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Treasuring Early Natural History Books

May 4, 2012 /2 Comments/in , , /by

Always happy to see a story involving my old hometown Cleveland’s book culture–Judith Rosen of Publishers Weekly reports that an 1886 book of natural history and ornithology, Nests and Eggs of Birds of Ohio, a copy of which was discovered in 1995 in the library of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, is now being republished by Princeton Architectural Press. PAP’s catalog listing for the book shows that the new edition has been retitled  America’s Other Audubon by Joy Kiser, the librarian who found one of twenty-five remaining copies of the rare book.

The author, Genevieve Jones, an amateur naturalist of her day, was inspired to create the book after seeing Audubon’s Birds of America paintings at the World’s Fair of 1876. She created sixty-eight original lithographs in making her book, which contemporaries described as “the most beautiful book ever produced in America.” Sadly, Jones died before it was finished and her family labored seven years to see to its completion, then underwriting printing and selling it by subscription. Only 90 copies were produced, and among the subscribers were Theodore Roosevelt and President Rutherford Hayes.

I love old natural history books, such as The Journal of A Disappointed Man by W.N.P. Barbellion, to which H.G. Wells contributed an Introduction upon its publication in 1919–a few months before the author died of multiple sclerosis at age thirty. Two sample entries from Barbellion’s youth, January 3, 1903: “Am writing an essay on the life-history of insects and have abandoned the idea of writing 0n ‘How Cats Spend their Time.'” and March 18, “Our Goldfinch roosts at 5:30. Joe’s kitten is a very small one. ‘Magpie’ is its name.”  I have an old Penguin copy of the book and a reprint published in 1989. Then there’s Fishes: Their Journeys and Migrations by Louis Roule, originally published in 1933, which I republished as a Kodansha Globe title in 1996, with a new Introduction by George Reiger of Field & Stream magazine. A reviewer of the original edition wrote, “Will please the nature student, the Izaak Walton enthusiast, or the reader who delights in believe-it-or-nots.” Living in an age of diminishing biological diversity with an accelerating pace of extinction, it is important to be aware of species and varieties that used to be common and are no more, or increasingly scarce, and I treasure these books for aiding that effort, decades after they were first published. That’s kind of miraculous.

Continuing to Correct Politico and Drudge

May 3, 2012 /0 Comments/in , , /by

Some readers of this blog will have noticed yesterday that an incorrectly reported Politico story–about Barack Obama as author of Dreams From My Father–which was then inflated on the Drudge Report in to a bogus “Obama lied” meme, led to me being quoted in TPM’s story on the dust-up, because I published the first paperback edition of the book, in 1996. The TPM story ran under the headline, “‘Dreams From My Father’ Publisher: Drudge, Politico Obama Hits Bunk.”

And now today, Craig Silverman–who in 2007 published a book with me, Regret the Error: How Media Mistakes Pollute the Press and Imperil Our Free Speech –writes about this situation on his blog, where he covers media mistakes and corrections, in a column, How Politico can fix its mistake about Obama book. In his piece, Craig does an excellent job taking away useful lessons from the episode that all media people and news orgs should consider following, especially on how to handle the aftermath of a mistake. For media people who care about preventing errors, and the misinformation and harm that flow from them, I urge you to heed Craig’s constructive advice.

For the record, I’ve also written about correcting the Politico error and the Drudge amplification of it here, and earlier wrote about publishing Dreams From My Father here.

Correcting Politico and Drudge on “Dreams From My Father”

May 2, 2012 /1 Comment/in , , , , /by

Happy to be quoted at length in this TPM story by Brian Beutler about the erroneous reporting by Politico, which mistakenly reported today that Barack Obama had failed in the earliest editions of Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance to acknowledge that he created composite characters in the book. I know otherwise because I published the first paperback edition of the book, in 1996, as I have written on this blog. I contacted TPM this afternoon to correct the record on the needlessly murky situation created by the false report that originated with today’s Politico story by Dylan Byers, then amplified on the Drudge Report. You may click on the TPM story or read it below.

