The Times is Out of Joint
I’m beginning to have second thoughts about my forty-year allegiance to the New York Times.
Two weeks ago I complained about their headline writers, one of whom managed to make it sound as if stem-cell research causes cancer, thus handing a bludgeon to every right-wing religious charlatan trying to replace science with superstition.
Next, they switched to some cheap, generic newsprint stock that curls at the corners of pages – a sure sign of editorial incontinence.
Then they hired a new Op-Ed columnist — William Kristol, an unreconstructed neo-con who has learned absolutely nothing from his unbroken, seven-year string of disastrous mistakes staunchly supporting Bush and the Iraq war and lately howling for war against Iran.
And today the Times runs an editorial praising Michael Mukasey for appointing an utterly dependent prosecutor – a Justice Department employee — to investigate destruction of the CIA waterboarding tapes. The Justice Department was a party to that decision – and the decision to torture in the first place – as was the White House. So now the Department will investigate itself and its bosses.
Guess whom the fox will finger in that henhouse.
They’ll indict a second assistant deputy administrative aide in the Misfiling Department and the apprentice electronics technician in charge of changing videocam batteries in the waterboarding chamber – those heinous violators of all the irreproachable commands issued by eminently blameless higher-ups.
I expect that the New York Times will then have to investigate itself to discover that hiring Kristol and publishing a hypocritical editorial were exactly what god had in mind for great newspapers.
If it weren’t for the Times crossword puzzles, I’d go back to my home town’s Kittanning Daily Leader Times, where they can’t afford Paul Krugman or Frank Rich, but they can unfailingly smell a rat.
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Ditch your subscription to the Punch and Pinch Gazette, buy a crossword puzzle book and enjoy the Kittanning DLT with your morning espresso. Someday, you will thank me for this advice.
Comment by John DePaul — January 4, 2008 @ 9:59 am
My calendar says this is someday; I thank you. To you faithful readers of the New York Post, the National Review, and the Washington Times, many of us owe the ecstatic realization, “There but for the grace of FDR go I.” And may I remind you, John, it was FDR who took us into the just and justified war which gave you the material for your two fine books. As an author, you are destined to search your soul until it comes up Obama.
Comment by Al — January 4, 2008 @ 10:57 am