No, I don’t mean its financial coffers are empty, but only an emergency cash infusion from the wonderfully Ian Fleming-named Mexican business tycoon Carlos Slim staved that off. But emotionally, the culture that pervades its newsroom is utterly exhausted.
Ten years ago, in early September, the following profile of an author promoting his new autobiography ran in the Times:
”I don’t regret setting bombs,” Bill Ayers said. ”I feel we didn’t do enough.” Mr. Ayers, who spent the 1970′s as a fugitive in the Weather Underground, was sitting in the kitchen of his big turn-of-the-19th-century stone house in the Hyde Park district of Chicago. The long curly locks in his Wanted poster are shorn, though he wears earrings. He still has tattooed on his neck the rainbow-and-lightning Weathermen logo that appeared on letters taking responsibility for bombings. And he still has the ebullient, ingratiating manner, the apparently intense interest in other people, that made him a charismatic figure in the radical student movement.
AdvertisementNow he has written a book, ”Fugitive Days” (Beacon Press, September). Mr. Ayers, who is 56, calls it a memoir, somewhat coyly perhaps, since he also says some of it is fiction. He writes that he participated in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, of the Capitol building in 1971, the Pentagon in 1972. But Mr. Ayers also seems to want to have it both ways, taking responsibility for daring acts in his youth, then deflecting it.
‘Is this, then, the truth?,” he writes. ”Not exactly. Although it feels entirely honest to me.”
But why would someone want to read a memoir parts of which are admittedly not true? Mr. Ayers was asked.
”Obviously, the point is it’s a reflection on memory,” he answered. ”It’s true as I remember it.”
Mr. Ayers is probably safe from prosecution anyway. A spokeswoman for the Justice Department said there was a five-year statute of limitations on Federal crimes except in cases of murder or when a person has been indicted.
Mr. Ayers, who in 1970 was said to have summed up the Weatherman philosophy as: ”Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that’s where it’s really at,” is today distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. And he says he doesn’t actually remember suggesting that rich people be killed or that people kill their parents, but ”it’s been quoted so many times I’m beginning to think I did,” he said. ”It was a joke about the distribution of wealth.”
He went underground in 1970, after his girlfriend, Diana Oughton, and two other people were killed when bombs they were making exploded in a Greenwich Village town house. With him in the Weather Underground was Bernardine Dohrn, who was put on the F.B.I.’s 10 Most Wanted List. J. Edgar Hoover called her ”the most dangerous woman in America” and ”la Pasionara of the Lunatic Left.” Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn later married.
In his book Mr. Ayers describes the Weathermen descending into a ”whirlpool of violence.”
”Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon,” he writes. But then comes a disclaimer: ”Even though I didn’t actually bomb the Pentagon — we bombed it, in the sense that Weathermen organized it and claimed it.” He goes on to provide details about the manufacture of the bomb and how a woman he calls Anna placed the bomb in a restroom. No one was killed or injured, though damage was extensive.
Between 1970 and 1974 the Weathermen took responsibility for 12 bombings, Mr. Ayers writes, and also helped spring Timothy Leary (sentenced on marijuana charges) from jail.
Today, Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn, 59, who is director of the Legal Clinic’s Children and Family Justice Center of Northwestern University, seem like typical baby boomers, caring for aging parents, suffering the empty-nest syndrome. Their son, Malik, 21, is at the University of California, San Diego; Zayd, 24, teaches at Boston University. They have also brought up Chesa Boudin, 21, the son of David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin, who are serving prison terms for a 1981 robbery of a Brinks truck in Rockland County, N.Y., that left four people dead. Last month, Ms. Boudin’s application for parole was rejected.
So, would Mr. Ayers do it all again, he is asked? ”I don’t want to discount the possibility,” he said.
Note the dispassionate tone of that piece, as if it were a boilerplate People magazine profile covering the latest movie from an Armani-clad Hollywood celebrity. Presumably multiple editors signed off on the article, and saw nothing wrong with its tone or its subject. The author typed it up, sent it off to the editors, who calmly passed it around the office LAN for fine-tuning, and then laid out the text to run the next day on the Times’ Website and in the morning edition of the paper.
Only, by sheer coincidence, that morning happened to be September 11th, 2001, when another man who didn’t regret using bombs — in this case, aircraft as bombs — and also felt his band of revolutionaries didn’t do enough again attacked the Pentagon, along with the World Trade Center.
The tantrum against the Tea Party and the debt ceiling deal is the same reason why the left won’t be satisfied until top marginal tax rates are back up to their 90 percent levels of World War II. They can’t be wrong. They can’t accept that they’re wrong, and they can’t accept losing to people who they think are not just wrong, but evil — in the case of the Tea Party, collectively evil but individually stupid.
For all the “Obama is Reagan” spin they’re trying to peddle to the moderates right now, if you scratched a liberal hard enough, he’d still tell you Reagan had nothing to do with the economic recovery or the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1980s. They just realize now that fighting 25-year-old battles won’t help their cause, but their anger makes them think they can still win the moderates back by using the worst Alinsky tactics possible on the Tea Party supporters.
The scary part is it was only the new realities after 9/11 that kept the left from mimicking the Bill Ayers terror style attacks during the final five years of George W. Bush’s administration, because they knew even the big media would be reluctant to try and spin domestic terrorists as some new mold of freedom fighter. But once you get to the point that you’re calling your domestic enemies terrorists, it’s not a very big step to go from there to justifying your own use of terror tactics against them, especially if the Republicans win both the White House and Senate back next year. A new generation of Ayers, and a new round of spin by sympathizers trying to explain away their actions, could be what’s coming next, once they get tired of just hyperbolic words and decide it’s time to take action.
“if you scratched a liberal hard enough, he’d still tell you Reagan had nothing to do with the economic recovery or the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1980s. They just realize now that fighting 25-year-old battles won’t help their cause”
Not all of them.
For the last couple of weeks, Paul Krugman has been running a series of columns for the New York Times trying (and failing) to prove that the economy was doing badly under Reagan. He uses some very odd statistics (like *25-year* moving averages!!) in support of his case.
Their politices have failed worse than miserably and they have no ideas other than doing more of what doesn’t work. It’s a big blow to the ego when you’ve spent years bragging how smart you are and then looking like a fool when you get your chance at bat. Name calling is all they have left. Don’t waste your time looking for consistency or logic in their diatribes, they need therapy more than anything right now.
The therapy that leftists need is the type provided by R. Lee Ermey in the recent Geico ads!
Why modern liberals are 100 percent wrong about EVERYTHING
Ed – The Times is morally bankrupt; now when will it become financially bankrupt? I await the moment.
Also, I thought the Democrats wanted everyone to be so-o-o-o civil because those wascally Wepublicans say such nasty things that influence others to shoot their reresentatives.
In fact, what the Democrats are doing is called transferance. The very things they ascribe to Republicans are what they themselves do.
Maybe the NY Times will still be around when Obama loses next year and does his narcissistic revenge thing at this country for rejecting him. What will that entail? For starters he might do an entirely unconstitutional end run around Congress and unilaterally give citizenship to all the illegals here. Even if his fiat is immediately declared unlawful all the illegals here, as well as people in Mexico and elsewhere that want citizenship, will certainly believe it to be legitimate. Those not already here illegally will become part of an unstoppable avalanche of people coming across the border, much to the Bamster’s delight. Then, he might climb abroad Air Force One and go pay homage to all the Anti-American trash around the world viscerally inconvenienced by the very existence of the USA. The possibilities are endless.
In any event, it will be a sideshow to the main event, which will be the near demise of the Democratic Party in November of next year. Maybe then the NY Times will turn out its lights with an analysis of how America drove a good man insane by merely rejecting him and he in turn destroyed a major political party merely by being born.
So the announcement today of a new program to deal with domestic terrorism by “big sis” has to do with what the liberal left will do in reaction to their losses in the 2012 elections. That would be domestic terrorism by any definition.
It’s morally bankrupt, but the NYT has been that for longer than I’ve been alive.
And, that’s awhile.
Borrowing at 100% GDP now.
What could possibly go wrong from here on?
Dream on, NYT haters. Pravda in the Big Apple, the sad gray hooker, will never go away. It is the mouthpiece of the Neo-Socialist Democrats and feeds its “news”, editorials and columnists to 95% of the remaining newspapers in the nation. It’s name has such cachet that it will survive bankruptcy – someone will pick up the newspaper . Maybe Murdoch?
What will certainly continue will be an NYT news service, competing with Reuters and AP( as it already does), and feeding the same noxious, venomous fecal matter to the compassionate social activists who are so immune to reasoned thinking and honest analysiss that they don’t realize that they are no longer Democrats, they are the Socialist proletariat.
And if you think it is absurd now, just wait to see what lunacy is to come as the campaign ratchets up. Soros is already working on scaring the elderly to the ballot box. Relax, Ed. They are so insanely consumed with genuine hatred and close to paranoia that they fail to realize that they are coming across to the “independents” as just plain looney. They’ll probably drive off a significant number of their own party.
It would be godsend for us all if Murdoch picked it the Times. He could get rid of Pinch Sulzberger and put in someone who is not a Leftist to be publisher.
Psychological deflection/projection and schizophrenia: great tools to bring to a civil debate.
And don’t forget world-class hypocrisy.
If anyone thinks the end days are going to be benign, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
For YEARS the NYT has been pure unadulterated shit and filled with shit reporters. I cancelled my print sub 4 years ago – saved the problem of bringing heavy recycling to the curb. The NYT is now sometimes read online, used for filler – print editions used by many for housetrained pets and bird cages. The reporting is at least 2-3 days old, watered down and oh so obviously politically skewed to an agenda. Twitter gives instantaneous news and one gets to sift very quickly to get the kernels of “truth”. PJM in the morning is like a breath of fresh air – real stuff – meaty, juicy and telling without being falsified.
