Thursday, October 19, 2006

Bush

Bush accepts Iraq-Vietnam echoes

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

whoever wrote the headline really stretched the president's statement.

Anonymous said...

"There's certainly a stepped up level of violence and we're heading into an election."

From that statement: "Bush Accepts Iraq-Vietnam Comparison"

more great journalistic work.

Anonymous said...

very true

dcat said...

Paul --
Wait a second -- now who's being selective? From the article:

**"In an interview with ABC News, Mr Bush was asked if he agreed with a newspaper columnist who had written that the current fighting in Iraq may be compared to the Tet offensive in Vietnam.

'He could be right,' Mr Bush said. 'There's certainly a stepped up level of violence and we're heading into an election.'"**

That "he could be right" is more than a little bit important. He was asked if there was a parallel with Tet and that was the president's response. I do not see how this makes for shoddy journalistic work. is the headline a bit of a strecth? Perhaps. But not as much as you are making it out to be, and certainly the tenor of the article does not seem inaccurate or wrong.

In this case the analogy does not seem inaccurate -- the question is, what do we do? tet proved to be a defeat despite military victory because what it showed was that victory was not right around the corner and that we had not smashed the enemy's capacity to wage war. That might be an especially instructive lesson to learn now, and one that might help us to avoid the aftermath of Tet. I'm not certain how a knee-jerk opposition to any invocation of Vietnam is useful here.

dcat

Anonymous said...

shoddy headline writing.
i don't think the writer was interested in "what do we do?" type stuff either.

Anonymous said...

shoddy headline writing.
i don't think the writer was interested in "what do we do?" type stuff either.

dcat said...

Paul --
Trust me when I say this -- headline writers almost always get it wrong, no matter the ideology or status of the source. Every single time I write an op-ed I include a suggested title. My suggested title has never once been used. Someone in the chain -- whoever is responsible for these things -- comes up with their own, which is inevitably misleading or simply not as good as the one I write. I'm a masochist, so I still do it with every submission, but I know it will never go through.

dc