TWO FROM THE HOUSTON
CHRONICLE EDITORIAL PAGE

Ah! My hometown newspaper. For the longest time, I've thought of the Chronicle as a rather conservative paper. It's not like the Wall Street Journal or the New York Post, of course, but the Chronicle has been historically a fairly conservative newspaper for a fairly conservative town. I mean, Houston is Bush country, after all. Since early 2003, however, the Chronicle's editorial positions, along with numerous op-ed pieces they've run, have been surprising me on a rather regular basis. Make no mistake: the Chronicle still leans right. But these are strange times. The lunatics in the White House and their legion of supporters on Capitol Hill have been doing a great job of making their ideological brethren with whom they disagree seem positively left wing. Given the absence of any true liberal voices in the mainstream media at the moment, I'm happy to settle for the Chronicle's apparent liberalism.

Check it out. Here's a piece from their editorial board:

DELAY'S DEVILMENT

The deformed spawn of U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, new congressional districts finally enacted by the Republican-controlled Legislature stand as a freakish monument to political megalomania.

And that's before a vote has even been cast in elections that seem likely to send at least a few more DeLay allies, or automatons, to Washington.

The campaigns unfolding across the state make clear that all other considerations are to be sacrificed in an attempt to keep the narrow Republican hold on power in the U.S. House.

Click here for the rest.

And, of course, the Chronicle regularly runs essays by the liberal New York Times columnist and Princeton economist Paul Krugman:

Let's stop pretending that everything's fine in Iraq

Such scenes, which enlarge the ranks of our enemies by making America look both weak and brutal, are inevitable in the guerrilla war President Bush got us into. Osama bin Laden must be smiling.

U.S. news organizations are under constant pressure to report good news from Iraq. In fact, as a Newsweek headline puts it, "It's worse than you think." Attacks on coalition forces are intensifying and getting more effective; no-go zones, which the military prefers to call "insurgent enclaves," are spreading — even in Baghdad. We're losing ground.

And the losses aren't only in Iraq. Al-Qaida has regrouped. The invasion of Iraq, intended to demonstrate American power, has done just the opposite: Nasty regimes around the world feel empowered now that our forces are bogged down. When a New York Times reporter asked Bush about North Korea's ongoing nuclear program, "he opened his palms and shrugged."

Click here for more.

Y'know, I said that Krugman is a liberal, but that's not entirely true. Krugman is pro-free trade (in the corporate globalism sense), which prevents him from boasting of any true left-wing credentials. He's more of a moderate, talking common sense. But from the Bush perspective, he's a commie-terrorist lover, and therefore, a big lib.

Like I said, we live in strange times.

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