Putin's playing this to the hilt, and Bush's followers are sucking it down. Here's W's opportunity to reward Vlad for his undying support.
By the way, I don't see any MY quote in Reynold's post.
It's the last link in the post (currently).
Oh, right. Sorry, my eyes started to burn from all the lying before I got there.
I think you're overreacting in these individual cases, ogged. the NYT was just going for a spectacular shot. And it is spectacular. Meanwhile Reynold's "selective quotation" was a full sentence that linked to the original article.
On the larger topic, I have mixed feelings about the appropriateness of politicing off of a masacre. Those who use it as occassion for the same old bullshit ("this shows why vouchers are so important...") certainly purchase their one-way ticket to eighth circle of the inferno. But one can imagine that a person might feel compelled to speak if he finds his cause directly involved. I recall reading a article by a prison reform where the author invoked the case of the Byrd killing in Texas. His/her point: the loathesome killers basically got free classes in White Supremacy during their time in prison. That struck me as appropriate reference to a horrendous event that otherwise one wouldn't want to politicize. Here, I think what's more horrific is the *speed* at which people are rushing in to turn this story into the latest talking points.
Agreed on the larger point, but Reynolds quoted one sentence from a paragraph that says something quite different from what the quote (and gloss) would lead one to believe.
It's a spectacular picture, but why crop and magnify it? Why that one?
F*** them, if that's how they want to play:
The people who did this thing are indeed what we should be fighting. But our military is otherwise occupied, fighting a completely unrelated war in Iraq.
I don't understand how InstaPundit is so popular -- he just seems to get it wrong a lot of the time. Of course, if I actually followed most of the links from Atrios, it might begin to appear to me that he gets it wrong most of the time, too. BUT I don't think both sides are "just as bad," despite our natural human longing for symmetry. Maybe they are, but it just feels unlikely.