I do have a sense of humor, and an ability to appreciate writing. Sincerely: your paragraph w/ the words “ratfuckers”, “Lansky”, “Hanoi”,
“Prince of Peace”, “moonscape” and “psychiatric” is good poetic prose.

As for talking to Mayer Kahana’s folks, I don’t need a message board. I live in Jew Central and they are around. I see one or two of their more prominent people regularly in the neighborhood and we chat.

Unfortunately, Kahaneniks are no more interesting or attractive up close than they are on tv, as when they made jackasses of themselves storming Pat Buchanan on stage. (Paddy Pig and company batted them away like nine-pins. It was pathetic.)

For the record, I do not advocate getting out the pitchforks and torches and transformers and sledgehammers and marching to Times Square or Hoboken or wherever the NYT is manufactured these days.

I voted for Richard Nixon and I agreed with much of his foreign policy. I meant him no insult. That said, who can deny that Nixon was a scary guy?

Nixon was the son of Quakers who sent birthday greetings from the Prince of Peace with carpet-bombing B-52s that reduced Hanoi to rubble and the paddies and jungle around it to a moonscape. Nixon threw psychiatric confidentiality out the window and would have done the same for the Confessional if the need arose. During his time as a lawyer in Cuba, he hobnobbed with Batista and Lansky and their ilk. He employed ratfuckers, and spooks and burglars and bagmen.

Sorry, Markus, but them’s just the facts. My take on why the NYT held back on Watergate is pure supposition but I think I’m on the money. Sulzberger had legitimate reason to fear, though probably not from anything so overt as legal arrest and formal charges as I suggested. Those were strange times.

Why you drag Simon into the discussion, I don’t understand. I neither asked for nor received his endorsement.

Kindest regards.

You’re a crank, and I don’t expect that anyone else reading this shares your goofy views. But I do wonder whether Roger would tolerate the posts of someone who advocates “frying the harddrives” of Pajamas Media, or “smashing the presses” of Commentary or The Weekly Standard.

rosignol — i think the “MSM” ably disseminates the best PR that the mainstream “Left” and the mainstream “Right” are able to put together, to the the overwhelming majority of Americans who think about politics less than ten minutes a week. For us weirdos who think about politics more than ten minutes a week, the Internet provides a smorgasboard of options with which to reinforce or challenge our partisan prejudices.

Looking at just the internet, sure. But when the MSM is factored into it, you have to take into account that the overwhelming majority of media outlets is sympathetic to the soft left.

What the internet does is give non-left groups an alternative channel that bypasses the ‘gatekeepers’ who decide what is important enough to get coverage on any given day.

That’s a win for everyone but the leftists.

My first class trip in grade-school (1956?) was a tour of NYT. We used classroom materials provided by NYT. We read articles in the NYT and wrote reports on them for homework.

My own father taught me the front-page hierarchy and how to navigate the paper. If you wanted to be counted one of the smart kids in high school you quoted the NYT which, you let it be known, you read on your own. Later on, the NYT became a daily habit and Sunday morning ritual.

My attitude toward the NYT changed when I learned that its Jewish owners had knowingly and deliberately kept the destruction of European Jewry out of their Paper of Record. Among Orthodox Jews with whom I identify, the last generation of Jewish owners of the NYT are held complicit in the gassing and incineration of their brethren. In Jewish law someone who witnesses murder without intervening is as guilty as the person who wields the murder weapon.

It is also commonly assumed among less secular, more ethnocentric Jews that the incessant and malicious slander of the Jewish State in the news and editorial columns of the NYT is not an independent political position but part of a world view peculiar to conflicted Jews and Christians of Jewish descent suffering from a deep, albeit unacknowledged form of self-conscious disturbance that might be called Tourquemada Syndrome.

If all this sounds parochial and irrelevant, think again. The NYT sets political fashion in this country as does no other institution, private or public. And the fashion it has championed since Vietnam and succeeded in popularizing across the nation is sedition.

Iím not suggesting that the NYT accomplished this alone. Whole armies of graying faculty at the universities and graying apparatchicks at the State Department and the CIA did their worst to support the effort. Reducing large portions of the population of the most powerful and democratic nation in the world to a confused, self-doubting, guilt-racked, defense-averse pack of mice is no small feat. But the NYT was a major trendsetter.

So Iím not one for waiting for the NYT to quietly fade away. I think something more proactive is required. Recall how stubbornly unwilling the powers at the NYT were to investigate the Watergate break-in. To believe their excuses, you would have to credit the notion that a group of Cubans from Florida with known CIA ties traveled to Washington during a Presidential election and broke into Democratic National Headquarters in order to steal IBM typewriters and Hewlett Packard calculators.

