The Paper of Wreckage
NYT reporters caught red-handed reporting
By Allan Uthman

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.