All The News That's Fit to Print

Wait, a NY Times writer that hates America. Come on. I don't believe it.

That's why even now -- after Howell Raines, after years of bile from Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd, even after the attempt to turn an old missing-explosives story into an election-eve bombshell -- it was astounding to hear Chris Hedges of the New York Times go off Saturday morning at a forum held here as part of the annual conference of the Association of Opinion Page Editors.

Hedges was invited to talk about his book, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. Many editors on hand were probably aware of Hedges' notoriety for a commencement address he gave in May 2003 at a small Illinois college in which he was booed off the stage for criticizing the war on Iraq. But no one expected Hedges to offer up an indictment of American foreign policy as sweeping and angry as our strongest Arab critics or nastiest MIT linguistics professor.

"We're absolutely reviled around the world, as we should be," Hedges said. "Our only friends are war criminals" -- a reference, he explained, to Ariel Sharon and Vladimir Putin.

America's amoral, bloodthirsty ways and the hate they generate would be much plainer to the American people, Hedges said, if only so many journalists weren't "trapped" by the government's war clichés and oriented to a Washington-centric view of the world. This group, he said, included his bosses at the Times.

"There was absolutely no interest in my newspaper in presenting the views of the French" as the U.S. moved toward war in Iraq, Hedges said. Instead, there was lots of guffawing over anti-French jokes, which he termed "racist."

The good news is that at least some at the Times see the French for what they are.