The New York Times Takes Kristol Meth

The bad just got worse

©Bryan Zepp Jamieson
http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/VRWC/kristol.htm
1/1/08

On the last day of a bad year, the New York Times decided to get up on its hind legs and pretend it was a bastion of journalistic freedom and ethics. It ran an editorial called “Looking at America,” and it contained a clarion call for “the Constitution, the rule of law and human decency.” The Times thundered sternly about how Putsch “squandered America’s position of moral and political leadership, swept aside international institutions and treaties, sullied America’s global image, and trampled on the constitutional pillars.” The Times thundered about the often-disgraceful behavior of troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, the national humiliation of Gitmo and a gulag of “interrogation camps” spread across Asia and Europe under some of the scummiest regimes to be found on the face of the earth. Finally, blaming the American people for all this, it expressed the mild hope that they might choose better in the next election.

This is the same New York Times that was one of the Putsch junta’s greatest enablers from 2000 onward. They blamed the horror of 9/11 for the subsequent actions of the administration (and the subtext was that they blamed 9/11 for their own inability to resist it), but the fact is these dirtbags in the GOP were planning what amounted to a fascist takeover of the US years before 9/11. Indeed, 9/11 was so convenient for the Putsch junta’s aims that millions of people believe that the Putsch junta let 9/11 happen, or were even involved in planning it.

The New York Times, which spent 2000 repeating every smear and mockery from the far right about Al Gore while ignoring the obvious fact that George W. Bush was a moron unfit to pump gas let alone lead the country, likes to pretend that they were forced to tone down their non-existent attacks on the administration, lest anyone think they favored the terrorists.

This is the New York Times that, rather than rock the boat, reluctantly printed the results of the NORC Survey, which showed that by every legitimate and legal state-wide recount method used, Al Gore won Florida in 2000. However, they posted it under the headline, “Survey shows Bush won Florida.” They based this on the fact that had Gore prevailed in limiting the recount to just the four counties (which the Florida Supreme Court struck down as a violation of the “one man one vote” principle) he would have lost.

There’s a technical term for a newspaper that is honest 99.99999% of the time. That term is “Worthless.” At that point, the Times in my estimation became a reliable source for sports scores, and home to some of America’s finest columnists, and that was the sum total of its value.

This is the same New York Times that let Judith Miller act as a shill for the administration, and cheer-lead the country into a bloody, pointless invasion and occupation of a nation that offered America no harm, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars. Miller was a paid liar, whoring for the administration, and the Times let her do it. She wound up in jail for a while for declining to reveal her sources, and none of the civil libertarians who normally would spring to a reporter’s aid in such a case did, because normally a reporter might be attacked for defending the public right to know against the government, and this representative of the New York Times was defending the government against the public right to know.

So when I read this high sounding coda to a tawdry year in the New York Times, I didn’t feel inspired, or proud of the Constitution, or that the New York Times was doing its job.

I just wondered where these pathetic, smarmy bastards got off thinking they could suddenly become a real newspaper again. After all these years acting as toadies to Putsch and the vile people behind him, the Times has a lot of nerve trying to blame the American people for the fact that Putsch has been a massive fuckup and a national humiliation of epic proportions.

All that happened BEFORE I learned that the New York Times had just hired William Kristol as a weekly columnist.

Now Kristol, an ideologue and a cultist who bases much of his philosophy on contempt and hatred for most Americans, chortled that people’s heads would explode at the news that he had been hired by the Times. The pretense, of course, is that people supposedly can’t handle any opposing points of view, which is Kristolese for “my brand of bullshit.” Oddly enough, David Broder and Thomas Friedmann also applauded the war, but they didn’t evoke the widespread feeling of disgust that Kristol has.

Kristol has been pushing since the 1990s for the invasion of Iraq and the formation of a “New American Empire.” A founding member of PNAC, he has fought to make journalism a tool of his own ideology for almost twenty years, as did his father, Irving Kristol, before him.

The main problem with Kristol isn’t that he’s an ideologue. The problem is that he has the journalistic and personal ethics of a public toilet.

Perhaps his most notorious caper was praising the second Inaugural speech by Putsch – while neglecting to mention that he wrote much of that speech. Among other patently false claims he has made recently are that neither Hillary nor Obama ever got any legislation passed in the Senate, that Democrats renounce the use of force under all conditions, including invasion, and that it was OK for Scooter Libby to obstruct justice, but that Bill Clinton deserved impeachment for the same thing.

If Judith Miller was derelict in lying the country into war, Kristol was beyond shameless. Days after 9/11, he was loudly blaming Saddam for it. Without a shred of evidence, of course, since in fact Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11, and even offered help and sympathy to the Americans in the days following. He often claimed it was “inevitable” Saddam would have nuclear weapons and would use them on America, even after UN inspectors concluded there was no nuclear weapons activity of any sort in Iraq. Kristol simply lied to support his ideology. He even blamed Saddam for the anthrax mailings to prominent Democrats and liberals 2002, even though by doing so, he was in the ludicrous position of claiming that Saddam was attacking the people Kristol assured everyone were his allies while leaving his real foes in the GOP and the right wing media alone.

During the Paula Jones scandal, which he did everything in his power to promote, Kristol publically berated feminists – a group he had previously shown no love for – for failing to come to Jones’ aid when she filed her ludicrous sexual harrassment suit against Bill Clinton, while at the same time he privately chortled to his then-employers in the GOP “this development will no doubt further damage the president's already fragile moral standing.”

No word on what Kristol thinks of Putsch’s fragile moral standing. Or the fragile moral standing of the New York Times. Or his own. Did they, too, “squander America’s position of moral and political leadership”?

The New York Times outdid itself this week, first by berating the public for supporting a man for which it prostituted itself for years, and then by hiring one of the most poisonous and dishonest ideologues to be found in American public life.

And then the Times can’t figure out why its sales keep slipping.