A former executive of the original paperback publisher of President Obama’s 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father weighed in on Wednesday’s manufactured controversy over whether Obama represented fiction as fact by using composite characters in his autobiography.
“It is unfathomable to me how Dylan Byers of Politico could have overlooked the very plain disclaimer that the book carried from the very start,” Philip Turner said to TPM via email. Turner was an editorial executive with Kodansha America, which published the paperback version of Dreams from My Father in 1996.
“The reference to ‘compression’ appears on page ix of the Introduction of the book I published then, which I have on my desk as I write this message,” Turner says. “What’s more, the 1996 paperback was an exact reprint with no changes of the hardcover edition that had been published a year earlier….” (emphasis added).
The fact that Obama used composite characters in his memoir — and that he disclosed this in the book’s introduction — was widely known before it was mentioned again in an excerpt from David Maraniss’ upcoming Obama biography, published Wednesday in Vanity Fair. It even featured prominently in a 2007 story by Politico’s top political reporter Mike Allen.
But on Wednesday, Politico published a story that made no reference to the disclaimer, suggesting Obama had misled his own readers. That piece has since been appended with a correction, but still reads as an indictment of the President.
—

For the record, this is the entire comment I sent to TPM which they quote from above:

As the first paperback publisher of “Dreams From My Father,” in 1996, I feel obliged to confirm everything in the above TPM story by Benjy Sarlin. The reference to “compression” appears on page ix of the Introduction of the book I published then, which I have on my desk as I write this message. What’s more, the 1996 paperback was an exact reprint with no changes of the hardcover edition that had been published a year earlier. For the record, I was editor-in-chief of Kodansha America then, and we acquired the rights to publish the book from Random House, whose imprint Times Books had done the hardcover. In the early 2000s Kodansha’s license to publish the paperback expired and rights reverted to Random House. Their Three Rivers Press imprint republished it in paperback in 2004 with a new preface by the author, and yet his original Introduction, with the disclaimer about “compression” remained in the book then.

It is unfathomable to me how Dylan Byers of Politico could have overlooked the very plain disclaimer that the book carried from the very start. I wonder if commenter @wpilderback isn’t right in his explanation below: “This was an opportunity for them to remind people that Obama slept with a white woman, and nothing more.” Even if Byers just made a stupid and avoidable mistake, I’m sure Drudge was only too happy to perpetuate the error.       

For readers interested in further information on the paperback edition I published, I refer you to a personal essay I published last month on my blog The Great Gray Bridge, via this link:  http://philipsturner.com/2012/03/11/dreams-father-circa-1995-96/

 

The Obama Campaign, Punching Early and Hard

May 1, 2012 /0 Comments/in /by

So much political news the past few days, much of it about the anniversary of the raid in which Osama Bin Laden was killed, and I’ve linked to some excellent pieces on that below*. Meantime, I really like how aggressively the #Obama2012 campaign is setting out to define Romney. While the Bin Laden dust-up is getting more coverage, yesterday there was this ad that ended with the line, It’s just what you expect from a guy who had a Swiss bank account, and now today it’s backed up with this infographic I saw on TPM showing Mitt’s foreign investment holdings. One hopes that at least some press people will be asking Romney’s people about these offshore accounts, and keep them on turf they’d rather not have to defend.

Mitt had such lousy opponents in the Republican primary that I detect he and his campaign are ill-prepared for what’s going to hit them in terms of coordinated opposition messages, one layered on top of another.  The copy below is straight from the Obama-Biden website, as is the graphic whose name on the jpeg is “Romney_World Map”. 