Journalistic integrity has come back thru the net – real reporter stars are shining – grass roots America is trying to regain factual reporting and truth – just do not let our elected officials shut it down – the price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance.
CANCEL YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONS TO THE NY TIMES!!!! BANKRUPT THE LIARS!!!!!!
NOBAMA IN 2012!!!!
The NY Slimes has been complicit in genocide since Walter Duranty shilled for Stalin in the 1930s (then Bill Keller refused to return Duranty’s Pulitzer 60 years later). They put the Shoah on the back pages, then had nothing to say about Mao murdering 50+ million people as refugees fleeing to Hong Kong were telling horror stories of mass starvation (I believe even Pravda printed such stories, since it fit with their anti-Mao narrative).
The NY Times’ silence leaves the deaths and blood of more than 100 million on its hands; and conservatives and Republican politicians should point this out in interviews with the MSM every time the Slimes is mentioned.
And nowadays, the NYT remains silent while Islamic infiltration and expansionism proceeds apace. All I can say is that the NYT loves totalitarianism.
“Tom Friedman — who knows a bit about Hezbollah — calls the tea partiers the “Hezbollah faction” of the GOP….”
To be fair Tom Friedman was also very critical of the 9/11 hijackers, going so far as to refer to them as “unlicensed pilots.”
it isn’t just the NYT that is bankrupt: Liberalism has bankrupted the nation.
taxes and regulations have made the cost of doing business in these united States prohibitive
marketing people run around yelling “the recession is because people aren’t spending any money”
people don’t have any money to spend because they don’t have jobs.
people don’t have jobs because it costs too much to do business here
and the bottom line on that is: we are in economic decline; not a recession.
welcome to the Poor House
If the Tea Party are terrorists, why is Nocera not yet blown to smithereens?
Any leftist worth his imaginary ideological armband would never mention Fox News, the New York Post or the London Times without emphasizing the name of the owner: Rupert Murdoch. The have successfully Alinsky-ized the man.
Why don’t we treat the Sulzbergers the same way? The Times, after all, is not a free-floating entity owned by some unknowables. It is owned by the Sulzberger Family and they should be held responsible for its bankrupt status.
Not only would this be playing the same game they play it might even (who knows?) engender some serious intra-family opposition to the the squirt who runs the once-fine newspaper.
“Pinch” Sulzberger, the baby-boomer heir to the Times dynasty, turned what used to be a respectable liberal newspaper into a rag comparable to the Huffington Post.
It was on his watch that the Jayson Blair scandal occurred, ruining the newspaper’s reputation.
And Sulzberger, true to his youth as an antiwar protester, pushed the reporting of the paper sharply to the left. There was no longer even a pretense of trying to be fair to anyone who wasn’t left-of-center.
It’s funny that you bring up the Ayers piece. Bill wasn’t that happy about it…
“Just as clearly Dinitia Smith was interested in her journalistic angle and not the truth. This is not a question of being misunderstood or “taken out of context,” but of deliberate distortion.”
“Smith’s angle is captured in the Times headline: “No regrets for a love of explosives” (September 11, 2001). She and I spoke a lot about regrets, about loss, about attempts to account for one’s life. I never said I had any love for explosives, and anyone who knows me found that headline sensationalistic nonsense.”
If this is open adulation for a terrorist, on the part of the Times, it certainly wasn’t received very well.
Anyway, with regard to Nocera, he’s a columnist on the op-ed page. If he wishes to compare the acts of the Tea Party to terrorists it’s not exactly civil, but again, this is an opinion piece. If you want someone to play nice and blubber on pointlessly go read David Brooks.
“If this is open adulation for a terrorist, on the part of the Times, it certainly wasn’t received very well.”
Gosh, I’m sorry Bill wasn’t happy with his profile. Hopefully it sold a few books though.
When the NYT finally does go down, it should be declared a National Holiday in America and Israel.
They’ll all be hired and moved to Qatar (if not already), by Al Jezeera immediately upon their release from the NYT, so good riddance to these “home grown terrorists”.
I am about 100 pages into Erik Larson’s new book, In the Garden of the Beasts, the history of the first Ambassador to Nazi Germany and his daughter, arriving in July, 1933, shortly after Hitler became Chancellor. Von Hindenburg, ailing, was still President. I can’t help thinking that the Obama Administration and its Congressional and MSM sycophants’ disrespect, ad hominem attacks and other verbal attacks are too much like the same from the SA, the Brownshirts, in those early days of the Nazi Regime, and we, Conservatives, Tea Partiers and regular Republicans are the Communists, “Socialists,” mental and physical misfits and, of course, the Jews.
I hope it’s just a thought, but…
Economic terrorist is SO un-PC.
I prefer to be called a “fiscal freedom fighter”. Or Bob. I also answer to “Hey you with the hair.”
Oh Good! Does this finally mean they will leave the educated and rational thinking people alone?