NY Times: Veterans are Dangerous and Bear Considerable Watching

The New York Times in this editorial furthers the ticking-time-bomb meme that they have done so much to create. They argue that veterans are such damaged goods that we must be registered and tracked by government agents. 

You know, like they don't want al-Qaeda operators to be. 

But it's for our own good. Otherwise, we might kill ourselves (or somebody else, they hint darkly).

Of course, this is the same New York Times that assured us that the Khmer Rouge were idealistic agrarian reformers, and that Cambodians would be much better off under Pol Pot. How'd that work out? The same Times that worked hand-in-glove with Castro to conceal that he was a Communist. And that still proudly displays a Pulitzer they took for running Stalin's propaganda under their own reporter's byline. 

Why does the Times hate veterans so? I explain overleaf... with an example from this editorial to illuminate things.   (And why do they love dictators and strongmen? I have an answer for that too, but not this time).

The principal reason that the editors of the Times loathe and fear Veteran-Americans is that they don't know any. That has as much to do with their hiring practices as their social circles. With one group that's an exception, they hire graduates from a short list of schools; their entire editorial staff comes from a mere dozen or so institutions. 

The exception? The Times's "diversity" program. You might think that they were looking for diverse viewpoints, but that's not the case; they're acutely aware that they're a mostly white, mostly male, mostly Ivy League crowd and they are eager to find some token nonwhite, nonmale, Ivy Leaguers to match. They have expanded their token-outreach in desperate quest of reporters who are plussed-up in melanin, or who can reasonably fake being part American Indian (even before casinos made in a lucrative racket, the fakes in white mediacademic circles -- think Ward Churchill -- outnumbered the real natives). 

This program hasn't been working out really well for them, as its two most prominent hires, Jayson Blair and Charlie LeDuff, have proven to be a serial fabricator and a serial plagiarist respectively. Blair they fired, but with so many white Timesmen (Fox Butterfield for instance) as crooked as LeDuff, they kept him on... besides, there's no real proof he's Indian -- he might be a white guy too! 

The problem with Ivy League black people is that lots of firms want to hire them, and most of the outfits trying to do so are doing something more important than the New York Times. Do you want to change the world, or would you rather write stories about the quiet, desperate lives of TriBeCa neurotics? So they have to reach further down into the pool. For Blair, they reached so far down that he wasn't even a college graduate. Still isn't, I believe. But he was "articulate" (the Ivy League white liberal's favorite term of condescension towards the swarthier element). 

If you can't find people who meet your standards, Pinch says, lower your standards. So they reached bottom and have been drilling for skin-deep diversity ever since.

But there are millions for trendy skin shades, not one cent for someone who knows something of war firsthand. (Times war reporting doesn't need that -- it's done from hotels, transcribing whatever local stringers tell you). 

What does hiring the Ivy League get you? Well, in this editorial it got you this dismissal of veterans' privacy: 

It is an eminently good thing ... to keep track of veterans .... But that’s to care for them as human beings, under that other constitutional right — to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Uh-huh. Constitutional rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Except, of course, that's not from anywhere at all in the Constitution. As every home-schooled kid knows, it's from the preamble to the Declaration of Independence. I suppose I shouldn't point it out to the Times's minions, most of whom went from private schools that stoked their self-esteem into Ivy League nurseries that enhanced it. I wouldn't want to burst their bubble... but given the resilience of that bubble to date, I don't think I need to worry about it. 

But it's pretty clear that the liberal arts program at Harvard or Yale is no longer an education. It's a pedigree. 

I'm sure everyone in the blogosphere will have fun with this one. Layers of editors! How's that working out for the Times? Not so good. Really, not so good.