Going down, coming up: The Economist and Newsweek

The Economist describes Libby's perjury as a "technicality". That regurgitation of Bush propaganda wouldn't mean much if it was an isolated incident, but it's part of a four year pattern. The Economist seems to have been invaded and acquired by Wall Street Journal cast-offs.

I've read about 90% of what the Economist has published over the past twenty years. They are in decline now.

On the other hand, I happened to read Newsweek's Libby/Cheney coverage on an airplane. I've not read Newsweek since I was a child, when it had degenerated into a variant of People magazine. This article was different. It put Libby's behavior into a convincingly romantic context of the 'honorable soldier against the apocalypse, making a kind of sense of a claustrophobic world of fear, loyalty and self-delusion.

The Atlantic is another magazine that's come up in the world. It may well be time for me to swap The Economist for Newsweek and The Atlantic.

PS. Newsweek gets extra credit for being the first Cheney/Libby coverage I've read that recalls Cheney's conviction that Sadaam was about to attack the US with smallpox. It was really smallpox Cheney feared more than a nuclear weapon. It was their conspiracy with Judith Miller to sell the Iraq smallpox threat that was Cheney's great crime. It turned out his "evidence" was delusional.