The Times Peers Down at the World
(12/28)
Russ Smith
New York Press
It’s no surprise that the last week of the year finds fewer people reading newspapers and magazines: holiday fallout, preparations for New Year’s Eve and family gatherings all take precedence. In New York City that’s a blessing, considering the immense amount of self-righteous twaddle The New York Times produced in its Dec. 28 edition.
I usually ignore the Times’ quack economist Paul Krugman, but his op-ed piece today was a classic. Mind you, this is a man who quotes the discredited journalist Gail Sheehy to lob one more spitball at George W. Bush (Dec. 21), something that I don’t think even Frank Rich has resorted to. Anyway, Krugman popped a few buttons on his trousers with his sum-up of 2001 (“Could’ve Been Worse”), boasting that he’d “long predicted” Argentina’s economy would melt down, and speculating that Enron’s collapse “raised questions...about the state of business ethics.” The only mystery was that Krugman didn’t blast NBC for its recent decision to accept hard liquor advertisements—the hypocrisy in the media about this entirely understandable change of policy has been sickening—but maybe he looked at the Absolut ads his own paper carries and thought better of it.
My favorite passage: “Really big good news: To my immense relief, the absurdity of Social Security privatization became manifest before the system had been dismantled. I had been really worried about that; the Bush administration’s claim that private accounts would improve rather than worsen the system’s finances made no sense at all, yet it got a free pass from most commentators.”
Krugman ignores the simple fact that Bush’s innovative, and overdue, plan to modernize an entitlement program enacted in the first half of the 20th century was temporarily shelved because of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Once next year’s midterm elections are over—depriving Democratic demagogues of a class-warfare issue—it’s certain the issue will arise once more.
The Times’ lead editorial, “A Turbulent First Year,” was a condescending appraisal of Bush’s past 11 months in office. Filled with back-handed compliments, the Times assures the world that the President isn’t as stupid as it had once feared. In fact, though reminding readers that Bush, in a set-up pop quiz by an unscrupulous Boston reporter in 1999, didn’t know the name of Pakistan’s head-of-state general, the editorialist concedes that the man who won the presidency because of “a badly designed ballot [the work of a Democrat, by the way] in some Florida counties” actually spends some time on the job.
“Since the terrorist attacks,” the editorial proclaims, “Mr. Bush has approached the war against Al Qaeda in much the same way he ran his campaign for president—by giving the people a series of clear, simple messages repeated with the firm discipline of a man who lives for his hourlong gym workouts.”
Typically, the Times warns Bush about the recession’s effect on his reelection campaign—which won’t begin until 2004—by evoking his father’s mistakes during the ’92 campaign. Never mind that the circumstance are completely different: When Bill Clinton challenged the first President Bush, the GOP had held the White House for 12 years; in addition, campaigning wasn’t GHWB’s long suit, especially when compared to the best pure politician this country, for better or (mostly) worse, has ever produced. Democrats today have dim memories of John F. Kennedy; the mythology says he was a champ on the hustings, charming reporters with his quips and movie-star looks. In fact, compared to Clinton’s ability to work a crowd, JFK seems like Alan Hevesi.
The following paragraphs are vintage Times-speak: “[T]here is no piece of history Mr. Bush is more familiar with than what happened to his father in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf war. Economic problems at home turned the American mood sour, with fatal results for his re-election campaign.
“The lesson the current President Bush takes from all that is the importance of maintaining the loyalty of his right-wing base, and showing the public he cares about their distress. In the new year he should reconsider the moral of his father’s story. The American people want neither sympathy nor ideological purity. They are concerned with getting the economy back on its feet, and if that does not happen quickly, history suggests they may begin looking worriedly at federal deficit spending, which was made inevitable by Mr. Bush’s huge tax cuts for wealthy Americans.”
This is what is known as propaganda.
There’s much Bush’s “right-wing base” had to complain about this year: the tax package was far too timid, backloading the cuts; the President’s cave-in to Teddy Kennedy on the education bill was arguably his biggest failure in 2001; and the fortunately failed “stimulus” bill was larded with compromises to big-spending Democrats.
The Times also conveniently omits the fact that Bush’s father reneged on his “no new taxes” pledge, angering supporters, and that the economy faltered during his third and fourth years in office, not his first.
Rudy Giuliani, in his farewell address at St. Paul’s Chapel yesterday, summarized what a growing number of New Yorkers feel about the aristocratic, detached chieftains at the Times. He said: “You know, if I had taken the advice of some of the monitors in The New York Times editorial board and retired—that’s a good thing to actually do, not take their advice. You can write that down as a rule... [E]ditorial boards have a place and they have a purpose. But they don’t really understand the inner workings of government. They don’t understand budgets. They really don’t understand how you balance a budget because they don’t have to do it. And they certainly don’t understand how you balance a $40 billion budget, because they’ve never had to do anything like that.”
Right on the mark. It’s also why the Times can rant and rave about the importance of the egregious estate tax; it’s fine for “normal people” to be taxed on assets after they die, inflicting hardship on their families, because the owners of the Times have no such concerns. Their own estates are tended to by battalions of lawyers, who make sure nothing untoward—like the necessity of selling off company stock to meet tax obligations—happens to the ruling class of New York journalism.