December 28, 2005
The New York Times vs. America
By Michelle
Malkin
2005 was
a banner year for the nation's Idiotarian newspaper of record,
The New York Times.
What's "Idiotarian"?
Popular warblogger Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs (littlegreenfootballs.com)
and Pajamas Media (pajamasmedia.com) coined the useful term to
describe stubborn blame-America ideologues hopelessly stuck in
a pre-September 11 mindset. The Times crusaded tirelessly
this year for the cut-and-run, troop-undermining, Bush-bashing,
reality-denying cause. Let's review:
On July
6, Army reserve officer Phillip Carter authored a freelance op-ed
for the Times calling on President Bush to promote military
recruitment efforts. The next day, the paper was forced to admit
that one of its editors had inserted misleading language into
the piece against Carter's wishes. The "correction":
"The
Op-Ed page in some copies yesterday carried an incorrect version
of an article about military recruitment. The writer, an Army
reserve officer, did not say, 'Imagine my surprise the other
day when I received orders to report to Fort Campbell, Ky.,
next Sunday,' nor did he characterize his recent call-up to
active duty as the precursor to a 'surprise tour of Iraq.' That
language was added by an editor and was to have been removed
before the article was published. Because of a production error,
it was not. The Times regrets the error."
Carter told
Times ombudsman Byron Calame: "Those were not words
I would have said. It left the impression that I was conscripted"
when, in fact, Carter volunteered for active duty.
Funny how
the "production errors" of the Times' truth
doctors always put the Bush administration and the war in the
worst light.
Not content
to meddle with the words of a living soldier, the Times
published a disgraceful distortion of a fallen soldier's last
words on Oct. 26. As reported in this column and in the news pages
of the New York Post, Times reporter James Dao
unapologetically abused the late Corporal Jeffrey B. Starr, whose
letter to his girlfriend in case of death in Iraq was selectively
edited to convey a bogus sense of "fatalism" for a massive
piece marking the anti-war movement's "2,000 dead in Iraq"
campaign. The Times added insult to injury by ignoring
President Bush's tribute to Starr on Nov. 30 during his Naval
Academy speech defending the war in Iraq.
After Starr
died, Bush said, "a letter was found on his laptop computer.
Here's what he wrote. He said, '[I]f you're reading this, then
I've died in Iraq. I don't regret going. Everybody dies, but few
get to do it for something as important as freedom. It may seem
confusing why we're in Iraq; it's not to me. I'm here helping
these people so they can live the way we live, not to have to
worry about tyrants or vicious dictators. Others have died for
my freedom; now this is my mark.'"
Stirring
words deemed unfit to print by the Times.
The Times
did find space to print the year's most insipid op-ed piece by
paranoid Harvard student Fatina Abdrabboh, who praised Al Gore
for overcoming America's allegedly rampant anti-Muslim bias by
picking up her car keys, which she dropped while running on a
gym treadmill:
"
. . . Mr. Gore's act represented all that I yearned for -- acceptance
and acknowledgment. . . . I left the gym with a renewed sense
of spirit, reassured that I belong to America and that America
belongs to me."
I kid you
not.
In June,
Debra Burlingame, sister of Charles F. "Chic" Burlingame
III, pilot of downed American Airlines Flight 77, blew the whistle
on plans by civil liberties zealots to turn Ground Zero in New
York into a Blame America monument. On July 29, the Times
editorial page, stocked with liberals who snort and stamp whenever
their patriotism is questioned, slammed Burlingame and her supporters
at Take Back the Memorial as "un-American" -- for exercising
their free speech rights.
Yes, "un-American."
This from a newspaper that smeared female interrogators at Guantanamo
Bay as "sex workers," sympathetically portrayed military
deserters as "un-volunteers," apologized for terror
suspects and illegal aliens at every turn, enabled the Bush Derangement
Syndrome-driven crusade of the lying Joe Wilson, and recklessly
endangered national security by publishing illegally obtained
information about classified counterterrorism programs.
So, which
side is The New York Times on? Let 2005 go down as the
year the Gray Lady wrapped herself permanently in a White Flag.
Copyright
2005 Creators Syndicate
