The 2016 election
is over and, against all odds and expectations, the candidate all time most loathed by the New York Times columnists won. Worth a parting comment on the corruption of the NYT hacks who slobber about the endless virtue of their favorite Democrats is a pre-election column, with its typical smarmy condescension,
from the ever self-promoting columnist, Nicholas Kristof. “I'm with her: the Strengths of Hillary Clinton.” “So in this last column before the election I
want to pitch you the reasons to vote for
Clinton and not just against Donald
Trump. I’ve known Clinton a bit for many years, and I have to say: The public
perception of her seems to me a gross and inaccurate caricature. I don’t
understand the venom, the “lock her up” chants, the assumption that she is a Lady Macbeth; it’s an echo of the animus a
lifetime ago some felt for Eleanor Roosevelt.” http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/06/opinion/sunday/im-with-her-the-strengths-of-hillary-clinton.html?_r=0 l
Ok, reader, all of this Hillary negativity
nonsense over the years you’ve been exposed to is not real. Right at the start Kristof
wants you to be aware of and bow to his privileged, insider-club status – unlike
you, he knows her (“a bit”), just “a bit” of understatement for fake modesty purposes.
He wants to make sure you understand how connected he is, and for many years, no less. If I may, this is epistemological superiority by physical proximity – ‘What I know from socializing with her, trumps (no pun intended) what you know from observing her for 25 years from afar.’ The nonstop grifting, the scandals, the self-enrichment from influence peddling, as Kristof sees it, are overblown. We are talking venal, not mortal sins here.
He wants to make sure you understand how connected he is, and for many years, no less. If I may, this is epistemological superiority by physical proximity – ‘What I know from socializing with her, trumps (no pun intended) what you know from observing her for 25 years from afar.’ The nonstop grifting, the scandals, the self-enrichment from influence peddling, as Kristof sees it, are overblown. We are talking venal, not mortal sins here.
The invocation of Eleanor Roosevelt is quite the
slick maneuver – poof goes Hillary’s many documented iniquities – beatitude by
association. Long bequeathed with liberal
sainthood, that “animus a lifetime ago that some felt” for Mrs. Roosevelt way back when has just somehow annoyingly
echoed its way up to 2016. Stuff like
this normally happens. Not every one out there is as enlightened as they should
be. Kristof doesn’t even have to spell
out who that “some” is that felt this animus -- in Lady Roosevelt’s time it was
the reactionaries who opposed the New Deal and objected to Eleanor’s favorite
philo-communist, Henry Wallace; today, it is that “vast right wing conspiracy”
and Obama’s “bitter clingers” who never tire of defaming this woman who, as he
says, “is a morally serious person whose
passion for four decades has been to use politics to create a more just society.” She is also an avariciously serious person
who along with her husband has accumulated a vast fortune selling government influence
to high rollers, many of them from foreign countries. She is also a seriously hypocritical person
who slanders and bullies female victims of her husband while championing
herself as an advocate for women. See: http://fosterspeak.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-question-hillary-cannot-answer.html
It is also worth noting here that Kristof has a
certain blindness for fakers. “In 2014, Newsweek revealed
that Somaly Mam—the Cambodian anti-trafficking crusader endorsed by Nicholas
Kristof, Sheryl Sandberg, and Susan Sarandon—lied about being sold into sexual
slavery as a child, the story that underpins her wrenching memoir, The Road
to Lost Innocence.” https://medium.com/galleys/greg-mortenson-disgraced-author-of-three-cups-of-tea-believes-he-will-have-the-last-laugh-760949b1f964#.c7gyfoakv Kristof
also continued to defend Greg Mortenson, author of Three Cups of Tea
after he was exposed as a fraud. “‘One
of the people I’ve enormously admired in recent years is Greg Mortenson,’Kristof
wrote in his April 20, 2011 column. While conceding that the accusations
against Mortenson ‘raised serious questions,’ Kristof countered that ‘it’s
indisputable that Greg has educated many thousands of children, and he has been
nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.’”https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-con-man-and-his-pet-columnist/
Being a fraud and a liar, for Kristof it
seems, doesn’t seem count too much against
you. In light of this, how seriously
should we take his endorsement of Hillary Clinton, widely distrusted by the
American people as a liar and a fraud?
Since Kristof likes to find “echos” of long ago,
raise your ears and catch this echo:
Nicholas Kristof as the Walter Duranty of the 21st century. Walter
Duranty, a British born journalist served as the Moscow bureau chief for the New York Times
from 1922 through 1936. Like Kristof, he
was a Pulitzer Prize winner. Duranty’s was bestowed for 13 articles written in
1931 and published in the New York Times
analyzing the Soviet Union under Stalin’s leadership. Unfortunately, these
articles were devoted to the crafting of a false image of Joseph Stalin as
someone whose obvious crudeness and brutality could be excused as the darker
side of of a great and determined man whose better instincts were focused on
the advancing the well being of toiling working class whose interests he
claimed to represent.
