The Week in Review section of today's New York Times gives a big plug to a new book that is a compilation of George W. Bush's supposed "gaffes." But the real gaffe is the tendency of the Times and its ideological allies mistakenly to characterize Mr. Bush as some kind of half-wit. Here is the first example of a "Bushism" that the Times provides: "Last week, he said, 'I am mindful not only of preserving executive powers for myself, but for predecessors as well.'" In the context, this was a perfectly reasonable response; the president was asked whether he would try to prevent President Clinton's pardon of Marc Rich from going into effect, under a legal theory that the Justice Department had come up with. Mr. Clinton is Mr. Bush's predecessor, and it was exactly his presidential powers that were being preserved. There's no gaffe.
The second example of a Bush gaffe that the Times provides is this: "He has dismissed the idea that Social Security is 'some kind of federal program.'" This statement, too, was reasonable in its context; he was trying to draw a contrast between the Gore Social Security plan, which treated Social Security like it was some kind of federal program, and the Bush plan, which recognized that Social Security consisted of money paid in by individual taxpayers, and which sought to give those taxpayers more control over how their money was invested by partially privatizing Social Security accounts. Again, not a gaffe but a legitimate way of illuminating a policy distinction.
Pregnant Pause: A column about the subway, in the City section of this morning's New York Times, asks, "How many times a day does this scene unfold: a pregnant woman gets on a crowded car, and nobody gets up? It's not that it never happened in the past; it's just that the practice seems to have made the leap to the commonplace." The editor of Smartertimes.com sees subway riders giving up their seats to pregnant women all the time. If the Times wanted to check this out, it could have a pregnant reporter, or one posing as one, ride the subway for a while and see what happens. Smartertimes.com has a vague recollection that a Times columnist actually did this a few years ago and was treated with the utmost courtesy by subway riders, but Smartertimes.com couldn't find the column in the Times archive.
Late Again: The cover story of this morning's New York Times magazine, about human cloning, is old news to anyone who read Anna Van Lenten's article in the November 29, 2000, Praxis Post.