Below are two op-ed page columns from columnist Ruth Rosen of the San Francisco Chronicle and Jay Bookman of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Each is strong. Each makes points that might otherwise be made on news pages. But these days, it seems, in our press anyone who pulls anything together — as Rosen does in her splendid list of criminals not brought to justice, or Bookman in his simple tally of how many of next year’s Republican congresspeople and senators will be black (the answer for those of you not willing to wait: 0)– is offering “opinion.” Reportage is increasingly an act not of putting the world together but of disassembling it. Tom
Where are they now?
Ruth Rosen
December 12, 2002
San Francisco Chronicle.ON TELEVISION, the good guys almost always catch the criminal by the last commercial. But in real life, criminals disappear and reappear with puzzling unpredictability.
American intelligence operations, for example, have been unable to locate Osama bin Laden, the 6-foot-4 bearded al Qaeda leader who masterminded the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. From somewhere — a cave or a trawler on the high seas — he still directs a multinational terrorist organization and taunts and threatens American officials.
Mullah Omar, the one-eyed enigmatic Taliban leader, has also disappeared. Every so often, some farmer spots him wandering in the mountains of Afghanistan, but American forces have been unable to find him as well.
The anthrax killer has also vanished — after sending deadly spores through the postal system to members of Congress and the media.
ON TELEVISION, the good guys almost always catch the criminal by the last commercial. But in real life, criminals disappear and reappear with puzzling unpredictability.
American intelligence operations, for example, have been unable to locate Osama bin Laden, the 6-foot-4 bearded al Qaeda leader who masterminded the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. From somewhere — a cave or a trawler on the high seas — he still directs a multinational terrorist organization and taunts and threatens American officials.
Mullah Omar, the one-eyed enigmatic Taliban leader, has also disappeared. Every so often, some farmer spots him wandering in the mountains of Afghanistan, but American forces have been unable to find him as well.
The anthrax killer has also vanished — after sending deadly spores through the postal system to members of Congress and the media.
Lott guilty of showing his true colors
By Jay Bookman
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
December 12, 2002“I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either.”
Even those with the most charitable of intentions would have a hard time twisting that into anything acceptable. With those comments, Lott was not celebrating a man or a career, but a man at one specific point in that career.
In 1948, when Thurmond ran for president, he did so as a one-issue candidate, and that issue was the preservation of segregation. It was blatant; it was racist; it was ugly.
“All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, our schools, our churches,” a defiant Thurmond said at the time.
Jay Bookman is the deputy editorial page editor. His column appears Thursdays.