The nearly mindless, copy-cat obsessiveness of the lightweight left only is exceeded by its genetically driven dishonesty.
Back in the 1990s when The New York Times was in the closing days of its long reign as the English-speaking world’s most prestigious daily, it fibbed with the ease of criminal. The difference was, the newspaper silkily masked its opinions in news stories.
In the second decade of the 21st century, the dethroned dowager of Western world journalism is in tatters, no longer caring about its reputation because it abandoned the fundamental principles of journalistic integrity. Shabby ain’t chic at The Times.
From the GQ of daily newspapers, it has prodigiously declined into a highchair for the hoary hystericals who have come to monopolize the lightweight left. The Times could be the Culver City News or the Piedmont Bugle. Doesn’t matter to them. The financially staggering newspaper has burned its once-thought indestructible sense of sophistication, glamour and class.
The boys at The Times, formerly known as “the gentlemen from The Times,” are down in the dirt with the rest of the yelping low-grade mugs. Their fall has been so steep, swift and predictable that the qualitative distinction between the very left and loud Huffington Post and The New York Times today is indiscernible. They serve up the same batch of bash stories with remarkably similar seasoning and the identical tilts. With the newspaper having hastily sacrificed its previously sacred pristine image, The Times’s boys walk around naked and proud, matching claim-for-claim the most unhinged, unaccountable far left blogs, verification be darned.
Here’s a Bulletin, Boys
Within minutes of the Tucson massacre at 10:10 a.m., the killer was identified and in custody, one of the swiftest turnarounds in the history of star-studded assassinations.
America knew by mid-afternoon that Jared Loughner, the killer, was a mental patient.
But the petty left-wing obsessives at The Times and at the Los Angeles Titanic ignored this tidbit. Instead, they exclusively invested the following seven days in blaming Sarah Palin, who has driven them crazy for almost 900 straight days, and the Republican party.
To summarize in 119 nifty words:
The loopy left’s storyline never wavered all last week: We don’t have proof. But by golly it sure feels as if the right’s rhetoric caused this. Therefore guns should be banned. The right should apologize. Last Thursday, the Titanic’s fruitiest, most Lohan-like girl reporter, Chatty Kathy Hennessey, warned Congressional Republicans that by thunder, they should not try to repeal ObamaCare, ‘cause, well,’cause it’ll destroy the civility we on the left believe is needed until Swish can be safely re-elected 22 months hence. The left also introduced a whole catalogue of just-minted, must-include buzz words the past nine days that bob up in every story, “anger,” “Republican,” “rhetoric,” “civility,” “gun control,” “Tea Party” and of course that all-time Gospel favorite, “Palin.”
Yesterday morning, a scant eight days after the rest of the country learned Loughner’s mental lights had been on dim for years, The Times and the Titanic rushed into print with the stunning news that Loughner was a screwball.
Perilously Playing with Words
The unscrupulous journalistic masseuses on the left have lived for the last 60 years by massaging and manipulating language, and no one does it better.
Some radioactive terms are almost too recent to be considered golden oldies. Remember when the phony “global warming” campaign collapsed, the boys slickly shifted to, clear your throat and roll the drums, “climate change,” switching the subject from “warming” to “change,” the better to span every darned weather condition God can think up.
One more illustration: “Liberals” and the rest of the petty left usually no longer identify themselves as “liberals.” Since they are only liberal if you mechanically agree with them, the term has fallen into deserved disrepute. Now they are “progressives.”
Bai, Bai, Birdie
Fortyish and balding, essayist Matt Bai of The Times has been scuffling hard for years to lift his national profile. In his struggle for attention, he routinely uses incendiary concepts, hoping one will catch lightning. He was one of the first to rush into print the day after the massacre and fault Ms. Palin. Here are two sample paragraphs from his Sunday, Jan. 9 essays:
“In fact, much of the message among Republicans last year, as they sought to exploit the Tea Party phenomenon, centered — like the Tea Party moniker itself — on this imagery of armed revolution. Popular spokespeople like Ms. Palin routinely drop words like “tyranny” and “socialism” when describing the president and his allies, as if blind to the idea that Americans legitimately faced with either enemy would almost certainly take up arms.
“It’s not that such leaders are necessarily trying to incite violence or hysteria; in fact, they’re not. It’s more that they are so caught up in a culture of hyperbole, so amused with their own verbal flourishes and the ensuing applause, that — like the bloggers and TV hosts to which they cater — they seem to lose their hold on the power of words.”
How dishonest is Mr. Bai Bai?
In yesterday’s essay, after dropping a few anti-Palin, anti-right, anti-Republican bombs during the week, he unloaded this subtle but lying punch to the jaw by playing the equivalency card:
“Within hours of the shooting rampage that killed six and critically wounded Representative Gabrielle Giffords, liberals were accusing conservatives of inciting the violence and conservatives were accusing liberals of exploiting the actions of a madman.”
He tried to stand above the fray and blame others for the national incitement he calculatedly helped ignite.
Equivalence is the same sneaky diplomatic game left-wingers have been playing for almost 63 years with the Israeli-Palestinian terrorists conflict. There, too, it is a base lie.
Did both sides accuse, Mr. Bai? No, sir. The left made a charge. The right responded to the charge. That is very different from an “accusation.” As a journalist, sir, you have a responsibility to be honest with your hypothesis before elevating your tone as if the loudest voice were the rightest person.
