The "Reckonings" column on the op-ed page of today's New York Times unleashes a nasty attack on three conservative Washington think tanks: the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute.
"Since the policy recommendations that come out of Heritage, or the Cato Institute, or even the American Enterprise Institute are so predictable, what purpose do these organizations serve? Good question," the Times column says.
Well, the same question could be asked about the "Reckonings" column, which is pretty predictable itself. But if the three tanks in question are so useless, why do Times political and policy reporters often quote experts who are based at them? Are they wasting their readers' time? Why does the Times print op-ed pieces written by their scholars? If the AEI is so useless, why do even Democratic politicians like Senator Lieberman participate in its events on military reform, and why do even Democratic politicians like Rep. Richard Gephardt participate in its events on tax reform? Experts at Heritage and AEI provided the intellectual underpinnings for the Clinton administration's major domestic policy achievement, welfare reform. AEI's foreign policy thinkers such as Michael Ledeen, Richard Perle and David Wurmser are provocatively challenging the conventional wisdom in Washington when it comes to dealing with dictators like Saddam Hussein and Yasser Arafat.
The "Reckonings" column uses the phrase "ideologue" as if it were a dirty word, but what's wrong with having strongly held beliefs?
World Criminal Court: The New York Times comes in today with an editorial backing the idea of American participation in a world criminal court. The Times claims the court would further American interests, but it remains unclear to Smartertimes.com how American interests are furthered by allowing Americans to be hauled before a court operated by representatives of a bunch of tyrannies.
Pollard: In an article about the possibility of America freeing Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, the New York Times today reports that Hillary Clinton "endorsed an improvement in Mr. Pollard's confinement conditions, but did not support releasing him." This gives the wrong impression. Mrs. Clinton's position was that she didn't have access to the classified information to decide for herself whether Pollard should be freed. It's true, she "did not support releasing him"; but she also did not support keeping him in jail. She just said she didn't have enough information to decide for herself. The Times makes it sounds like Mrs. Clinton wants Pollard to rot in prison forever, which may be true, but which isn't what the first lady and her spokesmen were saying during the Senate campaign.