[img]1|left|Ari Noonan ||no_popup[/img]You would think when liberal commentators wear their last crayon down to the nub, they would take this as a nuanced hint to upgrade the quality of their observations.
But I suspect Howell Raines, fired as editor of The New York Times for turning the once-revered newspaper into a crude, money-losing laughingstock liable to go out of business, aimed a shotgun at his nose the other day. He can’t remember whether he pulled the trigger.
Mr. Raines has written a banshee-sounding essay — http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/11/AR2010 — for this Sunday’s edition of the Washington Post criticizing the top-ranked Fox News Channel.
Even if Fox regularly buries all of its cable opposition, the only objective network in the television universe is a fair target for liberals and other partisans purely because it is No. 1.
But it is startling news when a relatively well-known figure rhetorically leaps from the roof of a tall building onto a midget’s thumbnail by bombing his emotional respectability to smithereens.
Hand Me Your Hand Because It’s Handy
Like many liberals, the extremely vexed Mr. Raines spends his days scratching himself with other people’s fingernails because Fox is the only network in America vaguely critical of the embarrassing Obama administration.
Mr. Haines does not believe a black President should be criticized.
As a result, when he isn’t on street corners, he walks through Washington residential neighborhoods blaring, “Kill the Fox News Channel and all of the people who appear on it.”
By liberal standards, that is known as admirable self-control.
Except for his commendably unassailable grammar, there appears to be little reason to extend a helping pitchfork to a gentleman so ardently determined to enhance his reputation as an intemperate national fool.
He is so darned upset that his fading idol has morphed into the fastest failing President in 220 years, and that he has taken healthcare reform down the chute with him, that he stands on Washington street corners and — you’ve got it — howls. Healthcare reform may recover and pass. However, Mr. Haines’s chances of recovering are worse than President McKinley’s.
Normally such a raving account of life in remote bucolic settings where people constantly chuckle is crafted by persons strapped to beds to narrow their chances for chances for further harming themselves.
Control Was a Bit of a Problem
The 67-year-old Mr. Raines, you may have guessed, was named after his primary talent. Shortly you shall sample a perspiring illustration of this ear-splitting skill.
After a volatile two-year stint at America’s favorite newspaper of record, Mr. Raines, known for his inability to self-discipline, was canned by the Times in 2003 for behaving more like a community organizer than a supervising journalist. He is from Birmingham, but gollleee, Murgatroyd.
Declaring that moderation is for sissies, he was booted because he insisted on converting the Times into a sassy affirmative action advocacy journal where reporters, shockingly were encouraged to violate journalism’s most sacred commandment: Embedding their views within their news stories.
In his latest incarnation, the shaky Mr. Raines adds “raving liar” to his portfolio of ineligibilities.
It is not known whether Mr. Raines is strapped down when he retires at night. But the gentle opening of his Sunday monograph provides favorable clues:
“One question has tugged at my professional conscience throughout the year-long Congressional debate over health-care reform, and it has nothing to do with the public option, portability or medical malpractice. It is this: Why haven't America's old-school news organizations blown the whistle on Roger Ailes, chief of Fox News, for using the network to conduct a propaganda campaign against the Obama administration — a campaign without precedent in our modern political history?
“Through clever use of the Fox News Channel and its cadre of raucous commentators, Ailes has overturned standards of fairness and objectivity that have guided American print and broadcast journalists since World War II. Yet, many members of my profession seem to stand by in silence as Ailes tears up the rulebook that served this country well as we covered the major stories of the past three generations, from the civil rights revolution to Watergate to the Wall Street scandals. This is not a liberal-versus-conservative issue. It is a matter of Fox turning reality on its head with, among other tactics, its endless repetition of its uber-lie: ‘The American people do not want health-care reform’.”
The next sound Mr. Raines should hear is unsmiling gentlemen in white coats telling him a knock-knock joke.
