In Sunset Boulevard you couldn’t help but sympathize with Norma Desmond. She made nostalgia, senility and decrepitude slightly pitiable, but also charming.

Gloria Swanson,

The New York Times, its stock value in the cellar while squirming under the thumb of a foreign robber baron, makes the same thing shabby, malodorous and pathetic, especially as recently dramatized by its former senior editor, the embittered Howell Raines, wheezing piteously against his former competition. “Ed Koch once told me he could not have been elected mayor of New York without the boosterism of the New York Post,” writes Raines in his Washington Post piece.

Raines and Blair

Raines implies that boosterism for a New York mayoral candidate is hideously tacky.  A truly world–class paper’s boosterism should be employed (apparently) to help Stalinists set up their killing fields and gulags. To wit: (more…)