The NYT let the Washington Post run away with the story because after locking horns with Nixonís White House over Daniel Ellsberg and the stolen Pentagon Papers, the NYT wasnít ready for a rematch. Richard Nixon, as the North Vietnamese found out after they left the bargaining table and had to be goaded back with B-52s, was not someone to trifle with. What Sulzberger Sr., the pioneering Jewish holocaust denier was afraid of was a knock on the door in the dead of night by large men in uniform waiting to frog-march him off to jail for the seditious traitor by nature and inclination that he was.

W would do well to borrow a page from Nixonís book of tricks. If they insist on undermining the war on terror, Punk Sulzberger and company need to be terrorized. This neednít interfere with their first amendment rights, either. Clip their wings. Leave them to run the NYT intact but Baby-Bell Times Books and their broadcast outlets. Narrow their media holdings and reduce their influence.

Of course, if so purely economic and civilized an approach isnít feasible, other alternatives have to be considered. Like frying their hard-drives and taking sledgehammers to their presses.

The cooperative editorialship mentioned by photoncourier also exists in Wikipedia (wikipedia.org) and there has been hijacked. The same might happen to blogs, in the sense that the steering currents that bloggers sail might be taken over or strongly influenced by one side of a debate. The Left is especially good at motivating people to do this sort of thing – to maliciously use cooperative systems to their political advantage.

So we need to be a bit careful here. We are, to some extent, inside an echo chamber as bloggers.

I have to disagree. The problem with Wikipedia is that, while it is not centrally managed, it is centrally located — it is a “commons”, where all can share and we are all hostage to the single user who spoils it for everyone.

By contrast, hack attacks aside, nobody edits my blog content except me… and, absent Chinese-style censorship, people will read my blog if they think it’s worth reading.

Perhaps it’s a failure of imagination on my part, but I don’t see what the Left can do to use this cooperative system to their political advantage, other than write blogs of their own. (This they are doing — Daily Kos remains popular. They’ve tried it with other independent, mutually-competitive media as well; witness Air America. But none of this has detracted from the center-right blogs or talk-radio stations.)

respectfully,
Daniel in Brookline

And Roger, from whence does your ever-shrill rancor for The Times spring? (I mean, aside from their oh-so-obvs case of Bush hatred) Is it a reaction to the “black room” story?

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/international/middleeast/19abuse.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Curse those treasonous scoundrels at The Times for bringing us this bad news! My god, if we lose the war, surely The Times will be to blame! As opposed to the insurgents, right?

If that story’s the sign of a “relative demise,” than I hope they keep sinking.

Remind me, btw, what stories PJ has broken, aside from the admittedly hysterical public reaming at the hands of a Senator?

The cooperative editorialship mentioned by photoncourier also exists in Wikipedia ( wikipedia.org ) and there has been hijacked. The same might happen to blogs, in the sense that the steering currents that bloggers sail might be taken over or strongly influenced by one side of a debate. The Left is especially good at motivating people to do this sort of thing – to maliciously use cooperative systems to their political advantage.

So we need to be a bit careful here. We are, to some extent, inside an echo chamber as bloggers.

…………

Also, I’m afraid that the trend we see of the MSM fading and the NYT losing its newpaper of record status is very long term. In the shorter term (next few years), we will still have a rabidly biased, agenda pushiing media that will be the only source of information for a significant percentage of our population. Hence, the “big lie” technique, used so well over the last few years (example: that the NSA wiretaps were “domestic”) will continue to favor the left, the anti-American, the Bushhitler-haters, and the appeasers.

So we see a good trend, and it has had some clout (costing the vicious partisan bastard, Dan Rather, his job, for example), but it has a long way to go.

…………….

The current administration is just fortunate that the blogosphere is around to help it, at least a little, because the administration is so terrible at helping itself. But we can’t do all the heavy lifting – the blogosphere has a little power, but that’s all. A little power.

I lost my interest in Miller way back in the beginning because she was always breathlessly reporting potential WMD finds. I suppose that was due to a combination of factors: 1) she was convinced Iraq had stockpiles of WMD, and 2) she wanted the scoop. Now why did I find that a turnoff? Because I am a cautious fellow who wants the facts, not dramatic maybes. Miller may have fallen out with the NY Times because her views didn’t fit well with the editors, but she lost my support for the same reason that the NY Times as a whole has lost my support: lack of reliable and newsworthy content.