The New York Times Does It Again… I Think.
The title of the article is “McCain’s Canal Zone Birth Prompts Queries About Whether That Rules Him Out” and, aside from the extremely poor grammar (don’t you think “McCain’s Canal Birth Zone Prompts Queries About His Candidacy” or “About His Presidential Eligibility” would have been a much more mellifluous title? I digress), I’m experiencing some definite schizophrenia about interpreting it.
When I analyze the framing of the “queries” in the article, and the weigh-in of the experts (they were named this time), I don’t really see the queries flowing forth as the title indicates. What I do see, instead, are passages like these:
But given mounting interest, the campaign recently asked Theodore B. Olson, a former solicitor general now advising Mr. McCain, to prepare a detailed legal analysis. ?I don?t have much doubt about it,? said Mr. Olson, who added, though, that he still needed to finish his research.
That sounds like, um, sound legal analysis to me. But still, who, exactly, is making these “queries”?
Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and one of Mr. McCain?s closest allies, said it would be incomprehensible to him if the son of a military member born in a military station could not run for president.
?He was posted there on orders from the United States government,? Mr. Graham said of Mr. McCain?s father. ?If that becomes a problem, we need to tell every military family that your kid can?t be president if they take an overseas assignment.?
I say again, that sounds pretty definite to me. Throughout the rest of this article, which is, I must admit, much more well-written than the NYT’s previous McCain sm- ahem, excuse me, that must have slipped out.
Anyway, this article is more well-written than the last NYT article I discussed in this blog.
But I say yet again? where are the queries? Who is raising the questions?!
In a paper written 20 years ago for the Yale Law Journal on the natural-born enigma, Jill Pryor, now a lawyer in Atlanta, said that any legal challenge to a presidential candidate born outside national boundaries would be ?unpredictable and unsatisfactory.?
?If I were on the Supreme Court, I would decide for John McCain,? Ms. Pryor said in a recent interview. ?But it is certainly not a frivolous issue.? (emphasis mine)
This begs the only question anyone seems to be raising in this whole debacle: Who, exactly, is questioning McCain’s American legitimacy?
And the answer seems to be: The New York Times is the only major entity questioning it.
It’s healthy for newspapers and their editors to raise issues. But as even the article says, this issue has been a non-issue since the nineteenth century. The Times isn’t doing the history buffs any favors. Once again, this just seems like another poorly timed (but better written) smear job.When the Times does this, my respect for the gold standard of American print journalism, which long ago hit bottom, keeps digging.
The New York Times: All the nineteenth-century news that’s fit to print… and where non-issues should go to die.
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