Mitt Romney has invested his money around the world, from the Cayman Islands to Ireland to Australia. We don’t know if he’s using these accounts to avoid paying his fair share in taxes, but we do know that in 2010, Romney’s tax rate was a startlingly low 13.9%. This means Romney pays a lower tax rate than many teachers, firefighters, police officers, and other middle-class Americans—even a lower rate than most other millionaires.
If elected, Romney’s proposed tax plan would cut tax rates for the wealthy even further—cutting his own taxes and protecting loopholes that he benefits from. At the same time, he opposes the President’s Buffett Rule, which would require millionaires and billionaires to pay their fair share. That’s not right.

Another salutary benefit of this early aggressiveness will be to energize the DEM base, which will be delighted to see the campaign’s determination to play rough–accurate and tough. For sure, there will be people in the press who decry this aggression, but as Josh Marshall has repeatedly pointed out with his bitch-slap theory of politics, if you can make your opponent look weak, or even, in old-fashioned gender terms, “un-man him,” you’re on the way to winning your race. I’m still worried about the enormous amount of Super-Pac spending that is going to be thrown against the president (and other DEMs) but there’s no question which candidate is running the better campaign at this point.

*See this collection of excellent journalism and commentary from the past couple days:

1) David Corn’s excellent tick-tock on the Bin Laden raid and the president’s decision to launch it. PBO is a cool customer. Read this and I think you’ll see what I mean.

2) Rick Ungar’s piece on forbes.com, about what he believes is the bad character revealed by Mitt’s cheap “Jimmy Carter” shot. What’s more, I would add, it undercut his supposed point. It was stupid politics, while revealing a bad heart, at least over this.

3) James Fallows up-close recollection of President Carter’s failed raid to free the American hostages in Iran, and why Romney got the point so wrong.

4) And two pieces, one by Jed Lewison in Daily Kos, and the other by Michael Hirsh in National Journal, about the real politicization of 9/11, including Mitt’s appearance today in lower Manhattan with Rudy Giuliani.

Loving Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther Novels

April 29, 2012 /2 Comments/in , /by


As some readers of this blog will have noticed, I’m a huge fan of the historical detective novels by Scotsman Philip Kerr featuring his WWII-era Berlin police detective Bernie Gunther. The first, March Violets, was published in 1989, followed by The Pale Criminal and A German Requiem, the latter coming out in 1991. They became known collectively as the “Berlin Noir” trilogy. As Kerr explains in the above video from his website, he put Bernie aside for fifteen years to write other books, including the excellent dystopian thriller The Second Angel, before returning to him in 2006 with the gripping The One From the Other. With the April 2012 publication of Prague Fatale the Gunther series is now up to eight titles.

While the first three books proceeded pretty much chronologically from the early 30s through the war years, the last five books are more varied in their narrative structure. Now, Kerr often flashes back and forth between the pre-war period and the war itself to the postwar period–placing Bernie in ever more morally conflicted situations. We may find Bernie in Argentina in the late 40s, trying to keep his head down, but inevitably running smack into Nazis who’ve fled Europe, often men he’d known or had run-ins with back in the day; a prisoner under interrogation by American intelligence officials investigating Nazi war crimes; or in the company of mobsters in 1950s Cuba*, like The Godfather brilliantly reimagined. But always the narrative returns to Berlin, with Bernie working as part of the Kripo–the Berlin detective division whose operations become increasingly threadbare and corrupt as police resources and manpower inexorably flow to the war and all sorts of morally compromised scum seek haven working in the squad–or working as the house dick at the Hotel Adlon, a once-opulent now down-on-its-heels hostelry.

As is often the case in the Bernie Gunther books, Prague Fatale finds Bernie encountering a real-life figure from the Nazi era. In the new book he’s under the unwelcome thumb of Reinhard Heydrich, SS-Obergruppenführer (a General) and chief of the Reich Main Security Office (including the Gestapo and Kripo), who assigns Bernie to protect him against a possible plot on his life. In her crime column last week, the New York Times Book Review‘s Marilyn Stasio called it “a locked-room whodunit” and the series, “endlessly fascinating,” while in the Louisville’s Courier-Journal reviewer Roger K. Miller wrote that he believes Kerr is the “absolute master of the genre; no one writing in English bests him, not David Downing or Jonathan Rabb, not even Alan Furst.” He continues,

