And the better

Maybe it's the distance from the cocktail parties (they've got malignant dwarf David Brooks living in DC for that) but the NY Times Editorial page has actually been doing its job lately on masthead editorials:

We can't think of a president who has gone to the American people more often than George W. Bush has to ask them to forget about things like democracy, judicial process and the balance of powers — and just trust him. We also can't think of a president who has deserved that trust less.

This has been a central flaw of Mr. Bush's presidency for a long time. But last week produced a flood of evidence that vividly drove home the point.

And this goes, as the editorial states across many areas, for example in regard to warrantless wiretapps the Times does something the Post's Jim Vander Hei is too lazy to do, notice that there is opposition to it from both parties, not just Democrats.

That Bush has done nothing about Abu Ghraib to fix the problems that existed and continued to torture whenever he can.

And finally to the continuing stain of Iraq:

The White House has blocked a Congressional investigation into whether it exaggerated the intelligence on Iraq, and continues to insist that the decision to invade was based on the consensus of American intelligence agencies.

But the next edition of the journal Foreign Affairs includes an article by the man in charge of intelligence on Iraq until last year, Paul Pillar, who said the administration cherry-picked intelligence to support a decision to invade that had already been made. He said Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney made it clear what results they wanted and heeded only the analysts who produced them. Incredibly, Mr. Pillar said, the president never asked for an assessment on the consequences of invading Iraq until a year after the invasion. He said the intelligence community did that analysis on its own and forecast a deeply divided society ripe for civil war.

When the administration did finally ask for an intelligence assessment, Mr. Pillar led the effort, which concluded in August 2004 that Iraq was on the brink of disaster. Officials then leaked his authorship to the columnist Robert Novak and to The Washington Times. The idea was that Mr. Pillar was not to be trusted because he dissented from the party line. Somehow, this sounds like a story we have heard before.

Yes, the Times manages to not mention it has gone along with the Bush Administration on some of these dubious matters. But at least it seems to be facing the music now. How one wishes the D.C. Cocktail circuit cared more for their country than their crab puffs.