In her farewell address this morning outgoing House Majority Leader Nancy (Do I Remind You of Chicago?) Pelosi, the Windy Biddy, reeled off a line that, for nonsense value, should stand for awhile.
“When I called the House to order for the first time, I did so on behalf of America’s children.”
If the Windy Biddy had been elected President of the School Board, this would have been one of the few times in the last four years when The Noise Machine made sense.
Which brings me to this afternoon’s main topic, the fall from the heights of journalism by The New York Times.
Reading the Times last evening, especially Bob Herbert’s barnyard essay, I was achingly jabbed in the ribs as a reminder of how far this once prestigious journal has fallen. For all of the 20th century, it was unchallenged as the finest written newspaper on the planet in the English language, has fallen.
Now it has become a journalistic travesty, as hysterically partisan in its news stories as the stodgy, predictable diatribes by low-grade far left thinkers such as Nick Kristof, Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich, Gail Collins and Mr. Herbert, not to mention the Saturday edition’s black version of a KKK leader, Chuckie M. Blow(hard).
Between Mr. Blow and Mr. Herbert, both on perpetual witch-hunts for victims — Lordy, do we value victims — you would think slaveholding has been reborn as America’s favorite and most profitable industry.
You would think it was against the law for white guys not to own at least one plantation and employ at least a dozen slaves.
You would think Mr. Herbert and Mr. Blow only escaped from their slaveholding masters for the former to write twice a week and for the latter to scratch something in crayon on Saturdays.
His Favorite Target
In a fawning piece on the insufferable Mr. Herbert three years ago, the Washington Monthly magazine captured him:
And then there's Bob Herbert's main focus. He reports on the disadvantaged and disenfranchised of America, about whom he will tell you things you didn't expect. I doubt you knew that “nearly half of full-time private sector workers in the U.S. get no paid sick days. None.”
Mr. Herbert has written, rewritten, and re-rewritten the same delusional line so many times in the last two years, fingering his worn-out worry beads over tax “breaks” for the rich, ignoring the detail that the “rich” pay most of America’s income taxes. Not his beloved “middle class” or his even more beloved “poor.”
Nearly every one of his essays remind me of a bug-eyed man suddenly realizing his is drowning in the surf, and the end is about five seconds away.
He has seen and told the truth so seldom that he still is obliged to call it “Mr.” on the rare occasions he encounters it.
Everything Republican is more disgusting to Mr. Herbert than a combo of Stalin and Hitler if they only were, please God, Siamese twins.
Since he is not funny, not original, not insightful, not measured, screaming about how poorly deadbeats are treated seems to be his lone remaining refuge.
How he wailed when it looked as if those who had been drawing unemployment checks for a mere 99 weeks were going to be denied an extra 13 months to peel couch potatoes.
Mr. Herbert’s closing line yesterday will do as today’s epitaph:
“The Republicans are back in control of the House, ready to run interference for the rich as recklessly and belligerently as ever.”
This is a point he hammered at us readers about 11 different times, thinking, I presume, we were all slow and shallow as his beloved liberals.
