The NY Times is naive in its criticism of Feingold...

but they continue to lay out the truth about Bush... They say the censure is
a bad idea and that Congress simply needs to do their job. And that is where
they are naive. This Congress or Senate is not going to investigate anything
about this White House. To think so is naivete. But, otherwise their comments
are right on...
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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/17/opinion/17fri1.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

<snip>

We understand the frustration that led Senator Russell Feingold to introduce a measure that
would censure President Bush for authorizing warrantless spying on Americans. It's galling
to watch from the outside as the Republicans and most Democrats refuse time and again to
hold Mr. Bush accountable for the lawlessness and incompetence of his administration.
Actually sitting among that cowardly crew must be maddening.

Still, the censure proposal is a bad idea. Members of Congress don't need to take
extraordinary measures like that now. They need to fulfill their sworn duty to
investigate the executive branch's misdeeds and failings. Talk about censure will
only distract the public from the failure of their elected representatives to earn
their paychecks.

We'd be applauding Mr. Feingold if he'd proposed creating a bipartisan panel to
determine whether the domestic spying operation that Mr. Bush has acknowledged
violates the 1978 surveillance law, as it certainly seems to do. The Senate should
also force the disclosure of any other spying Mr. Bush is conducting outside the law.
(Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has strongly hinted that is happening.)

The Senate Intelligence and Judiciary Committees should do this, but we can't expect
a real effort from Senator Pat Roberts, the Intelligence Committee chairman,
or Senator Arlen Specter, chairman of the Judiciary Committee. They're too busy trying
to give legal cover to the president's trampling on the law and the Constitution.

more...

investigations, all of them denied by the majority party. There was a mockery of an investigation that included the farce of deliberately not having testimony under oath from Gonzales.

Excuse my language but WHAT THE FUCK IS THE NEOCON TIMES TALKING ABOUT?

Senator Feingold didn't wake up last week after a long nap and decide out of the blue to start a movement to censure the Bush regime. Every other approach has been tried and has gone nowhere.

by saying the better options, which Feingold obviously uses as a basis for his decision without benefit of the idiotic wisdom of the NYT, are impossible(regrettable????) how does that mean feingold should have
stopped or started by ruining up against the stonewall at a lower, practically invisible inaudible level?

After that the NYT cannot get any real traction of its own to break down that wall, oh well. In itself, those actions demand a lot more than censure and something that IS productive instead of wishing Feingold
to be even more behind the eight ball than we are all forced to be.

This is typical if you think about the general judgment of the press, in trying to moderate debate with givens, non sequiturs, realism, gems, that in fact are the worst back seat quarterbacking in the nation, something we can top anytime in discussions online. If they would listen to themselves and all the things that cancel out out they would see what remains is doing nothing, respecting power, believing myths, pretending to be journalists, and the very spirit of misjudgment and bad advice.

Calling for investigations indeed. Let the NYT expend five inch high headlines a la the Post and launch investigations of its own and see how far they can get doing instead of carping at others reduced to powerless words but with the possibility of dutifully reaching out to the public by calling for what is just even without all the evidence being criminally withheld.

A post is in the GD.