The Brutal Pessimism of the New York Times
A good deal of masochistic pleasure must be welcomed by the liberal elite in their Manhattan townhouses. How else to explain the otherwise inexplicable popularity of Frank Rich, Maureen Dowd, Paul Krugman, and Bob Herbert, who assure their readers week after week that off all possible worlds, ours is the worst? Here are some samples from the most recent Paul Krugman rant:
President Bush certainly failed his test. After 9/11, all the country really needed from him was a speech. This time it needed action – and he didn’t deliver.But the federal government’s lethal ineptitude wasn’t just a consequence of Mr. Bush’s personal inadequacy; it was a consequence of ideological hostility to the very idea of using government to serve the public good. For 25 years the right has been denigrating the public sector, telling us that government is always the problem, not the solution. Why should we be surprised that when we needed a government solution, it wasn’t forthcoming?
Oh, so now, Katrina is not merely the fault of Bush, but of all small-government conservatives! Sweeping in its ignorance…
Ideological cynicism about government easily morphs into a readiness to treat government spending as a way to reward your friends.
Ummm-hmmm…this little homily is meant to remind us of how Michael Brown came to have his role in the disaster relief hierarchy…but it completely ignores the entire history of political appointees in Washington, which could easily be shown to reach back to the very beginnings of our republic.
No sooner do we recover from the nonsense of Paul Krugman than we are confronted with the vile ravings of Bob Herbert:
“Bush to New Orleans: Drop Dead”
Now, any editor worth his or her salt would have fired Bob Herbert long ago, for his outrageous allegations week after tiresome week, but of course, the Times is under the sway of uber-liberal Gail Collins, so Herbert is safe.
Hospitals with deathly ill patients were left without power, with ventilators that didn’t work, with floodwaters rising on the lower floors and with corpses rotting in the corridors and stairwells. People unable to breathe on their own, or with cancer or heart disease or kidney failure, slipped into comas and sank into their final sleep in front of helpless doctors and relatives. These were Americans in desperate trouble.The president didn’t seem to notice.
Death and the stink of decay were all over the city. Corpses were propped up in wheelchairs and on lawn furniture, or left to decompose on sunbaked sidewalks. Some floated by in water fouled by human feces.
Degenerates roamed the city, shooting at rescue workers, beating and robbing distraught residents and tourists, raping women and girls. The president of the richest, most powerful country in the history of the world didn’t seem to notice.
Viewers could watch diabetics go into insulin shock on national television, and you could see babies with the pale, vacant look of hunger that we’re more used to seeing in dispatches from the third world. You could see their mothers, dirty and hungry themselves, weeping.
Old, critically ill people were left to soil themselves and in some cases die like stray animals on the floor of an airport triage center. For days the president of the United States didn’t seem to notice.
He would have noticed if the majority of these stricken folks had been white and prosperous. But they weren’t. Most were black and poor, and thus, to the George W. Bush administration, still invisible.
This outrageous accusation of extreme racism has no part in American discourse. Either Bob Herbert believes what he says, and thus is proven as a delusionary, paranoid mental case, or he intentionally and deliberately engages in a foul, viscious lie, and thus is shown as a despicable moral degenerate. Either way, he has no business writing editorials for one of the most respected newspapers in the free world.
Prediction: The widely heralded move by the New York Times to move its columnists to subscription only will be a catastrophic failure that will be revoked in a matter of months; nobody but the most fervant Bush-hater would pay to read this excrement.
How can you stand to read that rot? Don’t your eyes burn afterward? The NYT is the media equivalent of using coarse grain sandpaper for toilet tissue.
Well, that’s how noble I am…I sacrifice my own well-being so that my readers don’t have to…
I’m amazed you didn’t have a stroke reading that horse offal. I felt my blood pressure go up ten points just reading the excerpts.
BTW, does the NYT moving their columnists to (I presume) on-line subscription-only status affect their print operations or just the online readers? If it’s the former, then my local birdcage liner (The People’s Republic of Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) will be getting an upgrade, if they haven’t already.
