You Make the Call

Bear's post below reminded me of my recurring feature "Editorial versus Front Page: you make the call." To remind you what this is about, I post a paragraph from a newspaper and you try to tell if it was lifted from the front page, or editorial page.

here's one:

President Bush, still smarting from charges that the United States was doing too little to assist in relief operations, announced that he was sending Secretary of State Colin L. Powell to the region, along with the president's brother, Jeb, the governor of Florida.

This little nugget of opinion was from the front page of the LA Times (subscription only). Whether Bush was "smarting" from those charges seems debatable, but what isn't debatable is that the writer of this piece hopes Bush is smarting.

Here's another few paragraphs I ran across at Powerline.

President Bush's initial, halting response to the Indian Ocean tsunami catastrophe, followed within days by strong expressions of concern and decisive action, spotlighted a governing style that sometimes finds its stride only after stumbling at the gate. This seems especially true when Bush is confronted with a cataclysmic event and must improvise quickly -- as with the Dec. 26 tsunami or the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks....

The first U.S. president with a graduate business degree, Bush sees himself as an unflinching leader who sticks to his guns. Yet on numerous occasions he has shown an ability to bend to the public will -- to the point of executing U-turns....

"Bush's default mechanism continues to be the laid-back quality that marked his Texas governorship, in which he had a short work day, a long midday break and delegated very extensively," said Fred I. Greenstein, a Princeton presidential scholar.

Again from the news pages of the LA Times. The whole article is quite amusingy. Yet another Bush hit piece cloaked as a legitimate news story.