Editor and Publisher: Two Interesting Stories

Editor and Publisher focuses on a couple of very interesting pieces today.

One is an editorial from the LA Times which has become the first newspaper to call for Vice President Dick Cheney to step down and out of the Bush Administration. And as a bonus, Rummy is asked to go bye-bye, too.

Second is a piece concerning the Toledo Blade (from Ohio) who has brought us some very good coverage of election mishaps and Coingate (the GOP money laundering scandal tied right to the Republican governor) and an investigation into its coverage of Coingate and the Pulitzer Prize it was nominated for but did not receive.

Read 'em.

Here, btw, is part of the LA Times' editorial today:

IF PRESIDENT BUSH HOPES the "shake-up" of his administration initiated last week will re-energize his listless presidency, he's bound to be disappointed. A far more audacious makeover is needed — one that sends Vice President Dick Cheney into early retirement.

...

Yes, that means dismissing Rumsfeld. The secretary should go not because he has been criticized by a group of retired generals but because he embodies the smugness and inability to acknowledge error that has characterized both the Iraq war and the wider war on terrorism. Rumsfeld has been the pinched public face of an administration that has cut legal and humanitarian corners in dealing with people — including U.S. citizens — suspected of involvement with terrorists.

Suppose Bush didn't stop there. Suppose he also asked Cheney, his mentor and friend but an even more polarizing figure than Rumsfeld, to step down.

We know the objections. The vice president is not a mere presidential appointee but an elected constitutional officer. In choosing a replacement, Bush might be pressured to predetermine the outcome of the 2008 Republican presidential race by anointing one would-be successor over another. Throwing Cheney overboard would be an implicit repudiation of the excessively hawkish foreign policy with which the vice president, even more than Rumsfeld, has been associated.