It has been over 20 years since I first began writing about liberal bias in American media. People who agree with me politically often ask me why I even bother anymore. I keep doing it for a few reasons. The first is that the bias hasn’t gone away. In fact, some might argue that it’s worse now than ever. The second is that conservative media is growing and we’re better equipped to push back now. The third is that it’s insidious and simply boycotting the sources doesn’t do anything. All of the mess this country is in at the moment is due to the fact that the mainstream media lied to the American public.
Earlier this month I told my colleagues via Slack that I read the Opinion sections of The New York Times and The Washington Post every day so that others don’t have to. Both have been awful for a very long time but the level of derangement since the 2016 presidential election often leaves me feeling more like a psychiatric researcher studying inmates in an asylum than a political writer.
There is enough crazy in the Opinion sections of both sites for me to get at least two posts a day out of it. That would be overkill though. It occurred to me a few weeks ago that I should do a weekly column highlighting the worst of the Times Opinion section, hence the title. For those who remember my old PJTV show “Kruiser Control,” it’ll be sort of like a print version of that, except that I’ll be mocking print rather than television media.
I’ll pick anywhere from two to five of the biggest cries for help and riff on them. I will also include one a week from The Washington Post in a closing section that I’m going to call the “PostScript.”
Aren’t I just full of the clever?
I’ll provide the actual headline to the op-ed and go from there.
On to Week One.
1. Let’s Not Pretend That the Way We Withdrew From Afghanistan Was the Problem
This one is from Ezra Klein. Klein occupies a weird space in leftist punditry for me. About once every 14 months or so he’ll come up with something I actually agree with. He will then almost immediately make me regret that. He often offers a couple of lucid observations in each column. The problem, however, is that the stuff he gets wrong is spectacularly wrong. Klein uses something Matt Yglesias wrote in 2005 as a launching point for this particular attempt at deep thought. Looking to Matt Yglesias for intellectual guidance is like asking Hunter Biden to be your accountability buddy while partying with a bunch of cocaine traffickers at a brothel in Thailand.
Just when it seems like Klein might be writing while wearing his big boy pants, he offers three lengthy paragraphs musing about ways that the withdrawal from Afghanistan might have been worse. That sort of blew up any of the valid points he made. Klein spends a thousand or so words avoiding saying the one thing that anyone who writes about American politics and has any integrity should be saying now: Joe Biden really stepped in it here.
Gotta protect the Drooling Precious though.
This, by the way, was the least ridiculous of the Reality Avoidance About Biden Theater performances in the Times last week.
2. Inflation Could Stay High Next Year, and That’s OK
The guy who wrote this should be forced to stand at a busy gas pump in Los Angeles for a day and explain this to people as they go broke filling up their vehicles. Each time he fails, he should be pantsed in full view of the security cameras. He should then be forced to spend another day watching that security footage after it’s been edited with recurring clips of Joy Behar from The View.
This is just the latest in a series of think pieces in the mainstream media attempting to explain why the horrifying spike in inflation during President Sniffsakid’s first seven months in office ain’t no big thang. This full-court press to explain away inflation epitomizes the almost uncrossable chasm between the priorities of the coastal media bubble elites and real Americans. When Joe in Akron is sweating the rising numbers on the pump as he fills up his truck, he’s not going to be comforted by some macroeconomics word barf in the mainstream media.
He also never wants to hear Joy Behar’s voice.
3. The Right-Wingers Who Admire the Taliban
Michelle Goldberg is the Times Opinion writer who consistently offers the coldest hot takes not written by Paul Krugman. This particular offering is so lazy that she would be fired if she weren’t employed by a bunch of pinkos. She proceeds from her fervent belief that every Republican in America sleeps in a Klan hood and the rest just veers away from sanity as if it’s being chased.
Whenever MSM hacks want to pimp the “white nationalist conservative threat” narrative they almost always begin by referencing someone from the far-fringe who most conservatives never heard of until the libmedia began writing about him. There was one guy four or five years ago whose name I kept having to Google every time the MSM mentioned him. I still can’t remember his name. The heavy, heavy implication in these screeds is that we’re all clinging to what these fringe loons say.
I can guarantee that I am in contact with more conservative Americans in any 20-minute span of any given day of the week than Michelle Goldberg will ever encounter in her lifetime. None of us are ever talking about the things that she thinks we’re talking about. We’re also not the Tucker Carlson cultists that they fancy us to be. They don’t grasp that we don’t idolize media types. Tucker can be fun, yeah, but I’m still not over his bowtie phase. We might need to talk about reparations.
4A. California Could Throw Away What It’s Won
4B. How Did Deep Blue California Get Played by Recall-Happy Republicans?
We’ll wrap up the Times portion of this with a quick twofer which I already opined about on Twitter:
There have been two @nytimes Op-Eds in the last 3 days expressing horror at the California recall process. Both were written by east coast libs who are just terrified of a Republican winning an election anywhere. #ShutItCommies
— SFK (@stephenkruiser) August 30, 2021
Since he is my favorite political writer, I have nothing to add to that.
PostScript: Republicans struggle to find new ways to scare the daylights out of voters
This was published on the same day as the bombings at the Kabul airport. It’s another showcase of laziness. The author takes the naivete that drives all liberal conversation about our border with Mexico and applies it to our efforts to get people out of Afghanistan. In the Liberal Land of Make-Believe, once you apply the “refugee” label to any group of people, they all immediately have sainthood conferred upon them. Anyone who dares wonder if a bad seed or two might have gotten into the group is branded a xenophobic racist Coldplay lover.
Without fail, these Coldplay-loving racist xenophobes are quickly proven right.
Up until the horror at the airport in Kabul, leftmedia stalwarts had been busy trying to shift the conversation away from Biden’s monumental failure to the way Republicans and conservatives were reacting to it. These nimrods actually believe that they can mitigate this flushing toilet of a presidency by framing it as a matter of perception. It wouldn’t seem so awful if those darn Rethuglicans would just stop being meanies to that sweet old man in the Oval Office who has a body count.
Thus endeth the first installment of this new offering. I hope you enjoyed a brief glimpse of the madness.
I leave you with this, my friends: I picked a bad week to stop sniffing glue.
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