The New York Times: Now 33% as Coherent as Dick Cheney!

Dick Cheney  and the New York Times have one thing in common:  both have  opinions about  the latest version of  Bush’s  North Korea policy:

Cheney froze, according to four of the participants at the Old Executive Office Building meeting. For more than 30 minutes he had been talking and answering questions, without missing a beat. But now, for several long seconds, he stared, unsmilingly, at his questioner, Steven Clemons of the New America Foundation, a public policy institution.

Finally, he spoke: “I’m not going to be the one to announce this decision,” the other participants recalled Cheney saying, pointing at himself. “You need to address your interest in this to the State Department.”

He then declared that he was done taking questions, and left the room.  [N.Y. Times]

Cheney is a favorite whipping boy for a lot of facile criticism, much of it from the sort of people who don’t actually understand this issue but tend to drive by when it hits page one, but I’d lay good money that history will have vindicated him by this time next year.   

The New York Times, on the other hand, has opted to cover every base.  In an “analysis” story, the Times calls  Bush’s new Agreed Framework  2.0  “a triumph of … diplomacy,” which is  the sort of language  left-leaning journalists, academics, and diplomats  tend to use when America throws its interests away and gets nothing in return.   Such things seldom trouble the  Times, but at  least they’ve sense  enough to realize that  Kim Jong Il won’t actually disarm —  heck, they’ve told us so — so the Times is already hedging its bets and managing our expectations.  All of which is rather hard to reconcile with what the Times was saying not so long ago:

That [diplomatic] effort unfortunately has stalled, and the fault — at least this time — is undeniably Pyongyang’s. [“¦.]

North Korea has said it would produce the accounting, but first it wants Washington to remove it from the list of state sponsors of terrorism and lift certain sanctions. Washington says the sequencing can be worked out if Pyongyang is prepared for full disclosure.

The Bush administration has a long history of using any excuse to scuttle any diplomatic deal, but in this case it is right. Pyongyang clearly agreed to full disclosure and the deadline. Since then serious questions have also arisen about Pyongyang’s nuclear cooperation with Syria. That must also be disclosed.  [New York Times Editorial, January 28, 2008; emphasis mine]

Here, reproduced in full, is the  text of North Korea’s disclosure about  nuclear cooperation with Syria:

[This space intentionally left blank]

Huzzah!   It’s a triumph of diplomacy!  

The closest I can come to distilling consistency from this is that the Times agrees with  skepticism  about Kim Jong Il’s nuclear proliferation until Dick Cheney expresses it.  United we stand!   Perhaps the problem with the Times isn’t so much its willingness to inject its views into its coverage so much as the coherence of the views themselves.