I suppose if their featherweight media essayist Jimmy (Very) Rainey can pen a lengthy paean to KPFK (90.7), one of the goofiest radical left-wing radio stations in the country, without once characterizing it as liberal, the end of Times may be near.
With the Los Angeles Times, as with God, anything is possible.
Shame on either my lack of coordination or discipline for my latest gaffe. When I was three-quarters of the way through Monday morning’s breakfast, I opened my trusty copy of the Times after perusing the New York Post, the Long Beach Press-Telegram, the Los Angeles Daily News and the South Bay Daily Breeze. At least the order was correct.
Anchoring Page 1 was perhaps the second-most villainized Republican in America by the loopy ideological reporters at 2nd and Spring, John Yoo. Those fairly unbalanced Times journalists only rank Sarah ahead of Mr. Yoo in their daily My God, How Intensely I Hate All Republicans ritual.
Yoo Is the Target. Yoo Is?
Mr. Yoo, you may recall, was one of two legal counsels during the Bush administration who researched, pondered and concluded that waterboarding was appropriate treatment of some crazed Muslim terrorists who are trying to knock America from its moorings.
Being good little liberals, the boys at the Times swear that the Republican-generated War on Terror is gooey hooey, a fake dispute dreamed up by right-wing Americans determined to scare the rest of the country.
One of my favorite liberals at the Times is Carol J. Williams, formerly the newspaper’s Caribbean correspondent, who was brought back to the home office two years ago, parked at a remote desk — closer to Latin America than East Los Angeles — handed the vacant title of Nothing Editor, and told to remain silent until the City Editor whistled for her.
Carol, rusty as you would expect an old model to be after two years of enforced idleness, was assigned to do a hatchet job on Mr. Yoo, a member of the so-liberal faculty at U.C. Berkeley.
Weapons of Destruction, Carol?
Packing two axes in her car trunk — just in case she needed to re-load — Carol set out for the Bay Area, musing to herself about what small pieces she could chop the hated Mr. Yoo into.
When liberal reporters write about conservatives, conducting interviews is window dressing, mere hollow form to impress the green interns back home.
The headline was: “Yoo feels at ease among opposition,” which sounded like a reasonable summation for one who lives on a campus where farther and farther left is called “centrism.”
Carol wrote a story that felt as if she had overdosed on the exotic hooch she may have hijacked during her Caribbean days. She went to Berkeley centrally to sandbag Mr. Yoo, to mock him, to revile him. Generously seeding the fabric of her story with her left-wing opinions, she riddled him paragraph after paragraph in her relentless quest to ridicule. Her objective was to punish him, to demean him, for daring to approve of what she — ever the objective reporter — calls torture.
(It is perfectly appropriate that she holds an opposing view. But journalistic code forbids her from expressing it in a story framed as an objective report. Thanks, kid.)
Every day is Halloween at the Times because prominent news stories are shamelessly bent to the left each morning. Ironically, every quote Carol uses from the impressive Mr. Yoo makes him sound measured, moderate, like a desirable dinner companion, or a popular Christian visitor to your seder table tonight.
At least you can’t accuse Carol of sneakiness. In her opening sentence, she sticks out her tongue at Mr. Yoo with this tasteless swipe:
“In his slate blue suit and Republic-red tie, John Yoo stands out as discordantly formal…”
With Swish in the White House, class once again has gone out of style.
May we conclude that the hue of Mr. Yoo’s necktie matches the shade of Carol’s shady political ideology?
A Smart Guy
Charles Krauthammer is the keenest political commentator in Washington, a refreshing breeze after soiling your hands and your mind reading the Times.
Said Dr. Krauthammer on Sarah Palin campaigning for Sen. John McCain in his tough Republican re-election battle against conservative former Congressman J. D. Hayworth:
“Poetic justice. He created her. She now is in Arizona trying to save him. It's the happy ending to a May-Dec romance — it appeals to the romantic in me.”