Duranty, like Kristof, was an insider with the power people. He “knew” Stalin "a bit" for many years. He witnessed Stalin’s show trials up close in
the mid-1930s in Moscow and confidently declared to The New Republic
after observing the 1937 trial that he found the confessions of the defendants
to be credible. [S.J. Taylor, Stalin’s Apologist:
Walter Duranty,
the New York Times’s Man in Moscow, Oxford, 1990, 267]
Like Kristof, Duranty was an
apologist for a dishonest, ruthless politician and served him (in Kristof's case, her) well. He was rewarded for his loyalty with what he
craved the most, proximity to a powerful man, the prestige and attention that
this proximity brings. His gratitude was
displayed by his eagerness to promulgate to the outside world a softened and
idealized image of Stalin. Duranty helped Stalin conceal from the outside world
a famine of his creation in Ukraine that plunged three to seven million people
into starvation, depending on varying accounts. “There is no actual
starvation or deaths from starvation but there is widespread mortality from
diseases due to malnutrition, especially in the Ukraine, North Caucasus and
Lower Volga” Duranty had written in 1933 at the time when people were
starving by the millions. [Taylor, Stalin’s Apologist,
207] The late Robert Conquest has written Harvest of Sorrow, the definitive account of Holomodor, Stalin’s Ukrainian holocaust.
https://www.amazon.com/Harvest-Sorrow-Soviet-Collectivization-Terror-Famine/dp/0195051807
And by the way, in the New York Times
executive offices hallway where over 80 portraits of Pulitzer Prize winners
hang, Duranty’s still resides with the inscription that the award recognized “a
profound and intimate comprehension of conditions in Russia [consistent with]
the best type of foreign correspondence.” [Douglas McCollam, CJR,
November/December, 2003, 43]
Back, however, to Duranty’s power-sucking echo in Kristof:
here, the court weasel does a bit of his own sycophantic softening: “Clinton has made thousands of compromises
and innumerable mistakes, her pursuit of wealth has been unseemly and
politically foolish, and it’s fair to question her judgment on everything from
emails to Iraq. But understand this, too: At the core she is not a calculating
crook but a smart, hard-working woman who is profoundly concerned with getting
things done for those left behind.” Again,
a very skillful touch. Hillary is not perfect (he has to make some nod to the
empirical world), and here comes the imperative: “But understand this” –
Kristof now is pulling rank on us. He
has the deep insight into her “core”, an interesting choice of words given that she is widely perceived to lack one. Perhaps the proximity she has
afforded him over the years has enabled him to peek into her soul – the cocktail parties, the interviews, the
hobnobbing. But, understand this: if Kristof was not an effusive bum-kisser, how close would he have ever been
able to get to this “seriously moral" woman and observe her core?
Kristof’s airbrushing of Hillary (who just like Stalin is all about bettering the toiling masses, the “left behind”) would be
incomplete without an obligatory final thrashing for The Donald. “[Trump] simply falls outside the norms: A
fraudster who seems a
racist, who has cheated people not only at Trump University but regularly
through his career, who boasts of sexual assaults and whom 17 women have
publicly accused of improper behavior, who has flip-flopped 138
times by one count, who lies every
five minutes by another, and who has less public service experience than
any incoming president in history.”
This could be a cut-and-paste from any of the hundreds of NYT and Washington Post editorial pieces over the last months. Every Republican candidate since Richard
Nixon has been routinely labeled by the Democrats and their shills who mascaraed
as independent journalists with the "old reliables" -- “Nazi”, “KKK-er”, “Fascist”, ad infinitum.
Kristof recently wrote a NYT column, “Is Everyone a Little
Bit Racist?” http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/28/opinion/nicholas-kristof-is-everyone-a-little-bit-racist.html?_r=0
What is to made of this? So, Kristof himself must be a little bit
racist? How then do Republicans and Trump differ from Democrats? What happens to the handy-dandy, old-reliable “racist” smears of NYT scribblers?
Don't waste your time trying to decipher Kristof's silly meanderings. His columns are a just reflection and verification of his status as a court lackey who recycles the prescribed PC bilge, a stooge who loves to hang out with important people and then brag about it to his credulous readers.
Kristof’s “racism” charge has become a word largely empty of specific meaning, used to condemn a critic as, well … a very bad person. “Racism” is a broad brush assault, perhaps unique in its smearing capacity in that, unlike with other kinds of allegations of moral or legal culpability, once charged, there is no way to demonstrate that you are not a racist. It is possible to prove that you are not a liar, a fool, a rapist, a robber, and a plagiarist; you can never effectively dispute the claim that you are a racist. No protest or evidence counts. Name one person who has ever been successful in doing it? Being a racist now is sort of like it was to have “cooties” back when you were in fifth grade. There was no remedy for the mysterious virus of cooties and you were deemed infected because someone decided that they didn’t like you.
Don't waste your time trying to decipher Kristof's silly meanderings. His columns are a just reflection and verification of his status as a court lackey who recycles the prescribed PC bilge, a stooge who loves to hang out with important people and then brag about it to his credulous readers.
Kristof’s “racism” charge has become a word largely empty of specific meaning, used to condemn a critic as, well … a very bad person. “Racism” is a broad brush assault, perhaps unique in its smearing capacity in that, unlike with other kinds of allegations of moral or legal culpability, once charged, there is no way to demonstrate that you are not a racist. It is possible to prove that you are not a liar, a fool, a rapist, a robber, and a plagiarist; you can never effectively dispute the claim that you are a racist. No protest or evidence counts. Name one person who has ever been successful in doing it? Being a racist now is sort of like it was to have “cooties” back when you were in fifth grade. There was no remedy for the mysterious virus of cooties and you were deemed infected because someone decided that they didn’t like you.
Kristof is the complete NYT columnist package – self-promoting,
condescending and a tool for the rich and powerful. No thoughtful person should take him
seriously.
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