Confirmed: New York Times Still Trapped in the 1970s

“NY Times ‘Dot Earth’ Blogger Draws Cartoon of Christmas Trees Tying a Man to the Car Top:”

Environmentalists prefer plants and animals to humans. The latest proof? Through a panicky global-warming tweet from Think Progress blaring “Floods and heat cause mass Christmas Tree deaths,” I came across a new cartoon drawn by veteran New York Times environmental reporter-turned-“Dot Earth” blogger Andrew Revkin.

Revkin had several pine trees driving a car with a balding white guy tied to the car top. “What would the next few weeks be like if the trees had a holiday for a change?”

Pretty much like this 1976 Saturday Night Live sketch on “The Killer Trees”, featuring host Candice Bergen, in which a murderous Christmas tree stabs musical guest Frank Zappa with one its branches.

Last month, blogger David Thompson spotted the New York Times rooting for graffiti artists when one of their prized canvases — a Queens warehouse — was stripped and repainted by the owner of the building. (Remember him?) Were there any Romans who rooted for the Vandals when civilization fell?

The Times has followed that story up with a sequel: “As Legal Graffiti Walls Disappear, Street Artists Ponder Future:”

For years they painted murals on the Lower East Side, paying building owners up to $1,000 to paint ads and personal pieces. But over the last 10 years, he said, he has gone from 15 walls to only one, as most were replaced by upscale housing, restaurants or billboards.

“There are hardly any spots left in the city for graffiti writers,” Mr. Feliciano, 47, said. “It’s going to mean that everybody’s going to be fighting for space. And you know what happens if they don’t have space to express themselves.”

Granted, he and his friends have a canvas nearby. Behind their studio is a full-size plywood replica of a 1980s subway car, which they cover regularly with intricate pieces and figures.

“We’ve been reduced to painting at the office,” Mr. Feliciano joked. “We can’t go painting trains at our age. At least this is easier in the backyard. And it has that shape we enjoyed in our youth.”

Don’t worry, I’m sure the Brave New World of the upcoming De Blasio administration will reopen the floodgates to all sorts of exciting opportunities for the destruction of city and private property, which the Times will no doubt praise in Barack to the Future radical chic fashion.

But in the meantime, “Is it too soon to say, ‘I told you so?’“, Ann Coulter recently asked:

A couple of weeks ago, the Times ran another item downplaying the coming crime surge under Mayor de Blasio. Former hedge fund manager Neil Barsky wrote a column mocking his fellow 1-percenters for fretting about the new mayor with this advice: “Calm down.” (I find few balms as soothing as being told to “calm down.”)

Reluctantly, Barsky admitted (17 times) that he is a very rich man. As he explained, he, too, enjoys the city having been turned into a “a millionaires’ playground” and having a mayor who is “one of us.” (Bloomberg’s not one of me, buster.) He sniffed that he found “this affluent angst more than a bit overwrought.”

They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

Liberal zealots view de Blasio as a breath of fresh air because he’s stuck in policies of the 1960s. That’s when Americans were assured by brain-dead liberals that if we could just improve criminals’ self-esteem, crime would disappear. You’ll see!

The result? The violent crime rate quadrupled.

We never got an apology on behalf of the tens of thousands of Americans who were murdered, maimed, raped and robbed as a direct result of liberal law enforcement strategies — much less the show trials these people deserved.

Liberal activists just waited out Giuliani and Bloomberg. Now they’re ready to retry all the old ideas. Mayor-elect de Blasio recently met with convicted criminals to get their views on policing policies. Wow! Look at de Blasio’s new ideas!

The ex-cons actually complained to de Blasio that they don’t like being watched so much.

The left simply refuses to believe that locking up criminals has any effect on crime and insists we just need to explain to them that committing violent felonies is wrong. (headline from Aug. 10, 2000: “Number in Prison Grows Despite Crime Reduction.”) It’s strange because liberals totally understand cause-and-effect when it comes to … well, um, nothing.

Suggesting that the “1 percent” – such as himself — are the most terrified of a de Blasio mayoralty, Barsky claimed that the massively rich have been the primary beneficiaries of record-low crime rates in New York — “those who can actually afford its housing, attend concerts in Lincoln Center, eat in its fancy restaurants and pay for parking to boot.”

Of course, one cost will be lower: no need to hire a sitter to attend a taping of NBC’s Saturday Night Live, or watch the remake of Charles Bronson’s Death Wish when it could be playing itself out nightly right in the streets.

Back in 2011, spotting a Timesman writing about a low-income housing project to be built in Woodstock and concluding — apparently with a straight face — that “the only thing more important than making the world better can be keeping Woodstock the same,” Kathy Shaidle responded, “NYT accidentally summarizes ‘progressivism’ in half a sentence:”

“Progressives” live in the past — a past that (like the one they so often accuse conservatives of romantically yearning for) didn’t exist:

Rosa Parks wasn’t just “tired” — she was a semi-professional activist, trained at a Communist “school”; Alger Hiss was guilty; so were Sacco and Venzetti; there really were Communist spies in the State Department; FDR prolonged the Depression; “busing” increased racial hatred; Bush’s verbal SATs were higher than Kerry’s…

Once you realize that liberals live in a nostalgic past of their own invention and on-going promotion (like Mrs. Havisham or a tragic Tennessee Williams “heroine”) almost everything “progressives” do then makes “sense.”