Just the online readers, I think…we shall see…
Well, I hate to be the skunk at the garden party again, but I think Krugman makes a very valid point which you have not refuted. If you shrink government, you will have a state with fewer resources. If you have fewer resources, you are less able to do things like maintain levees and respond to catastrophes. It is a reasonable question to ask whether the philosophy of small government leads to a diminution of the federal government’s effectiveness. This linkage seems self-evident to me. Regardless, Krugman doesn’t blame Kartina on “all small government conservatives” — rather, he blames government “ineptitude” on those with a small government philosophy. I think it is reasonable to ask how big government ought to be, and whether the Bush administration’s shift to smaller government is the right choice. (To be precise: smaller in the sense of shrinking certain parts of the government, which regrettably included funding for coastal maintenance).
MSNBC compared the $105 million which was requested by the Army Corps for New Orleans (of which $40 million was approved) to the $450 million to build bridges to uninhabited islands in Alaska as part of the recent energy bill. I realize that pork has long been part of appropriations bills, but some things are so egregious that they deserve an honored place in the Porker Hall of Fame. I think it is also reasonable to ask whether the (Republican) Congress should be held accountable for passing this bill and whether Bush should be accountable for not vetoing it (or, for that matter, any other bill –appropriations or otherwise — in his term in office).
Regarding Krugman’s mention of Brown as a political appointee: of course there have been political appointees since day one, but that is irrelevant. The President is responsible for those he appoints, whether they are political appointees or not. If you name a political appointee to run FEMA and the appointee fails, then the President is responsible. If you want to name a political appointee as ambassador to the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, then fine — there’s not much downside there. However, if you give a position like FEMA head to an inexperienced person whose sole qualification appears to be having been the college roommate of one of Bush’s friends, then you have made a reckless move which endangers American lives. Whether previous administrations also gave patronage jobs has nothing to do with it.
peter, you’re such a skunk!…just joking, of course. Here we have, I think, one of the fundamental differences between you and I, regarding the following analogy. Larger government:smaller government as efficient government:inefficient government. I grant you that Katrina has highlighted huge problems in federal disaster recovery, but I think the main one is that FEMA perhaps needs to be removed from Homeland Security (as, I think, you yourself suggested in an earlier post). I had a post earlier on an editorial that pointed out, however, that FEMA was never intended to be the first responder, and it is becoming increasingly clear, at least to me, that New Orleans and Louisiana officials must bear the brunt of the blame for their totally inept initial response over the first 48-72 hours.
Well, of course smarter government is better than either larger or smaller. China has a pretty big government, without much to show for it. I used to live in Hong Kong, which (pre-1997) had a fairly large bureaucracy, but it functioned better than any other place I have ever been. Large doesn’t equate to good — but if you “starve the beast” I believe that it requires far more skill than governments generally have to have a state which meets the people’s needs.
The President, in addition to everything else, is something like a CEO. He has a lot of levers (especially with a friendly Congress) to downsize, expand, or organize the government as he (or, in 2009, she) sees fit. It is fair to judge him on the consequences of the decisions which are made.
Regarding who should be blamed: kinda looks like everybody. I liked John Tierney’s column in the Times today about the magic marker thing. However, Louisiana government has been rotten since the days of Huey Long. I expected inadequcy from them. I was hoping for something better from the Feds.
peter, I’m with you there…one thought that keeps going through my mind is, “4 years after 9/11 and this is the best we can do? Where did all that homeland security money go?”…one thing I think both sides can agree on – wherever the blame (and, as you say, there’s plenty to go around) – clearly there were big, lethal problems that need to be worked through…
I think a lot of the answer to “where did homeland security money go” is the formula which allocated funds by state — instead of the bulk of the money going to places with a high likelihood of terrorist or natural catastrophe, it was distributed as a pork barrel project so places like Nebraska and South Dakota received funds which would have been spent more wisely elsewhere –
Interesting question for an intrepid investigative journalist somewhere (if such people still exist)…
How did the state of Louisiana spend its Homeland Security money?
RINOs Without A Hero?
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