Saturday, February 23, 2008
NYT Public Editor Bats Cleanup For Keller
The NY Times' piece-of-shit story on John McCain has buried the Old Grey Mare under a storm of righteous criticism, so I've got to hand it to them that they now have the cojones to trot out their Public Editor Clark Hoyt who, under the guise of taking Bill Keller to task for allowing said fiasco, actually takes an entirely fresh and innuendo-laden shot at McCain.
It isn't really like that is it, Mr. Hoyt? In fact you've left out some very pertinent facts regarding those charges you make against McCain- well, okay, they're not really charges- you're right. To be fair, they are more accurately just more of the same disingenuous nudge-nudge-wink-wink bullshit comprising the original smear article you now pretend to criticize.
First, McCain's lawyer Bob Bennett said on the very day the Times printed its smear that, as counsel to the Democrat-majority committee investigating the Keating Five back in the day, he explicitly told the committee that his investigations proved beyond a reasonable doubt that McCain was innocent of any wrongdoing, but that McCain's name was kept in the investigation by Democrat members in order to offer up a Republican in what was in fact a scandal confined to Democrats.
As for writing "to the Federal Communications Commission to urge a speed-up on a decision affecting one of [Vicki Iseman's] clients", the record shows that McCain indeed did exactly that. The implication is that this is wrong. It isn't. It would have been had McCain suggested his support for a particular outcome in the pending decision, but he did no such thing. He wrote to the FCC on behalf of Iseman's client because said decision had been demonstrably unusually delayed; McCain wrote to ask that the matter be finally resolved.
So Public Editor Clark Hoyt is the man charged with cleaning up after Bill Keller. But Hoyt's piece-of-shit article masquerading as an admonition to Keller is in fact an extension of the New York Times' original slandering of McCain by innuendo. So no, the New York Times has not yet hit bottom.
The pity of it is that, without the sex, The Times was on to a good story. McCain, who was reprimanded by the Senate Ethics Committee in 1991 for exercising “poor judgment” by intervening with federal regulators on behalf of a corrupt savings and loan executive, recast himself as a crusader against special interests and the corrupting influence of money in politics. Yet he has continued to maintain complex relationships with lobbyists like Iseman, at whose request he wrote to the Federal Communications Commission to urge a speed-up on a decision affecting one of her clients.Well now.
It isn't really like that is it, Mr. Hoyt? In fact you've left out some very pertinent facts regarding those charges you make against McCain- well, okay, they're not really charges- you're right. To be fair, they are more accurately just more of the same disingenuous nudge-nudge-wink-wink bullshit comprising the original smear article you now pretend to criticize.
First, McCain's lawyer Bob Bennett said on the very day the Times printed its smear that, as counsel to the Democrat-majority committee investigating the Keating Five back in the day, he explicitly told the committee that his investigations proved beyond a reasonable doubt that McCain was innocent of any wrongdoing, but that McCain's name was kept in the investigation by Democrat members in order to offer up a Republican in what was in fact a scandal confined to Democrats.
As for writing "to the Federal Communications Commission to urge a speed-up on a decision affecting one of [Vicki Iseman's] clients", the record shows that McCain indeed did exactly that. The implication is that this is wrong. It isn't. It would have been had McCain suggested his support for a particular outcome in the pending decision, but he did no such thing. He wrote to the FCC on behalf of Iseman's client because said decision had been demonstrably unusually delayed; McCain wrote to ask that the matter be finally resolved.
So Public Editor Clark Hoyt is the man charged with cleaning up after Bill Keller. But Hoyt's piece-of-shit article masquerading as an admonition to Keller is in fact an extension of the New York Times' original slandering of McCain by innuendo. So no, the New York Times has not yet hit bottom.
