Good Writing, Part II

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I am happy to see that the Kansas City Star still uses articles from reporters who know how to write well. Please see the article below, and then my comments. You may or may not agree with the thoughts in the article; we are looking at writing here.

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Durbin calls Cheney 'delusional'
By Margaret Talev
McClatchy Newspapers [Owners of the KC Star]


WASHINGTON - Vice President Dick Cheney is "delusional" about what's happening in Iraq, the Democrats' top Senate vote-counter said Thursday.

That harsh assessment by Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., two days after President Bush sought bipartisan comity in his State of the Union address, underscores how difficult achieving that may be.

Moreover, it illuminates how many in Congress especially blame Cheney for the president's insistence on building up troop levels in Iraq rather than pulling out of the sectarian violence there after nearly four years and redeploying troops to Afghanistan and other terrorist trouble spots.

During the Senate Democratic leadership team's weekly briefing with reporters, Durbin cited a television interview from a day earlier in which Cheney told CNN "there's been a lot of success" in Iraq and rejected the idea that the situation was beyond control.

"To have Vice President Cheney suggest that we have had a series of enormous successes in Iraq is delusional," Durbin said. "I don't understand how he can continue to say those things while the president calls them 'slow failure'."

That's the term President Bush used in a separate television interview earlier this month, saying that's where the situation would be headed unless another 21,500 troops were injected.
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Margaret Talev

Margaret Talev works in the Washington DC bureau of McClatchy, which is the second largest owners of newspapers in the country. She has worked for The Sacramento Bee, the Los Angeles Times and The Tampa Tribune.

I think it was well written, and it tells what happened – not what should be, or what could be, but what happened and what is.

That is the same lesson the Star taught to a young cub reporter in the winter of 1917-1918. He wanted either to enlist in the Army for World War I, or to learn to write. His father let him go to the Star instead of to Europe. His name was Ernest Hemingway, and they taught him well.

http://www.ernest.hemingway.com/reporter.htm

What do you think?