338 Comments

Richard M. Nixon and Ross Douthat

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These two political philosophies are not mutually exclusive.

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KUATO LIBEL!!!!!

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Worth repeating.

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There's that time machine, again.

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It's emblematic of projection.

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Yeah, the Grey Lady is somewhat stodgy. Maybe even mummified.

Edited: Had to replace "someone" with "somewhat."

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I had no nuns, my sense of the subjunctive comes from my bad habit of taking a year of some language. But yes, it can sing to me. The worst is when you do it properly and some morans comments as if you were stating a fact.

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With him that's a well-trod path.

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I'm thinking some sort of near death experience, perhaps associated with sniffing glue.

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Stephen Baldwin, Nick Lachey and Patricia Heaton.

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*Wipes tear away*

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I wish I had had you as a mentor.

Well, not if it was to get into Dear Shit for Brains...

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Arthur "Little Pinch" Sulzberger-- the hereditary (fourth generation) publisher and chairman of the board of the NYT-- is why.

Little Pinch, who summers and winters and serves on boards with people like David Koch, and who considers himself awfully top drawer (he's very offended when people assume he's Jewish), is the one who fought for Bush Administration stenographer Judith Miller, cheerleader-in-chief for the Iraq invasion, long after her reputation (and the paper's) had tanked.

He's also clung loyally to the rabid Hillary hater Maureen Dowd, giving her prime real estate on the op-ed page despite the fact that she is now at least several decades past her expiration date, and has been writing the same poisonous little mean-girls column over and over again forever.

He's the one who abruptly fired the rigorous executive editor Jill Abramson and replaced her with Dean Bosquet, just in time for this year's election coverage, which has been stunningly anti-Hillary--not good, skeptical journalism, but pretty much rumor-mongering, and sometimes outright smears from the right-wing hate machine. (The Times is anti-Clinton from the word go: back in the 1990s they turned the front page over to professional Clinton-hater Jeff Gerth, who pursued the ridiculous Whitewater scandal like some kind of ink-stained Captain Ahab and in the process helped to give legitimacy to every right-wing smear coming down the pike.)

To counter any charge of "liberal media bias," Little Pinch has packed the paper with right-leaning, or at any rate right-sympathizing, political reporters like Jennifer Steinhauer and Jonathan Martin.

The New York Times was never the bastion of liberalism it is so often accused of being: that's just right-wing schtick, right-wingers being feverishly certain that any news outlet to the left of the New York Post is part of the international communist conspiracy and must be silenced at once, for Freedom.

In fact the Times has actually always been pretty middle of the road, and at notable moments--during the height of the Cold War, for instance, or at the launch of the so-called War on Terror--it's been pretty disgustingly in bed with administrations of both parties.

But it has had its great moments as a newspaper.

However, under the odious leadership of Little Pinch, the Times--although, God help us, it's still the best newspaper in America--is just plain worse than it's ever been.

And that's why Ross Douthat has a job there, writing things.

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To be fair, Abby Normal was one of the villagers before she died.

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