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This Week's Media Hits and Misses

The crisis in Pakistan provided the freshest evidence of the genius of the Bush foreign policy apparatus. Shockingly, putting the amorphous concept of "the war on terror" at the center of a plan held together by string and duct tape does not make for a coherent strategy. Who knew? Here's some of the coverage.

Hit: Frank Rich, Sunday's go-to guy for the freshest intelligence on the Bush mob, explains how the president made himself the perfect role model for our man in Islamabad.

Hit: Steve Coll's New Yorker Comment is a great Pakistan situationer. It ends by predicting that Musharraf's presidency will end just like Richard Nixon's—with a helicopter taking off from the lawn of the presidential palace.

Hit: Sid Blumenthal's diatribe: "On the rubble of neoconservatism, the Bush Administration has adopted 'realism' by default, though not even as a gloss on its emptiness."

Hit: Fred Kaplan's slightly calmer dissection of the Pakistani dilemma in Slate.

Hit: Shoot the lawyers first. Reporting from Islamabad on World News Tonight, ABC correspondent Dan Harris expressed his astonishment over the admirable role lawyers were playing in the Pakistani protest:

HARRIS: During the crackdown in Myanmar, it was the monks who symbolized the resistance. China's Tiananmen Square, it was the students. In Pakistan, somewhat improbably, it is, thus far, the lawyers.

[To a demonstrator] In the United States, lawyers are viewed with some skepticism. So it's a little surprising ... for us, that lawyers are on the front lines here.

ATTORNEY: Sir, here we prove that here the matter is not money. Here, the matter is our dignity. ... We are not scared."

Hit: Jon Lee Anderson's Letter from Iraq. A lengthy but fascinating look at the complex moral arithmetic involved in securing Baghdad's Ghazaliya suburb. Most chilling: the story of an American collaborator whose goal is to avenge the death of his older brother by killing 100 men.

Hit: David Gates's splendid essay about the culture of the '60s in Newsweek.

Miss: Everything else in Newsweek's tired '60s cover package (especially the hideous Peter Max cover).

Hit: The Guardian reveals everyone's favorite get-out-of-jail-free card in Iraq: "Iran made me do it."

Under the MSM Radar:
Hit: Glenn Greenwald's fierce public battle with Gen. David Petraeus's chief spokesman, Col. Steven Boylan, over an invective-filled e-mail ("You are not a journalist nor do you have any journalistic ethical standards, as we found out from the last time I engaged with you") that had Boylan's return address on it. After Greenwald posted it, Boylan denied sending it, even though an analysis by several experts confirmed that it came through the same military computers that other genuine Boylan e-mails had flowed through. Mystery mounted as Boylan showed absolutely no interest in determining who was impersonating him—if in fact anyone really was.

Miss: So far, no mainstream paper has touched the story, although the Washington Post's Howie Kurtz was asked about it in one of his online chats. Howie's trenchant analysis: "It's a very strange tale. I'm not sure what to make of it. I think Boylan's complaint had more to do with the publication of what he contends is a fake e-mail sent by someone else."
Heart-warming details: Col. Boylan freelances for the extreme right wing magazine Human Events, and his wife and children manned a phone bank for George Bush in 2004.
(Thanks to FCP blog editor JWS.)