Fox's Varney: NY Times is mourning Saddam's death
On the December 29 edition of Fox News' Your World with Neil Cavuto, guest host Stuart Varney asked: "If and when Saddam [Hussein] is put to death, will The New York Times be in mourning about it?" Varney was discussing a December 29 New York Times editorial that said Saddam's trial was "flawed, politicized and divisive" and that executing him will not "automatically create a new and better Iraq." Subsequently, on the January 1 edition of Your World, Varney claimed that "it appears the paper of record is" mourning Saddam's death because "[t]oday's headline call[ed] the hanging 'a rush job.' " Varney then asked: "So, is the Times now an advocate for the Iraqi dictator?"
While Varney did not indicate which specific January 1 Times article bore a headline calling Saddam's hanging "a rush job," a January 1 Times article was headlined: "U.S. Questioned Iraq on the Rush to Hang Hussein."
The onscreen text on the December 29 edition of Your World asked "Media Bias?" while the January 1 onscreen text asked: "Mourning Saddam?"
From the December 29 edition of Fox News' Your World with Neil Cavuto:
VARNEY: If and when Saddam is put to death, will The New York Times be in mourning about it? In an op-ed piece [in fact, it was an editorial] entitled "The Rush to Hang Saddam Hussein," editors question if the trial was legitimate and if Iraq will even be better off with him dead.
From the January 1 edition of Fox News' Your World with Neil Cavuto:
VARNEY: It began with articles last week criticizing Saddam's impending doom. That prompted us to ask on this show if The New York Times would be in mourning if Saddam was executed. Well, now it appears the paper of record is! Today's headline calling the hanging "a rush job." So, is the Times now an advocate for the Iraqi dictator?
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THAT was the reason for the rush...
There was no reason to rush. It's not like that horrible 3000th death would make the news, uh, two days later...
The Times should be happy with the outcome, a brutal death completed with jeers and filmed, with a sectarian backlash resulting in hundreds of dead Iraqi civilians, creating a martyr.
The excellent January 1 Times article is disturbing for a number of reasons that Varney would never dare to discuss on Fox News, and no way shape or form does it even comes close to "mourning" the death of Hussein. Exploiting Hussein's execution in order to dishonestly bash the New York Times is simply disgusting.
dancing in the streets with Michelle Maulkin rejoicing over the video she so desperately hoped would be made.
From Melanie Morgan's website:
[link to www.cafepress.com]
Imagine that, trying to profit off of this. This is very telling about the real values these phony christians hold.
Loved the mission accomplished mug with the photo of the hanging. In a nutshell it is the Bush legacy. Photo ops over substance, politics over national interests, emotional sentiment over the rule of law, vengeance over justice, and giving a fearful mob bread and circuses. The reality is that this hanging is another example of total incompetence. At least Bush can say "My daddy didnt get im but I did."
>>VARNEY: "That prompted us to ask on this show if The New York Times would be in mourning..."
Prompts me to ask here if Varney wants flawed and divisive trials here in the U.S.(?) Is Varney an advocate for lynchings? Would Varney be happy to hang _anyone_ he deems we'd be better off without? Does Varney want to censor the press?
A trial is legitimate, or IF the hanging was a "rush job" or even IF Iraq would somehow be better off with Saddam dead [as opposed to say imprisoned for life] is tantamount to MOURNING his death???
Only on FOX.
I dont know how they did it but they actually made one of the most brutal dictators the world has ever known a sympathetic character at his hanging. As the NYT points out, Saddam was perhaps the most dignified man on the gallows-also pointing out that Saddam knew the importance of having a grand exit. How the f*** could you make this controversial? Its Saddam. Moronic simply moronic. The man's crimes should have spelled out ad naseum. They convicted him on one charge and rushed to hang- on a holy day. As it is his death has inflamed sectarian hatreds not just in Iraq but also the region
I am sure the Times "mourned" Saddam in the same way I "mourned" Pinochet. Which is not at all.
This whole thing is just another sick piece of a war based on lies from the start.
I love how they cut off the first part of the "headline". These people simply do not care.