The accuracy and detail of time and place are exquisite — things such as slang, power relationships, views of everyday life—are deftly and unobtrusively worked into the narrative. Deeper than that is what might be called the morality lesson. At Bernie’s core, he remains a once-and-future stoic white knight in the wisecracking Raymond Chandler mode, though life has thrown him blows to the physical, moral and emotional armor such as Philip Marlowe never had to face. Bernie, as ever, is appalled at what he has become. Heydrich, shortly to become the architect of the “final solution,” is possibly the most ruthless figure in the Nazi pantheon of horror. . . . Yet Bernie’s essential decency shines through even this Heydrich-suffused muck.Those who read closely will find further nuggets. As in Field Gray Kerr uses historical points to make contemporary ones; for instance, the SS torturers praise waterboarding as their most effective method. . . .Lovers of literature should learn to love Bernie. He could use it.

Aside from plotting and character, another thing about Kerr’s writing is simply how enjoyable it is too read his sentences. Even when writing about the most arcane and detestable aspects of the Nazi regime, the writing is lucid, fluent, and filled with vivid image-making. If you enjoy reading detective fiction, or books about WWII, and haven’t yet encountered the Bernie Gunther novels, I urge you to begin reading Philip Kerr. I treasure his work, and I believe you will too.

 

*In If the Dead Rise Not (2010), the sixth Gunther novel, Bernie becomes entangled with a killer named Max Reles, a corrupt American businessman colluding with Nazis building the 1936 Olympics facilities, all of them skimming huge profits from the contracting. Reles is every bit as evil as any of the Nazis who’ve ever crossed Bernie’s path. In the narrative’s flash-forward Bernie unexpectedly encounters Reles again almost twenty years later, in pre-Castro Cuba, and the reader learns that Max has come by his homicidal qualities by bloodline. In the novel, his brother was the real-life Abe Reles, aka “Kid Twist,” nicknamed for the maniacal delight he took in strangling his victims. In Weegee-era New York City, Abe Reles made front-page news as a notorious New York mob turncoat who in 1941 turned state’s evidence against his Murder Inc. confederates Lepke Buchalter and Albert Anastasio. Abe was only a few days into his bombshell testimony in front of a  Brooklyn jury, when after-hours, ostensibly under police protection in his Coney Island hotel, he was flung from a high floor, dead when he hit the roof below. Some said he may have jumped, though as it turned out, suicide made little sense, logically or forensically. The certain convictions and complete dismantlement of the mob died with him. Coincidentally, in 2008 I had edited and published a nonfiction book called The Canary Sang But Couldn’t Fly: The Fatal Fall of Abe Reles, the Mobster Who Shattered Murder Inc.’s Code of Silence by Edmund Elmaleh**, so I knew Kid Twist’s story well. Since reading If the Dead Rise Not I’ve checked and double-checked, and have found no evidence that the real Abe Reles had a brother named Max. I’m really taken with the inventiveness of Kerr in creating a fictional sibling counterpart to the vicious Kid Twist in his superbly imaginative novel.

**As an addendum to this admittedly lengthy footnote, I must add that late in 2008, just a few weeks before finished copies of Elmaleh’s book were due to arrive at the offices of Sterling Publishing, where I was then Editorial Director of Union Square Press, I received word that the author had suddenly collapsed and died. Unfortunately, Eddie, as I had come to know him, never got to see a printed copy of what was his first published book. At least he didn’t die by misadventure, as Abe Reles had. Finally, as it turned out for me, my time was almost up too, not in this life, but at that publishing house. In a big layoff two weeks in to January of 2009 I was relieved of my job, a milestone I have written about here on this blog, and which has permitted me much more time to read books like the Bernie Gunther novels.

