The Daily Dose

The Willard Hotel

David Halberstam, the Pulitzer-winning journalist, has died. Jon Meacham, the managing editor of Newsweek, eulogizes him as "a generous man, always kind to those coming along," while Jack Shafer, the longtime press critic for Slate, recalls the time Johnny Apple, then a rising young reporter at the Times, met Halberstam in 1964: "Halberstam . . . watched him one afternoon 'walking around the city room as if he owned it,' as Timothy Crouse writes in The Boys on the Bus. Apple approached Halberstam's desk and nonchalantly informed him of the nice things the publisher's cousins and a company vice president had had to say about him at a social event the previous evening. Said Halberstam to Apple: 'Fuck off, kid!'"

After interviewing a half-dozen prominent GOP operatives, most of them high-level officials in the Reagan and Bush I and Bush II administrations, Daivd Ignatius "heard the same devastating critique: this White House is isolated and ineffective; the country has stopped listening to President Bush, just as it once tuned out the hapless Jimmy Carter; the president's misplaced sense of personal loyalty is hurting his party and the nation." Some of the quotes are devastating.

In less than 700 words, John Stossel touches on all that is wrong with politicized environmentalism.