I saw that Mr. "No Spin" O'Reilly put Michelle Malkin on as a guest host for him. Par for the course, I suppose. I think I might make my own cafepress store and put up a t-shirt with Malkin on it that reads, "Hey Maklin! Show us how you shave your muff, or shut up!"
I find her alliance with the Right and Fox laughable, for if they had their way Malkin would be relegated to the kitchen or to a brothel as some back alley pimp's number one "Asian" geisha girl. In other words, she is shilling for the very element who have no moral quandary marginalizing women and Asians, or pretty much anyone not male and white and wealthy. How they must laugh behind her back for being dippy enough to "carry their water", although I'm sure they would prefer that she wear something shear and revealing while she services her grateful future oppressors.
I've thought the exact same thing for some time...
What always kills me about Malkin is the degree to which she has a raging hate-on for immigrants even though she is a total anchor-baby who was only born here in the States so that her parents visas wouldn't expire, thus preventing them from having to go back to the Phillipines...that and for someone nearly as bat-guano-crazy as Pamela Geller Oshry (Atlas Shrugs) to whine about her critics being "unhinged" negates even the tiniest shred of credibility that i might have ever been willing to lend to any of the Little Brown Brownshirt*'s demented ravings.
(*Ms. Malkin also occasionally writes columns for a website named for the first Anglo baby born in the colonies which has some ties to a white supremacist organization who i will not specifically bless with a direct reference other than that they share a name with a generic term for a weather pattern)
meanwhile, all i can think regarding the Saddam hanging is the notion that the people in our government who made sure that he got a free pass on all of that murder and genocide back in the 80's should have been on trial right next to him
they were fighting the commies, so its okay. You know who was the first to fight the commies?
Michelle bags on Immigrants. I would like to see that link.
So then did i just imagine all of the screeching that she and all of the other right-wing nuts did last spring on tv and the web bemoaning the brown peril that was mobbing our streets. If you'd have taken her word for it, we were in for a Mexi-pocalypse of near biblical proportions, and by god that lurking peril may still get us yet.
If you believe her and others, every one of us with a Spanish surname is part of some "reconquista" conspiracy meant to convert the American Southwest back into northern Mexico. (As if years of a far-right dominated state legislature and all of the corporate welfare they dole out haven't already turned much of Arizona into a nearly 3rd world economy that we'd want to go even further backwards and be governed by the barely competent PRI)
Malkin actually has the balls to mention "anchor babies" despite (by her own definition) being one herself:
[link to michellemalkin.com]
What a loser you are......
...it is no worse than Rush calling Cindy Sheehan a whore, which he did. I would at least say that the liberal voices in the MEDIA are much more civilized than the right, as are the politicians. CNN 'mistakenly' uses Barrack Obama's name for Osama and what does the Obama camp do? Graciously accept it as a mistake. That kind of dignified behaviour was curiously absent, or conciously so, when Kerry made his mistake. It was turned into a politically motivated smear campaign, plain and simple.
It only looks like a question mark:
[link to www.crooksandliars.com]
Fox news has discovered that if you use a question mark on screen, "you can say ****ing anything!"
In a German novel I once read, a perverted media drives a huge fit of nation-wide racism in a fictional world on the "?" idea. The Government was unable to stop them from basically spreading lies, since they are not saying it, only "wondering". But, of course, people don't give a ****** ***** ** **** about the "?".
Mr. varney calls himself a Christian. A " Bush Christian " no doubt, they seem to love murder and lies.
...of the problems inherent in trials of deposed dictators. The problem lies in "trying" a person for crimes of which is he is patently guilty as an act of vengeance for his brutality.
Honestly, how do you defend Saddam Hussein? Of course he did what he was accused of; what do you do as his defense lawyer? The idea that Saddam might have been acquitted of the charges is ludicrous, and the death penalty was barely in doubt, so why hold a trial at all? Given that the outcome was a foregone conclusion, it's easy to say the trial wasn't "fair", but how could he not have been convicted? What, he didn't order thousands of people butchered?
The "irregularities" in Saddam's trial were hardly the fault of the Iraqi courts. It wasn't their fault that lawyers got murdered, or that Saddam turned his trial into a circus. You can't let the defendant determine the conduct of his own trial. If he refuses to show up, or refuses to sit down and be quiet, you just have to hold the trial without him, or bind and gag him. Given the circumstances, Saddam's trial was as fair as it could be.
