr. Friedman barked at the AFL-CIO back in March. The Times editorial gives no explanation of why it supports linkage of trade and human rights in Burma but not in Africa or China. And the Times gives no explanation of why its preferred method of supporting Burma's people "in their struggle against a destructive tyranny" consists of trade sanctions rather than a more muscular policy such as direct financial and military assistance from America to groups that oppose the current regime in Burma.