Opinion: In today’s pages: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Barack Obama and Wall Street
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Why is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad smiling? Perhaps it’s because the Times’ Op-Ed page gave him a prime chunk of its real estate. In an interview with two top Times editors and Jerusalem Bureau Chief Richard Boudreaux, Amadinejad offered critiques of U.S. foreign policy and President Bush’s motives, called for a referendum by Palestinians to determine their own future, and defended Iranian nuclear research:
Countries that have the atomic bomb themselves are all telling us not to have peaceful nuclear energy. It is one of the biggest jokes of today.
It’s a must-read, even if his jokes aren’t funny. Also on the page, author Stephen Schlesinger, a student of the United Nations, lays out how Bush has relied on the U.N. to advance his foreign-policy goals even as administration officials have belittled the institution. And columnist Jonah Goldberg blasts the media for seeing racism in every criticism of Barack Obama:
Another rich irony is that the only racists who matter in this election are the ones in the Democratic Party. News flash: Republicans aren’t voting for the Democratic nominee because they’re Republicans. A new AP-Yahoo News poll confirms this. It claims that racial prejudice is a significant factor among the independents and Democrats Obama needs to win, specifically among Hillary Clinton’s primary voters.
Over in the editorial stack, the Times editorial board urges Congress not to give the Treasury Department unfettered power to buy distressed Wall Street assets. Noting the U.S. Mint’s plan to issue new versions of the penny, it urges the country to abandon the coin instead and round to the nearest nickel. And it laments the fact that disciplinary hearings will be conducted behind closed doors for 15 LAPD officers singled out for punishment for last year’s May Day police fiasco:
Are they the right officers to punish? Are they being unfairly scapegoated for administrative bungling? Do their actions warrant even stiffer penalties? The public will never know -- because the Police Commission two years ago scrapped the open board of rights hearings that served the city well for more than a quarter of a century.