I think what's missing from the arguments about Saddam's trial and execution is recognition of the real purpose of trials such as his. People like Saddam Hussein are not put on trial to establish their guilt, because their guilt is beyond question. They are put on trial as a kind of fact-finding truth-telling. The truth of Saddam Hussein is that the US bears an enormous burden of guilt for him being in power. We put his Baathist predecessors in power, and we armed, funded, and sustained his regime for years knowing full well that he was a brutal despot. However, the US is not responsible for the fact that he was a murderous psychopath. We knew he was, and supported him anyway, but we didn't tell him to butcher Kurds and Shiites.
That's what's so false about all this rhetoric surrounding his trial and execution. We sit back and say "Justice was done, a brutal dictator has been punished, it's a great day for freedom" while pretending we had nothing to do with him being in power in the first place. It's just another example of the triumph American good over anti-American evil. Critics complain that his trial was a sham, and his execution hasty, when their real complaint is over the total absence in all of this reckoning of any admission of American culpability in the crimes. It smacks of an excuse to avoid appearing to be 'blame America first liberals.'
Well, dammit, stand up for what you believe. If you think America should have been on trial alongside Saddam, then say so. If you think it would have made Saddam's trial more "fair" if US policy had been indicted along with him, then cop to it. If, like me, you see that the US is indeed culpable in Saddam's crimes, and at the same time Saddam did what he wanted to and was not a brutal despot at our behest, then you adopt my attitude toward his execution:
I don't give a damn that he was executed, and I don't believe a word of all the sanctimonious, posturing crap coming from our "leaders". It makes not a whit of difference that Saddam is dead; it solves nothing and signifies nothing.
-mid
In an international court. That would have stopped the problems of defense lawyers being assasinated. It would have also been better recieved by the world than a trial by an occupied government. And YES I think Bush and Cheney should be tried also. The Nuremberg tribunals called starting a war of aggression the Supreme War Crime, they did just that. If the Nuremberg laws were applied they would be hung. But there is no intenational death penalty anymore. The problem is our complicity in some of his crimes against humanity would have come out. I dont believe in the death penalty at ALL, but not because of what they do or do not deserve and Saddam was a tyrant who deserves the severest punishment available.
NYT doesn't mourn Saddam, they just realize that his death won't bring stability or democracy to Iraq... do your homework, Fox...
Stuart & others who believe that the NYT article is showing empathy toward Saddam's trail/hanging only have to refer to an article on The Progressive's website by Matthew Rothchild, which points out 2 world organizations condemming the trail & hanging.....
.....The world’s two leading human rights organizations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, both came to a different conclusion from Bush.
Human Rights Watch concurred.
It called Saddam’s trial “deeply flawed,” and termed his execution “a significant step away from respect for human rights and the rule of law in Iraq.”
Among the “serious flaws” that Human Rights Watch noted: “failures to disclose key evidence to the defense, violations of the defendants’ right to question prosecution witnesses, and the presiding judge’s demonstrations of bias.”
Yes, Saddam Hussein was a mass murderer on a colossal scale. But even he deserved a fair trial.
Amnesty International called the trial “deeply flawed and unfair.” It was “a shabby affair,” said Malcolm Smart, director of Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Program.
Amnesty International cited “the grave nature of the flaws,” which included the following:
“The court failed to take adequate measures to ensure the protection of witnesses and defense lawyers, three of whom were assassinated during the course of the trial,” it said. “Saddam Hussein was also denied access to legal counsel for the first year after his arrest, and complaints by his lawyers throughout the trial relating to the proceedings do not appear to have been adequately answered by the tribunal.”
Nor were they adequately answered by the appeals court.
As much as I don't believe we should have ever been in Iraq, what should have occurred is Saddam should have been shipped off to the Hague for a sanctioned trail/tribunal which would have, no doubt, satisfied those in Iraq & the world, but sadly not Mr. Varney.
For instance is Fox no more than a propoganda machine? You can't get angry, I'm just asking