A Sweet Farewell to Levon Helm

April 28, 2012 /0 Comments/in /by

The NY Times reports that this past Thursday more than 2,000 fans, friends, and admirers of Levon Helm flocked to Woodstock, NY, to pay tribute to the late drummer, singer, and all around good man. Levon’s family prepared the palm card shown here with his picture and dates to hand out to the sad celebrants. What struck me in this story and other accounts I’ve read are the tales of his contributions to the local community–playing on the Town Green, inviting locals to attend concerts at the Ramble free of charge, and other kindnesses. He is missed by so many.

In honor of The Band’s creative musical enterprise, here’s a great video clip that combines a studio performance of “King Harvest Has Surely Come” with “Long Black Veil.” The late Richard Manuel sings lead on the first, and the late Rick Danko on the second song. Levon is drumming and harmonizing throughout, with Garth Hudson sweetening the heady sound and Robbie Robertston adding lots of tasty lead licks.

If you haven’t read my posts following Levon’s death over te past week, you may read them here and here.

Finally, it seems right to add a few lyrics from Bob Dylan, famously sung by Levon in “The Weight.”

Crazy chester followed me, and he caught me in the fog.
He said, “i will fix your rack, if you’ll take jack, my dog.”
I said, “wait a minute, chester, you know I’m a peaceful man.”
He said, “that’s okay, boy, won’t you feed him when you can.”

Take a load off fanny, take a load for free;
Take a load off fanny, and (and) (and) you can put the load right on me.

Catch a cannon ball now, t’take me down the line
My bag is sinkin’ low and I do believe it’s time.
To get back to miss fanny, you know she’s the only one.
Who sent me here with her regards for everyone.

Contrasts and Contradictions among Jews in America and Israel

April 28, 2012 /0 Comments/in , /by

At his blog MJ Rosenberg has a powerful analysis on why Israeli government officials have been so determined in their efforts to derail last Sunday’s “60 Minutes piece” on the flight of Palestinian Christians from the country. As I watched the segment with longtime CBS correspondent Bob Simon, it struck me that for decades Israel has benefited from the tourism of evangelicals and patronage from the same politically conservative quarters in Congress. If it were to be established that Christians are faring poorly and fleeing the ‘Holy Land,’ and what’s more, faring poorly and fleeing as a result of Israel’s policies, that close relationship could well become endangered, that is if American Christians were to become exercised about the fate of Christians of semitic, i.e., Arab ethnicity. This explains why the Israeli government protested the segment to CBS so vociferously even before it aired. Rosenberg points out this is also why, once it was clear the segment would air anyway, the umbrella organization of Jewish community federations in the U.S. sent an “emergency email to its affiliates and members” that read in part, “We hope that CBS will be flooded with responses through their inboxes, Facebook, Twitter and mail after the program to express discontent if it is as biased as we anticipate.”

Rosenberg writes, “Ever since the Likud party first came to power in 1977, Israeli propagandists have managed to successfully convince conservative American Christians that their counterparts in the Holy Land are Israelis. . . . But this 60 Minutes story revealed to millions of American viewers (it was the 6th highest rated show last week) that, in fact, their counterparts are Palestinian Christians who are being squeezed out by the Israeli authorities and especially by the whole settlement enterprise which is gobbling up their land, homes, and ability to travel from one town to another.”

Rosenberg concedes the “exodus is not the result of an Israeli policy to specifically target Christians and drive them from the place Christianity began. Rather, it is the result of the oppressive policies toward Palestinians in general—policies that do not distinguish between Palestinian Muslims and Palestinian Christians.” The effect is nonetheless much the same as if it were the result of anti-Christian bias, with the figures telling the tale, cited by him in a parenthetical phrase: “(In 1967 Christians constituted 5% of Jerusalem’s population; Christians today constitute just 1.5%. Bethlehem, not long ago an overwhelmingly Christian city, is now hardly Christian at all.).”

