The NYT Counterattacks On The One's Behalf

The electoral clock is counting down. The candidate you are actively pushing for the White House is holding a slim to none lead in the polls. You are cheerleading him towards victory.

Suddenly, catastrophe strikes.

There is a foreign policy crisis. Your candidate looks weak, equivocating, unsure of himself. His spine has left his body. His opponent looks strong, knowledgable, prescient. This is bad. What to do?

If your the NY Times, its to write an opinion hit-piece on McCain, ignoring McCain's response to the crisis in Georgia and instead, concentrating on cherry picked facts in an attempt to show that McCain is a war-mongerer too dangerous to be given the reigns of power. And, of course, you run it as front page news.
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The NYT front page hit piece of the day is "Response to 9-11 Offers Outline of McCain Doctrine." I won't recount the whole piece. You can read it here.

Just a couple of points worth mentioning. One, the NYT spends the first several paragraphs pointing out that McCain was the first person to call for attacks on Iraq, believing it would pay dividends far beyond the borders of that country. What the NYT studiously ignores is that, in fact, that has turned out to be right. Success in Iraq has been bad news for al Qaeda who have watched their stock value tumble in response to defeat in Iraq almost as much as the NYT has seen its own stock value tumble since 9-11, now near the single digits after a high of $52 per share. Instead what we get from the NYT is:

[McCain's] critics charge that the emotion of Sept. 11 overwhelmed his former cool-eyed caution about deploying American troops without a clear national interest and a well-defined exit, turning him into a tool of the Bush administration in its push for a war to transform the region.

Whoa. Let's pull that apart. One, to claim that there was not a clear national interest in attacking Iraq as seen in 2002 is the penultimate rewrite of history. Two, McCain was out in front of Bush on the call to invade Iraq and depose Saddam Hussein. Three, what is it with the left that we can only send troops into battle with a clear plan for surrender and retreat. Our post modern left just have no contact with reality. Actually, the NYT does in fact quote someone with sense on this last issue - McCain's younger brother, Joe:

“To quote Sherman, war is all hell and we need to fight it out and get it over with and that is when the killing stops”

I won't go into the rest of the article. Basically, its a litany of everything the NYT can spin in an effort to show that McCain acted decisively while not always acting under the correct information. They do so largely out of the context of the time, and instead evaluate it all in the 20/20 hindsight of today.

That the NYT is in the tank for Obama is no secret. That the NYT stock prices are plummeting is likewise no secret. Could it have anything to do with regularly running biased and unfair opinion pieces as front page news? Just asking.