BCT Editorial – 4/24/07

This page was last updated on April 24, 2007.

Fatal flaws; Editorial; Beaver County Times; April 24, 2007.

Below is a detailed critique of the subject editorial.

“Paul Wolfowitz’s troubles at the World Bank should come as no surprise.

“As deputy secretary of defense, Wolfowitz was one of the architects of the Bush administration’s failed policies regarding the invasion and occupation of Iraq. He refused to listen to those who opposed his views. His way was the only way.

“Now, he’s trouble at the World Bank, where he is the president, for dictating a huge pay raise and promotions for his girlfriend, a bank employee required by conflict-of-interest rules to take an outside job during his tenure. (He used his pull to get her a job in the State Department.)

“Tracy Rubin, a columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, notes that ‘the Wolfowitz scandal provides a case study of why the White House is in such trouble. When you believe you are above the norms of the hoi polloi and need to explain yourselves to none; when you brook no challenges to your fixed believes, you’re unlikely to see disaster coming until it is upon you. Even today, the White House has yet to grasp the fatal flaws of this approach.’”

[RWC] Note how once again a Times editorial treats an op-ed author as if he/she is a news source.

“With these guys, it’s everybody else’s fault, even when their dream world is crumbling all around them. Our nation’s is paying a terrible price for their fantasies.”

[RWC] If you’re a regular reader of Times editorials, you remember they occasionally quote the liberal Washington Post. Here’s why the Times didn’t quote the Post this time.

The April 22^nd editorial “Trouble at the World Bank” said, “Beware a rush to judgment over the Wolfowitz pay flap … It was Mr. Wolfowitz who, before taking over at the bank, called the potential conflict of interest to the attention of the bank’s ethics committee. He asked to be recused from any personnel decisions involving Ms. Riza. The committee agreed that a conflict existed, but it said that could probably be solved only by Ms. Riza leaving the bank, either permanently or on loan to another agency. The committee also told Mr. Wolfowitz that, if she chose to go elsewhere, Ms. Riza should be given a raise because she already had been short-listed for a promotion. So when Mr. Wolfowitz dictated her new terms of employment he was responding in part to the committee’s instructions. Further raises were intended to be equal to what she might have earned had she stayed at the bank, responding to the committee’s advice that she receive ‘compensation to offset negative career impact’ from her reassignment.”

Further, the editorial stated, “The ethics panel reviewed the situation again a half-year later, in February 2006, after receiving an anonymous complaint from a bank employee precisely on the issue of excessive pay. Once again it found, ‘on the basis of a careful review,’ that the allegations ‘do not appear to pose ethical issues appropriate for further consideration by the Committee.’”

This Times editorial is yet another example of what I mean when I write we can’t trust anything we read without independent verification.