In other news regarding Israel and the American Jewish community from last week, I was pleased to see J.J. Goldberg’s commentary in The Forward, What Stirred Hornet’s Nest?, where he questions the weirdly uniform series of attacks disguised as book reviews of Peter Beinart’s The Crisis of Zionism, an excellent book that I have also blogged about several times in recent weeks. The pushback was overdue, and I’m glad to see it now emerging. The book deserves the widest possible readership, and the numerous ad hominen attacks on Beinart are shameful.

Blogger Philip Weiss also read the Goldberg column and makes a charge of his own in a blog post titled Why did Washington Post and NYT lend themselves to ‘unglued’ ‘angerfest’ directed at Beinart?: “I believe the New York Times and Washington Post‘s eager participation in this rightwing frenzy can be explained by two trends: the large Jewish presence in the establishment, and the rightwing Zionist character of the Jewish establishment. C.f., the Iraq wardrums in the media. Some day, Jewish and American historians will marvel at this.”
[I believe Weiss should have written “Iran wardrums in the media,” but I haven’t seen a correction yet on his blog Mondoweiss.]

There was a third related episode last week, when the chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces, Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz, said, according to the Times, that he believes Iran’s leaders are “rational” and that they will not build a nuclear weapon. This remark was greeted approvingly by Meir Javedanfar, an Iranian-born expert now living in Tel Aviv who with Yossi Melman wrote a book for me in 2006, The Nuclear Sphinx of Tehran, and with whom I am a nowadays a Facebook friend.

The Times reported that “Javendanfar told The Guardian newspaper that Mr. Gantz’s comments were ‘a welcome development’ that ‘takes the hysterics out of Israel’s public assessment of the Iranian nuclear program.’ Well, no sooner did the hysterics gets dialed down a drop than Israeli Defense Ehud Barak the next day gave a public slap to Lt. Gen. Gantz, saying, “The truth must be told: The chance that this level of pressures will make Iran respond to the international demand to halt the program in an irreversible manner—the chance of that appears low.” In the midst of this, another Israeli official seemed to side with Gantz, with Javendafar writing on his Facebook timeline: “Gathering momentum like an avalanche: today another former senior Israeli intelligence official voiced his opposition to an attack against Iran. Yuval Diskin, head of Shin Bet (Israeli FBI) until last year” who,”questioned Netanyahu and Barak’s leadership, saying he has no faith in them. ‘I don’t believe in leadership which makes decisions based upon messianic feelings.'”

Now, Saturday’s Times has picked up Diskin’s comments and reported on themin more depth with additional context. Interestingly, Diskin delivered them at a public forum in Israel, not in a liberal redoubt, but in the geopolitically sensitive town of Kfar Saba, where terrorist incidents have occurred over the past decade. From the Times story:

Echoing Meir Dagan, the former head of the Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, Mr. Diskin also said that the government was “misleading the public” about the likely effectiveness of an aerial strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. “A lot of experts have long been saying that one of the results of an Israeli attack on Iran could be a dramatic acceleration of the Iranian nuclear program,” Mr. Diskin said at a community forum in Kfar Saba, a central Israeli city. “What the Iranians prefer to do today slowly and quietly, they would have the legitimacy to do quickly and in a much shorter time.”

Not limiting his comments to Israel’s foreign relations, the Times points out,

Indeed, Mr. Diskin did not limit his critique to the policy on Iran. He said Israel had in recent years become “more and more racist,” and, invoking the 1995 assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, said there were many extremist Jews today who “would be willing to take up arms against their Jewish brothers.”

The Times asked Javedanfar for his view of Diskin’s remarks, and in an email reply he expanded on his Facebook comments.

“Israel’s citizens would be forgiven for thinking that when it comes to addressing the Iranian nuclear threat, Netanyahu and Barak rely more on their own self-created image as the messiahs than mounting evidence and warnings that such an attack could be counterproductive. The public nature of such warnings by former intelligence officials puts pressure on Netanyahu and Barak,” he added, “because if they attack Iran and it backfires, such warnings could be used against both of them in postwar commissions.”

