Will you think it's ethical? I Dowd it. ;-)

What do you mean "stand up for her right to be wrong"?

It is clearly wrong, in my view, to do what she did.

I wish, (at least in Australian media), that it was a much rarer thing to do, too.

Well, I had to pay for re-reading the original NYT column.

However, I don't think that there is SUCH a great difference. (Due to the fact that there would be none, if said in German.)

Decimated being somewhere near the top of my list of favorite misused words, by the way.

Well, I can't speak to how it reads in German, but maybe I can help you understand that it is very different in English.

What Bush actually said--the original quote--was that those al Qaeda operatives who are either jailed or dead are not a problem anymore. Ms. Dowd's errant ellipses have Bush saying that all of al Qaeda is no longer a problem.

These are very different claims (in any language). :wink:

roger

Agreed, nearly as good as "outsourced" or "socially compliant suspension of staff".

Well, some of the opponents of Mr. George W. Bush tend to adopt ethics of Lenin-Trotsky-Stalin. One of the latter (do not remember, who did it exactly)claimed that anything that helped to establish the global dictatorship of proletariat was morally justified. This gave approval to mass murder, attempts of conquering Poland and Finland before the WWII, labor camps, staged trials and many other things. Mr. Bush's political enemies paraphrased this, considering anything helpful to decrease rating of Mr. Bush and his neo-conservative team being morally justified. Such an ethics condones any lies if they can harm their potential victim.

Wow, honestly I thought the jist of Bush's statement was about Al-Queda, not just half of all the operatives.

I read the quote when it first came out, and stumbled on the grammar at "they're not a problem anymore". So I figured Bush got the phrases discombobulated. It seems he meant Al-Queda, but his conversational grammer makes it ambiguous.

Maureen Dowd probably took it the same way too. To me, the distinction seems about as important as getting your tenses wrong, so "Oops", and get on with life.


Why lynch a good journalist for a typo? ... What am I missing here?

Mrs. Dowd could have just quoted Mr. Bush's words in their plenitude without reducing and permit us, the readers, to draw the conclusions. Despite of English not being my native tongue, I realized without difficulty that Mr. Bush referred to the captured or dead functionaries and not to an organization as a whole, though he hinted that its power was seriously impaired by the U.S. actions. Mrs. Dowd's reduced quote made me think that Mr. Bush wanted to say that Al Qaeda was hardly existent. I think that there is a sufficient difference between these two statements.
The words of Mr. Bush meant that he wanted to say that there were sufficient successes in neutralization of the terror group, but not that it was no more able to attack, hence being safe.

CB - You might not recognize the change in meaning Dowd made, but hers English skills would almost certainly make her aware of what she had done. (That's not intended as an insult. I might not have noticed it, had I not read of others taking exception with the change.)

Of course, it is possible the change in meaning was unintentional. I'm inclined to think she did it on purpose, but of course I don't know that for a fact.

1) An Easy, Small Error.
She could have included lots of huge text, but it's nicer to have a short, easy-flowing article. Trying to tidy things up a bit, she dropped a phrase by mistake ... a mistake that changed the meaning and just slipped right by her. Even a NYTimes journalist is not a computer!

2) Not a huge difference
The key phrase for me was "slowly but surely being decimated". Like he's patting people on the back, Bush is just reassuring people that we're making progress, and the spirit of his quote still comes across.

To make it correct, she could have cut MORE words, removing "they're not a problem anymore." All this press for one phrase?

3) Accidental
I had to really study the two quotes before getting it, so it seems unintentional to me. Bush could easily mumble or cough, pick a slightly different word, and the meaning would change about as much!

4) Minor Damage
A misapplied ellipse seems like nothing compared to entire articles or topic coverage being highly slanted in the first place. Aren't we being penny-wise and pound-foolish?


So my curiosity is still... Why make such a big fuss? Why pick on this one typo here?
Was this combined with a very slanted point of view or some yellow journalism?
Is Ms. Dowd a famous or controversial figure that people are eager to put down?

Interesting that I lean towards one reading of this while you, CB, seem to be stating that you know it was just a harmless mistake. Am I reading you wrong? (Surely you don't know what she intended or did not.)

if you look at her column to merely define quantities, decimation is reducing by 1/10 but "half" is much greater, so she just jumped quantities. If decimation is the goal, then having half the leadership already scratched, she just stated a conclusion of inequal quantities. Mathematically, shes correct.
the GOP is just hunting for counters to the Trent Lott and Rick Santorum congressional mispeaks.Scrat, you are correct , Dowd is a columnist and is guilty of the same unforgivable use of language skills as Rush Limbaugh when he does his well-spun op-ed sophistry.

No, Scrat, I certainly don't know what happened here... hence I'm posting my wild guesses and questions. I look up to everyone on this thread because you're all far more experienced than me, so I read the quote over and over again. I think maybe I understand the change in meaning. It seems clear. But it baffles me why people react so strongly. So I go back and read the meaning again!

The phrase "they're not a problem anymore." refers to half of Al-Queda instead of all of Al-Queda. That's the problem, right?

Instead of wiping out an absolutely huge chunk of Al-Queda slowly over the months (50% is incredible!), the erroneous quote indicates we've wiped out most all of Al-Queda. The magnitude changed, right?
And Al-Queda "is slowly but surely being decimated" in either case, right? It's in the process of currently being decimated. But for the purposes of Ms. Dowd's article, this was not enough.

Now I'm just curious what my blind spot is... It bothers me!
I'm betting this was not an editorial article, where you can spew all kinds of diatribe. Seems like people are being pretty upset about it. So perhaps this was a front-page article, trying to be meticulously factual, like a dictionary. Or maybe she was writing a persuasive article, where her proposals depended on this critical measurement.

I don't know. Why is it so important to them? I'm putting scenarios together, trying to imagine what a journalist goes through in the heat of a deadline, furiously editting and so on. And what kind of audience would depend on this particular distinction, rather than the overall tone of the quote.

Yet that same audience uses wild phrases like "scandal-plagued" and undefined innuendo as "looking into".

Either I'm blind to
a) how much people rely on every word in the NYTimes, or
b) how important this one article was, or
c) how important Ms. Dowd is, or
d) how meticulous journalists are expected to be, every minute, or
e) what a chronic pattern this kind of problem has been, or
f) how hokey and trivial these critics are.

I'm in no position to judge yet, but my ignorance bothers me.
No big deal, I let it go... I'm just missing something ... :-(

CB-A sense of humor, rich in irony, like yours, is a dangerous thing. You are wise to leave ir go. However you cant take back your words and we are eavesdropping. (nudge nudge)

I read that just as it was written - that group of terrorists - not Al Qaeda as a whole.

It seems simple to me, but is anything ever that simple? :wink:

Those kinds of misquotes are done all the time. Most are never called on it, because the media must do their own house-cleaning. c.i.

Scrat,

Yup it was horrible journalism. But....

You seem to have conservativism down to a religion here. You'll find the smallest most trite things and trumpet them if it fits your agenda.

Dowd's daft. Op-ed is for the people who need help forming their opinions. It's not a big deal and this type of commentary is quite common in right wing media as well. But we can trust you to make the biggest deal you can about it. :-)

So there! :wink:

But we want you to watch her for us, Scrat. Just in case...