How much do you really know about her?

Sometimes the best examples of the New York Times’s increasingly delusional, anti-rational, anti-American and, let’s face it, anti-human-nature mindset are to be found not on the front page, where their slavish adoration of the Obama Administration continues apace, if somewhat diminished, but in the feature pages. There, their crackpot social theories and their chic cultural Marxism are given free rein to inject their slow-acting poison into the bloodstream of the body politic, with what serious consequences we can now all see after more than four decades of this nonsense. Which is why this piece, innocuously published in the Fashion & Style section, is so important.

If you want to encounter the smiling face of evil, read on:

A Best Friend? You Must Be Kidding

After all, from Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn to Harry Potter and Ron Weasley, the childhood “best friend” has long been romanticized in literature and pop culture — not to mention in the sentimental memories of countless adults.

But increasingly, some educators and other professionals who work with children are asking a question that might surprise their parents: Should a child really have a best friend?

You read that right: the Times has just declared war on best friends. By now, nothing  that emerges from that seething pile of maleficent animosity toward every decent thing should surprise us, but this is a new low, even for the paper that publishes Frank Rich. And it gets worse: (more…)

Sandra Soto, PhD, is a professor of “gender and women’s studies” at the University of Arizona and, naturally, she couldn’t resist getting in her little gender-and-women’s-studies professorial dig at the Arizona immigration law. Hey, we’re all lefty bedfellows here, right?

Wrong:

Oops.

As everyone knows – everyone, that is, excepting those sophisticates who revere The New York Times – the former “paper of record” routinely plays fast and loose with news that bears on its ideological agenda, both by how (and whether) such stories are reported and, more subtly, by the emphasis they’re given (or not given) by their placement in the paper. Thus it was, for instance, most infamously, that Abu Grahaib was on the paper’s front page for an astonishing 32 straight days; while The Times somehow managed to report on Barack Obama’s dropping a certain Reverend Jeremiah Wright from the ceremony announcing his candidacy for the presidency without getting into the ugly details of precisely what it was that made his self-identified mentor so embarrassing. And, by the way, even then, burying the story on page 19.  The Wright story was there for the taking – he’d already been quoted in all his inflammatory viciousness by Rolling Stone – but, given The Times’s outsized influence with the lemmings of the mainstream media, the practical effect of its indulgent coverage was to bury for a full year the story that would  have surely derailed the freshman senator’s candidacy before it got started.

Then, again, sometimes ideologically difficult stories never get run at all. Which brings us to the curious case of Eric Massa, the upstate New York Democratic congressman who’s just resigned in the face of an ethics investigation for having allegedly harassed an aide. Last Thursday, the Times covered the story the same way as everyone else – okay, they stuck it on page 28, and they didn’t specify the aide was male, (except via a single reference to the aide as “him”), the same way males and females are interchangeable in their wedding announcements, but that sort of lunatic p.c. is pro forma. So, for that matter, was that Massa’s resignation seemed as much a concern for Timesmen David Halbfinger and Raymond Hernandez as for “blindsided Democratic leaders in Washington, who are already facing a brutal political climate as they try to defend the party’s majority in the midterm elections in November.”

Nor was the paper’s Saturday follow-up story on Massa’s mea culpa – “there is no doubt that this ethics issue is my fault and mine alone” –  problematic. Indeed, for Times readers that seemed the end of the story. As usual, they dwell in smug ignorance. (more…)

As dogged New York Times readers know, the paper’s staggering capacity for hypocrisy is on all-too regular display. But there was an especially noteworthy example in a Feb. 18 story, published in the sports section under the heading “College Basketball.” Datelined Durham, N.C., the AP dispatch begins:

The woman who falsely accused three Duke lacrosse players of rape nearly four years ago has been charged with attempted murder, arson and other counts after a fight with her boyfriend, the police said.

That the accusations against the Duke lacrosse players were false and malicious is, of course, common knowledge. Indeed, everyone now knows the rape charge was utterly baseless from the get-go; and, more that they were victims not just of the accuser, Crystal Mangum, but of a vast cabal of left-wing Duke professors who pronounced them guilty based on zero evidence; and of a politically driven prosecutor whose contempt for the legal niceties was so glaringly apparent that he ended up doing time himself. Oh, and of a malicious and biased press irresistibly drawn to a ludicrous tale of the sexual ravaging of a poor black girl at the hands of rich, white, preppy male athletes precisely because it confirmed every hackneyed liberal cliché of race hatred and class exploitation that informs their provincial worldview. (more…)

In his New York Times blog, “The Caucus,” Jeff Zeleny takes a look at the Political Fallout From the Supreme Court Ruling and dishes up a bowl of thin gruel for his mostly anguished readers.  Remember Mirror, Mirror, the bearded Spock episode in the original Star Trek, the one about an alternative reality where your evil twin Skippy exists in a separate, malevolent universe?

Well, really, that’s what it’s like to scroll through Jeff’s story and especially the readers’ comments.  Here’s how he starts:

Even before their Massachusetts victory this week, Republicans already enjoyed a multitude of advantages in this year’s midterm elections. The Supreme Court has likely just delivered one more: money. Today’s ruling upends the nation’s campaign finance laws, allowing corporations and labor unions to spend freely on behalf of political candidates…

Am I remembering it wrong, or didn’t Democrats rake in tons of corporate dough themselves last time around?  And, not to belabor the Star Trek metaphor, in what parallel or non-parallel universe have labor unions ever spent freely on behalf of Republicans? (more…)

H4Y7XVAZ5KPJAs all sentient readers (and innumerable ex-readers) of The New York Times know, but executive editor Bill Keller seemingly does not, among the things that make the paper so relentlessly irritating is that its left/liberal assumptions are pervasive and inescapable. As my first Diary entry noted, even turning to the food or fashion section one can never be sure of finding refuge from a gratuitous, nasty aside about Sarah Palin, or a bit of offhand rah-rahing for Obamacare, or the conviction that those twin monsters, diversity and multiculturalism, are unquestioned goods.

The sports section is, of course, especially egregious in pushing the paper’s social agenda, enthusiastically embracing the victim mentality in its every twisted guise on the court or diamond or gridiron. Most memorably, there was former Executive Editor Howell Raines’s feminist-inspired jihad against Augusta National and, even more notoriously, the paper’s shameless crusade against the Duke lacrosse players falsely accused of rape. (more…)

Back in September, after the Giles-O’Keefe ACORN reveal had blown through the alternative media with Katrina-strength winds, the New York Times‘ public editor, Clark Hoyt (Mr. Collins to the Gray Lady’s Lady Catherine de Bourgh), wondered if just maybe the paper had tuned in a bit late to the story.  Managing editor for news Jill Abramson joined him in the public fret-fest, conceding the Times was “slow off the mark,” blaming “insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio.” Hoyt then disclosed that Abramson and executive editor Bill Keller “would now assign an editor to monitor opinion media and brief them frequently on bubbling controversies.”

“Clueless Clark”

Who was this individual assigned by the Times to give them a window on the alien universe of Fox, talk radio and the conservative blogosphere? Keller – the Times‘ transparency and all that — announced he/she would remain anonymous, since he wanted to spare “X” “a bombardment of e-mails and excoriation in the blogosphere.”

Oh, and here’s how Hoyt concluded his column:  “Despite what the critics think, Abramson said the problem was not liberal bias.”

And they say the Times has no comics section! (more…)