How to synthesize all this recent news about the American Jewish community, Israel, and the international scene? My takeaway is that in Israel–unlike the U.S.–there is at least some open and candid disagreement among officials and citizens over the country’s correct’s course of action. In the States, American Jews and progressive politicians are subject to attempts by establishment Jewish organizations and right-wing elements to silence people and stifle debate that is unworthy of American democracy. I would add that the split in Israel now seen between defense and intelligence officers on the one hand, and elected leaders on the other is worryingly reminiscent of the debate that prevailed in the U.S. before the Bush administration invaded Iraq in March 2003. As an American, a Jew, a world citizen, I sincerely hope the outcome will be different in this instance, though I’m very concerned it may not be. If you share my hope and concern, please lend a hand by sharing this commentary among your contacts and in your social networks. Also, if you like, the comment field is open below.

 

From the Annals of Republican Chutzpah

April 28, 2012 /0 Comments/in , /by

With the first anniversary of the killing of Osama Bin Laden approaching on May 1-2, the NY Times reports on the emerging right-wing line, that the Obama administration is supposedly “politicizing” the killing of Osama Bin Laden. This might be funny if weren’t so offensive, considering how after 9/11 the Bush administration relentlessly capitalized on raw emotions, national grief, and fear of terrorism to gain political advantage over Democrats. Refresh your memory with this Karl Rove quote from a Washington Post article on January 18, 2002:

“We can go to the country on this issue because they trust the Republican Party to do a better job of protecting and strengthening America’s military might and thereby protecting America,” Karl Rove said at the Republican National Committee meeting here.

That Rove quote was an early indicator of how they would manage the 2002 mid-terms. Or, just recall the staging of the 2004 Repub convention, held right here in New York City, when Mayor Giuliani and other pols fetishized the attacks, even while they were beginning to deny compensation and benefits to Ground Zero recovery workers who were already falling ill from their work on the toxic pile.

Today’s Times story, under the headline, Obama Trumpets Killing of Bin Laden, and Critics Pounce, allows Repub mouthpieces to give ridiculous quotes like the one below, in response to the fact that this week President Obama did an interview with NBC’s Brian Williams in the White House Situation Room, where the president and other administration officials monitored the raid on Osama’s Pakistan compound:

Tony Fratto, a deputy press secretary under Mr. Bush, said that it was “unseemly” to use the room for such a purpose. “I don’t believe it ever would have occurred to us to conduct an interview in the Situation Room,” he said, “and don’t believe we would have considered it appropriate.”

Worse, John McCain also tries to diminish the president:

“The one decision he got right into a pathetic, political act of self-congratulation. Shame on Barack Obama for diminishing the memory of September 11th and the killing of Osama bin Laden by turning it into a cheap political attack ad.”

Let’s be clear about what’s happening here. The Republicans are panicked that their prior political advantage on this issue has been eroded and they’re desperate to minimize what is clearly going to be an advantage for President Obama over Mitt Romney in his re-election bid. The only question is how big an advantage it will be, especially considering Romney’s George W. Bush-like line from April 2007 spoken during the Republican primary campaign of that year, ““it’s not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person.” That line led to criticism from Republican pundit Byron York: “We have already spent billions and gone to a lot of effort to try to get bin Laden … it would be worth still more money and still more effort to kill the man behind 9/11.”

I also find it amusing that the right-wing often claims that Democratic presidents somehow sully or diminish the office. Remember FBI agent Gary Aldrich’s claims about the Clintons supposedly disrespecting the office, or the claims of incoming Bush staffers (later proven untrue) that outgoing Clinton admin officials had sabotaged White House phones and computers during the transition in 2001? This is also the theme to the right-wing recycling of claims this week from the 2008 campaign that  President Obama is merely a celebrity, with a racial subtext tossed in.

The Times story by Peter Baker and Michael D. Shear does far too little to remind readers of Republican conduct in this area, failing to point out the historical hypocrisy that the right-wing is dealing in here. If you feel as I do, please share this commentary widely.