Entries tagged with “New York Times” from RealityBites

Glenn Greenwald holds the NYT responsible for its journalism, in this look back at how their reporting and editorializing about regime change in Venezuela has changed from 2002 to present. He goes onto to reflect on how we should keep that in mind in deciding how to respond to the terrorism in Mumbai. Thoughtful and interesting writing as usual from Mr. Greenwald. [via]

George Packer sums up Bill Kristol's column at the NY Times so well.

It's not just that he was fundamentally wrong at least every other week throughout the year (misattributing a quote in his first column, counting Clinton out after Iowa, placing Obama at a Jeremiah Wright sermon that Obama didn't attend, predicting the imminent return of a McCain adviser named Mike Murphy who ended up staying off the campaign, all but predicting a McCain victory, sort of predicting that McCain would oppose the bailout, praising McCain's "suspension" of his campaign as a smart move, preferring fake populism to professional excellence and Joe the Plumber to Horace the Poet, urging Ayers-Wright attack tactics as the way for McCain to win, basically telling McCain to ignore all the advice Kristol had given him throughout the year, but above all, vouching again and again and again, privately and publicly, for Palin as an excellent Vice-Presidential choice). What the hell--it was an unpredictable year.

The real grounds for firing Kristol are that he didn't take his column seriously. In his year on the Op-Ed page, not one memorable sentence, not one provocative thought, not one valuable piece of information appeared under his name. The prose was so limp ("Who, inquiring minds want to know, is going to spare us a first Obama term?") that you had the sense Kristol wrote his column during the commercial breaks of his gig on Fox News Sunday and gave it about the same amount of thought.

Short version for the NYT management: Save some money. Don't bother renewing his contract this time around. [via]

Paul Krugman highlights a Republican talking point that emerged during Arnold Schwarzenegger's appearance on This Week yesterday.

He asserted, as a simple matter of fact, that "government created the housing bubble", because Fannie and Freddie made all these loans to people who couldn't afford to pay them.

This is utterly false. Fannie/Freddie did some bad things, and did, it turns out, get to some extent into subprime. But thanks to the accounting scandals, they were actually withdrawing from the market during the height of the housing bubble -- the vast majority of the loans now going bad came from the private sector.

Yet it's now clear that the phony account of the crisis -- that it's all due to Fannie, Freddie, and nasty liberals forcing poor Angelo Mozilo to make loans to Those People -- is setting in as Republican orthodoxy, part of what you have to believe to be a respectable member of the party.

That's almost as good as Krugman's appearance on the This Week roundtable discussion in which he repeatedly schooled George Will and the others. It was so nice to have someone who actually knows what they're talking about right there on the spot to correct the talking heads.