With Friends Like New York Times Columnists Thomas Friedman, Maureen Dowd And Frank Rich – Does Barack Obama Need Enemies?

By Clint Reilly

Forget the exhausted claims of “liberal bias”; the Times has a serious smugness problem on its hands. Even I – a life-long Democrat, Obama supporter, Times subscriber and daily reader – find the paper’s pomposity and orthodoxy difficult to stomach. An October 1 column on the Times op-ed page illustrates my point.

Noted Times columnist and best-selling author Thomas Friedman (The World Is Flat) was irate. The U.S. House of Representatives had just voted down the $700 billion bailout. Friedman fumed, smoke billowing from his column in great clouds:

“I’ve always believed America’s government was a unique political system – one designed by geniuses so it could be run by idiots. I was wrong. We have House members, many of whom I suspect can’t balance their checkbooks, rejecting a complex rescue package because some voters, whom I fear also don’t understand, swamped them with phone calls…”

No words more clearly illustrate the attitude of moral superiority and intellectual certainty that perfumes the op-ed pages of the New York Times.

Here, Friedman is typically incredulous.

Why, those ignorant plebeians had the gall to barrage their elected representatives with outrage! And worse, the sniveling politicians actually caved to the people’s wishes!

Isn’t this democracy at work?

Whether the bailout bill was good or bad is beside the point. Friedman’s depiction of the plan’s opponents as blithering imbeciles doesn’t even permit the legitimacy of alternative points of view, let alone their possible merit. And yet many noted economists and academics across the country and around the world expressed deep skepticism about the bailout package as it was constituted.

When a heavily revised bill came to the Senate floor on the eve of Friedman’s column, 10 conscientious Democratic senators still voted against the bailout, including respected names like Russ Feingold, Byron Dorgan, Mary Landrieu, Debbie Stabenow, Ron Wyden and Tim Johnson.

While Obama dashes around the country trying to reach out to voters with a message of unity, the Times’ haughty, predictable echo chamber on the op-ed page convinces Middle America that coastal voters really are elitist snobs.

Comments

Posted by: eryn at October 7, 2008 12:45 PM

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