The New York Times Versus America By Michelle Malkin

CNSNews.com Commentary
December 28, 2005

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 and Pajamas Media 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 girl friend 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.

(Michelle Malkin is author of the new book "Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild.")


New York Times Accused of Toying with Treason
by Jim Kouri

Source: http://www.postchronicle.com/commentary/article_2122552.shtml

Dec 28, 2005

From our chutzpah file comes this story: today's New York Times reports that defense lawyers in some of the country's biggest terrorism cases say they plan to bring legal challenges to determine whether the National Security Agency used illegal wiretaps against several dozen Muslim men tied to Al Qaeda.
In an article written by James Risen, who wrote the original NSA spy article, the lawyers said in interviews that they wanted to learn whether the men were monitored by the agency and, if so, whether the government withheld critical information or misled judges and defense lawyers about how and why the men were singled out. So Risen's article may actually help known terrorists -- including the one who planned to blowup the Brooklyn Bridge -- avoid prosecution. He should be proud.

It's been a long time coming, but finally someone from the mainstream news media had the wherewithal to use the words "New York Times" and "treason" in the same sentence. Although I thought the New York Post -- part of Ruppert Murdock's News Corp conglomerate -- didn't go far enough and may have hedged their accusations a bit, the editorial writers were the bold in their assertions. After the Times articles on top secret counterterrorism operations -- the NSA and FBI operations -- there remained little doubt that reporters at the Gray Lady had an agenda.

Here's the opening of their December 27 editorial titled, "Gray Lady Toys with Treason":

"Has The New York Times declared itself to be on the front line in the war against the War on Terror? The self-styled paper of record seems to be trying to reclaim the loyalty of those radical lefties who ludicrously accused it of uncritically reporting on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

"Yet the paper has done more than merely try to embarrass the Bush administration these last few months.

"It has published classified information -- and thereby knowingly blown the covers of secret programs and agencies engaged in combating the terrorist threat."

While the New York Post stopped short of calling the New York Times' actions treasonous, I for one won't. I believe that the Times should be investigated, prosecuted and suffer the consequences of their actions in a time of war. Whether they believe we are fighting a war or not, isn't the point. The point is they committed an act far worse than those accused leakers in the Valerie Plame investigation; an investigation that the NY Times championed. How many times during the course of the Plame investigation did the Times sanctimoniously fret over our national security? Does the word hypocrisy come to mind?

For too long, the so-called "newspaper of record" has played loose and fancy-free with the truth. Columnist and author Michelle Malkin caught them in a number of lies for which the Times editors offered tepid excuses and apologies. In her December 27 column she wrote:

"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":

"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."

This is only one example contained in Malkin's column.

Even more troubling is what isn't caught as untruthful in the pages of the New York Times. While many of the nation's news organizations are attempting to limit the use of "unnamed sources" or "anonymous sources," the Times will build an entire news story based on these nameless, faceless newsmakers. The Gray Lady has become the Kitty Kelly of the news business.

The problem is that most news organizations, including Fox News Channel, use the New York Times coverage as a template for what will be covered by their news people. Some editors, according the former CBS reporter and author Bernard Goldberg, will not cover a story unless it's already been covered by the New York Times. Why is so much respect lavished on this newspaper?

It's similar to the situation in academia where institutions such as Harvard and Yale are still held in the highest esteem, while the quality of their education has been in decline since the 1960s, when radical left-wing ideologues took over their campuses.

But the Times always had a left-leaning agenda. They were the primary apologists for the Soviet Union's brutal murderer and dictator Joseph Stalin. In fact, most of the left in the US were against entering World War II until Hitler attacked the USSR. Then the liberal-left began to call for action against the Nazis.

The left-wingers in politics, the media, academia and activism have turned the idea of treason on its head. Today, no one dares to voice their concerns about someone's patriotism or dare to use the term treasonous to describe the words or conduct of these America haters. They assert that they are patriots. And even conservative politicians and pundits fail to laugh in their faces when they utter such nonsense.

During a recent Fox News Channel debate between talk show host Mike Gallagher and left-wing columnist from The Nation, David Corn, something interesting occurred which went unnoticed. Usually, it's the liberal-left debater who resorts to name calling (i.e. racist, xenophobe, jingoist, etc.). After Corn's diatribe against the war and the Commander-in-Chief, Gallagher simply replied that Corn believed what he was saying because he's Un-American. For the rest of the debate all David Corn could do is protest that he indeed was not Un-American. And Gallagher laughed for the rest of the time he and Corn were on the air. A wise man once told me that most leftists are cowards, but hell hath no fury like that of a leftist uncovered.

Someday, hopefully soon, conservatives will stop pussy-footing around and call a traitor a traitor and treasonous behavor treason. Let's uncover them. Let the fury begin.