How the N.Y. Times betrayed us ( With the MoveOn.Org ad for General Betray Us...)

Long Beach Press Telegram ^ | 09/25/2007 08:18:10 PM PDT | George Will

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Two days before Christmas in 1967, President Lyndon Johnson, visiting the Vatican, presented Pope Paul VI with a foot-high bust of Lyndon Johnson. Small choices can reveal the character of a person.

Or of an institution. Consider The New York Times' choices concerning MoveOn.org's issue advocacy ad in the Times calling Gen. David Petraeus "General Betray Us" and accusing him of "cooking the books for the White House."

Last June, the Times was in high dudgeon - it knows no other degree of dudgeon - about the Supreme Court's refusal to affirm a sweeping government power to suppress political speech. The court ruled that a small group of Wisconsin citizens had been improperly refused the right to run an issue advocacy ad urging the state's two senators not to filibuster the president's judicial nominees.

Because one of those senators was seeking re-election, the group's ad was deemed an "electioneering communication" - one that "refers to" a candidate for federal office.

McCain-Feingold bans such communications by corporations, including incorporated nonprofit citizens' groups, in the weeks before an election - when the Times' editorial page is in full-throated enjoyment of speech rights it would deny to others.

Concurring with the court's judgment that the Wisconsin group's ad should have been permitted, Justice Antonin Scalia noted that although McCain-Feingold was written to prevent "corrosive and distorting effects" by entities with "immense aggregations of wealth," it actually muzzled - with the Times' strenuous approval - a small group of Wisconsin citizens.

Less than three months after the Times excoriated the court for weakening restrictions on issue ads, the paper made a huge and patently illegal contribution to MoveOn.org's issue advocacy ad.

[Doctor Raoul]

There’s no hypocrite like a liberal hypocrite...

[Izzy Dunne]

This was yet another Rove plot to discredit the NYT.

Oh, wait...

[<1/1,000,000th%]

Good post!

[Enchante]

Shameless vicious hypocrites of the NY Times --of course they will never err on the side of more conservative speech...... Pinch Sulzberger and friends are demagogues of the left, working hard for America's defeat.

btw, I found the opening anecdote about LBJ to be astonishing, even though I knew he was an egomaniac beyond almost anyone who has lived in the past few decades..... but giving the POPE a bust of yourself??? What a clown. How sad that he was ever our President.

"Two days before Christmas in 1967, President Lyndon Johnson, visiting the Vatican, presented Pope Paul VI with a foot-high bust of Lyndon Johnson. Small choices can reveal the character of a person"

[dblshot]

What’s black and white and red all over?

The New York Times.