Allan Uthman: 'The Paper of Wreckage'

NYT reporters caught red-handed reporting

Allan Uthman, Buffalo Beast

Forget North Korea. Iran can wait. America faces a much more clever and
powerful enemy: the elitofascists at the New York Times. If you listen to
the insistent, unavoidable blabber of right-wing opinion, the Gray Lady is a
commie terrorist, doing whatever she can to help the Jihadists destroy
America.

Radio talker Melanie Morgan said that if the New York Times' executive
editor were tired and convicted for the article, she "would have no problem
with him being sent to the gas chamber." These sentiments were more or less
echoed by Michelle Malkin, Cal Thomas, Bill Kristol, and the usual gang of
idiots, including a few congressmen and the White House itself. The charges
are the usual bullshit: treason, sedition, espionage. The one thing these
various accusers have in common, besides an abiding devotion to the Bush
administration, is that they all have a troubled relationship with the first
amendment, and have now grown to despise it.

The Times is certainly far from perfect. It has had its share of
embarrassingly false reportage. It promotes the gleefully dumb opinions of
respected buffoons like Tom Friedman and David Brooks. Even worse are its
sins of omission, like their near-total blackout on our international status
as a rogue criminal, or any serious coverage of election fraud.

But that really is beside the point here. This mob assault is the same thing
that happened to Newsweek last year. It's about intimidation, about keeping
a lid on things. When Abu Ghraib broke, they focused their outrage on the
people who leaked the pictures. When the NSA domestic spying campaign went
public, it was the press they attacked. Whenever any story breaks that makes
the White House look bad, they see it either as anti-Bush propaganda, or as
an act of sedition designed to weaken national security, or both.

What doesn't seem to bother them too much, though, is when the press lies. I
didn't notice much scathing rhetoric from the right when it became clear
that both the New York Times and the Washington Post had penned a string of
false stories about WMD in Iraq. And none of them seemed to mind being lied
to about the circumstances surrounding the death of Pat Tillman or the
rescue of Jessica Lynch--although they certainly directed anger at the
reporters who so cruelly relieved them of those feel-good hoaxes.

But now these people are so used to hating the press and in particular the
Times that they're not even making sense anymore. As with the still-recent
bashing the Times underwent following its revelation the NSA's warrantless
surveillance program, there is no way that anything damaging was revealed to
al Qaeda (terrorists don't care if you obtain a warrant before listening to
them).

The animosity directed at the Times for its report on efforts to track
terrorist money isn't just hyperbolic, it's completely baseless. The notion
that Al Qaeda didn't already know about it is idiotic, especially
considering that Bush has been bragging about it for years, and the Belgian
SWIFT database, which helps track terrorist financiers, promotes that fact
on their website. The same story was also "exposed" by the Wall Street
Journal and the L.A. Times, to no ill effect (although the WSJ managed, in a
single inexplicable editorial, to defend their printing the story while
attacking the Times for theirs). In a normal world, these facts would have
shut everybody up within a couple of days. But facts like these just bounce
off the skulls of Bush loyalists, and they keep right on repeating the
charges which have just been refuted so effectively, still insisting that
vital secrets have been revealed to the enemy, as if they can simply will it
to be true.

And in a sense they can, because it has the cumulative effect of inoculating
followers against further information. People will actually say,
straight-faced, that you can't believe what you read in the New York Times,
while espousing devotion to the largely fictional content of magazines like
the Weekly Standard or the American Spectator. Right wingers have
successfully politicized the act of reporting. They've made informing the
public into an act of disloyalty. Works out great for the White House, but
not so much for the rest of us.

Take David Horowitz. Horowitz is head ape at the Scaife-funded
FrontPageMag.com, an online magazine that specializes in accusing
left-wingers--mostly journalists and university professors--of treason.
Always quick to attack media reports which inform us of our own government's
activities as deliberate attempts to inform "our enemies," FrontPageMag
needs no more proof against its opponents than that they disseminate
information that doesn't please the editors of FrontPageMag. Their rhetoric
is so reminiscent of similar Nazi accusations of the press and intellectuals
in general that it is nearly impossible not to notice.

Horowitz is also in hysterics over an article in the New York Times, but it
isn't about tracking financial transactions. The new big threat to our
national security in the Times, he says, is a piece in the travel section
about Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld's vacation homes in St. Michaels,
Maryland.

Rumsfeld's office gave permission for the photos of his home that accompany
the article. Even the Secret Service told the American Prospect that the
Times article "is not a security threat." But Horowitz and his insane clown
posse know better. Horowitz called the article an "apparent retaliation for
criticism of its disclosure of classified intelligence to America's
enemies." Again, this is about a fluff piece in the travel section.

"Make no mistake about it, there is a war going on in this country. The
aggressors in this war are Democrats, liberals and leftists," Horowitz
wrote. The "initiators" in Horowitz' war are Al Gore and Jimmy Carter.

Horowitz' fellow FrontPage contributor Rocco DiPippo, at his blog, took it
from there, issuing "a call to the blogosphere to begin finding and publicly
listing the addresses of all New York Times reporters and editors."

Naturally, slavering readers did just that, and DiPippo vomited forth the
locations of Times editor Arthur O. Sulzberger and Linda J. Spillers, the
photographer that took pictures of Rumsfeld's place for the article.

When, inevitably, a liberal blogger responded to DiPippo's "campaign to hold
the New York Times's staff accountable for its treasonous and irresponsible
actions in this time of war" by publishing his personal information (337
Water Street, Warren, RI, 02885; 401-569-6245), he commented that he
"expect[s] this sort of behavior"--precisely the behavior he engaged
in--"from the lunatic Left."

Horowitz and his fellow FrontPage fascists are some of the worst scumbags to
befoul politics today. Their appeals to nationalist loyalty and bullying
attacks on dissenters are truly un-American, and I mean it when I say that
I'll gladly publish his home address, phone number and cell phone
coordinates if anyone can provide me with them. I want him to know what it's
like to be targeted and intimidated. I want him to piss his pants with fear
every time he walks from his house to his car. Maybe then he would gain a
little perspective; maybe he'd see what's wrong with his little pogrom
against freedom of the press. Probably not, but either way I'd like to see
it.

But these people are not alone. There are a lot of them, crying out with
unnerving bloodlust for journalists to be punished, and severely, for daring
to question the almighty leader. Most reasonable people don't want to deal
with them, of course. But they need to be engaged and shouted down, because
the quieter and more timid we are, the louder and stronger they will get.

The New York Times is just a symbol to these people: a symbol of their
ultimate enemy, the free press. It's just too dangerous to tolerate "in this
time of war," so it'll just have to go. Where have I heard this before?
Democracy depends on a free, independent press--it is absolutely essential
to maintaining a free country. And the conservatives are, putting it mildly,
against the idea.

Horowitz is right; there is a war going on in this country. A war between
people who actually believe in freedom, and people who would have their own
countrymen jailed or killed for violating their precious ignorance. And the
way things look today, with a mainstream bore like the New York Times on the
chopping block, I'm not feeling very confident about winning.

Copyright 2006, The Beast.

Source: Buffalo Beast
http://buffalobeast.com/103/PaperofWreckage.htm

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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson