New York Times writers are in a nail-biting competition. Evidenced by its sycophantic swooning over Sen. John “Vietnam” Kerry, Times columnists and news writers are neck-and-neck in a bet over who can best deify Kerry’s Vietnam experiences.
Three self-inflicted flesh wounds are merited Purple Hearts. Two hundred and fifty of his peers finding him “unfit for command” is political calculation. Fabricated stories are mere exaggerations or misunderstandings. Botox is a symbol of his being “a man of the people.”
Truth be told, in the Times’ “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” soldier Kerry stands as a triumphant war hero for the sissy left. In desperate need for some evidence of a liberal being tough on foreign policy, the Times has tirelessly referred to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth’s arguments against Kerry as, 250 witnesses and documentary evidence later, “unsubstantiated.”
Evidently, the credibility the Times is looking for rests with Mr. Kerry. In a testament to his true integrity, Kerry claimed in 1979 that he spent “Christmas Eve of 1968 five miles across the Cambodian border, being shot at by our South Vietnamese allies.”
It has now been proven Kerry was 55 miles from the border at Christmas.
Kerry continued, “The absurdity of almost being killed by our own allies in a country in which President Nixon claimed there were no American troops was very real.” (Kerry was going for an Oscar.)
If you do a quick fact check, Lyndon Johnson, not Richard Nixon, was still president in December 1968.
And just last year, soldier Kerry stated he has gripping recollections of how he felt when he heard about Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination early in 1968 while he was in Vietnam. By his own admission, Kerry was not deployed to Vietnam until November 1968.
But in the oblivion of the Times, these facts are mere quiddities. According to the Times, Kerry’s “Christmas in Cambodia” is “the one allegation in the book Unfit for Command that Mr. Kerry’s campaign has not been able to put to rest.” Kerry didn’t lie. Kerry wasn’t propagating another falsehood to inflame his war-hero image. It is merely something yet to be “put to rest.”
Of course, the standard Times propaganda extends well beyond scary Kerry. In its unequivocal dedication to demoralizing the Iraq war effort, the Times ran Abu Ghraib stories on its front page for 43 out of 47 days. The Chicago Sun-Times, certainly no Wall Street Journal, had 27 front pagers during the same period. Any upcoming developments will be sandblasted with hot pink paint.
Despite the paper’s ominous predictions of Bush-imposed theocracy, the Times entirely omitted a bogus California separation of church and state ruling from both news and editorial. A recent lawsuit filed by the Thomas More Law Center claimed seventh-graders were required by some history teacher to pretend “they’re Muslims, wear Islamic garb, memorize verses from the Quran, pray to Allah and even to play ‘jihad games.’ ” The California judge pretended that this program was devoid of “any devotional or religious intent,” and therefore purely “educational.”
In the last six months, the Times has run 40 articles with remarks on the new liberal attempt at radio, the virtually non existent “Air America” station. In contrast, the Chicago Sun-Times has published 23 articles and The Boston Globe has run 13 pieces.
A Lexis-Nexis search on the Times’ incessantly assigned label of “Big Business” between 2001 and 2003 showed the paper used “Big Business” in 646 documents during a three-year period. Even restricting the search to not include editorials or columns made a paltry dent, lobbing out 531 instances of “Big Business” objectivity. And in a testament to the paper’s love for the Bush administration, “Big Oil” was presented to readers “dispassionately” 96 times between 2001 and 2003.
In comparison to the flagrant bias of “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” The Boston Globe managed to refrain from the phrase “Big Business” all but 337 times between 2001 and 2003. The Denver Post came limping in with 196 instances during the same period. Even the Chicago Sun-Times managed to abstain from “Big Business,” outside of 210 documents.
To be sure, it is virtually a weekly occurrence that the Times discredits itself with unabashed and patent bias. The paper has no reservations about partial framing, omissions or superfluous reporting on insignificants such as “Air America.” The truth is of absolutely zero importance to the Times. Integrity is immaterial.
Consequently, and appropriately, the Times has become liberals’ supreme Xanadu ruler. But given an accuracy record that could make Michael Moore blush, perhaps the Times fairytale would be more appropriately titled, “Alice in Wonderland.”
Darren Bernard welcomes comments at [email protected].
