WorldNetDaily: Newsweek clams up on U.S. flag in trash

Worse than that, Newsweek will not explain why they published a gratuitously critical report in the Japanese and international editions but not in the USA edition.

To recap for you: in the week of February 2, 2005, Newsweek produced three different editions with three different covers. The Japanese cover featured an American flag stuffed in a trash can, its staff broken. The cover legend translates as:

The Day America Died: With Bush Remaining in Office, the Ideal of "Freedom" is Dashed to the Ground.

The international edition was not much kinder: with a picture of Bush on the cover, it asked, "America Leads...But Is Anyone Following?" Both those editions carried a report alleging that the rest of the world was rejecting America all around.

And in that same week, the USA edition featured three Oscar-nominated actors on the cover and bore the legend "Oscar Confidential." The critical report did not appear. I assume that what appeared instead was a lot of pap about the Academy Awards. (I have already said that the Academy Awards ceased to be worth having a long time ago, with very rare exceptions.)

Here is the article by one Andrew Moravcsik, which appeared in the Japanese and international editions and not in the USA edition. Moravcsik essentially says that America, ever guilty of swindling the world by selling a false vision of freedom, now has gone crazy and actually believes its own swindle. I won't bother excerpting from the article here. Read it for yourselves, if you want to see what could almost pass for a John Kerry full-page ad in The International Herald-Tribune. Indeed, the un-worthies at MoveOn.org could have written it, except that Moravcsik uses better English, no obscenities or other vulgarisms, and, most cagily, no outright threats or solicitations of murder. He does, however, employ lies, half-truths, and puerile name-calling of the type I used to read in The Yale Daily News.

So why didn't Newsweek dare publish this in the United States? What are they, chicken? Bwoooock, bwock bwock bwock bwock bwock bwock bwock bwock bwock bwock!

Come out, Newsweek, wherever you are! Put up your journalistic dukes and fight! Or shall the rest of us add cowards to your other accolades?