enough already, III

Yesterday the Weekly Standard offered up a quick compare-and-contrast of the coverage of President Reagan's passing, as provided by the NYT and WaPo. It's about what one would expect; but one note in passing caught my eye.

The picture of Reagan adorning the Times front-page is, to my eye at least, exactly the size of the front-page picture of Smarty Jones, the racehorse that lost the Belmont Stakes on Saturday. A story on Smarty Jones shares the top fold of the Times front-page with Reagan, incidentally, as do stories on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the competition over who will be Senator John Kerry's running mate. (In the Post, Reagan gets the top fold all to himself.)

Last week on O'Reilly's show (yes, he is an insufferable blowhard, but nonetheless is more tolerable than Larry King), a guest noted that the Times had to that point featured Abu Ghraib on the front page twenty-eight days running. I'm not in the habit of perusing the print edition, but it certainly appears that the editors are keeping the streak alive.

If you are unable to describe any new developments that might warrant such wall-to-wall coverage—well, you're not alone. And a look at what some of our enemies have been saying is rather instructive.

Quick trials for Saddam Hussein and others from his regime, although rejected by Washington, would have deterred some of the violence now shaking Iraq, Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari said on Friday.

“We pleaded, really,” Zebari told Reuters. “We were frustrated that we were unable to do that.”

Iraqi leaders had argued that trying Saddam and officials like Ali Hassan Majid — known as “chemical Ali” for his leading role in chemical weapons attacks against the Kurds — “would have a major impact” on those carrying out attacks on the U.S.-led coalition, said Zebari, who is himself a Kurd.

Those staging the attacks were asking, “What can they do to you? They will arrest you and put you in a prison and feed you four times a day,” he said in an interview.

Oh, yeah: the Abu Ghraib photographs have just destroyed our credibility in the Arab world.