…this is now. And what a difference a year…or…something…makes. A compare and contrast of the New York Times’ ever-flexible standards of what we need to know:
“The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted here.”–New York Times, on the Climategate emails, Nov. 20, 2009
“The articles published today and in coming days are based on thousands of United States embassy cables, the daily reports from the field intended for the eyes of senior policy makers in Washington. . . . The Times believes that the documents serve an important public interest, illuminating the goals, successes, compromises and frustrations of American diplomacy in a way that other accounts cannot match.”–New York Times, on the WikiLeaks documents
These are our principles, and if you don’t like them, we have others.
Pejman tries to talk sense to Andrew Sullivan. Just the latest example of why I delinked him years ago. And I agree that the word “neocon,” if it ever had any use, does no longer, except as a mindless epithet.
It’s possible that not all of the magazine’s archives are online, or that the search engine didn’t pick up every example. But hey, I at least made the effort, which is more than we can say for vanden Heuvel. Even if I missed a few, I think my point is made: Libertarians have been out in front on this issue from the start. And contra vanden Heuvel and Ames/Levine, not only was libertarian criticism not muted when a Republican occupied the White House, during that time libertarian journalists, wonks, and pundits did a damned sight better job covering TSA abuses, inefficacy, and theatrics than the The Nation.
The mindless criticism of the Koch brothers by those funded by George Soros is also simultaneously amusing and infuriating.
Is there any prominent person or editorial board (outside of the administration) on the left who made a huge stink about Valerie Plame’s outing who is remotely as horrified by the ongoing Wikileaks travesty?
The outrage is indeed selective.
What I want to know is why Wikileaks can’t get its hands on Obama’s college transcripts. Apparently, there are some secrets that the administration can keep.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Michael Ledeen actually kind of likes the leaks. Well, some of them are damaging to the terrorists. And it’s nice to see that the administration and State Department aren’t as utterly clueless in private as they are in public.
“The main thing was the way he said he hated Americans,” Stull said. “It was serious. He looked me in the eye and had this look in his eye, like it was his determination in life — ‘I hate Americans.'” Now that we have lots of guys named Mo, it probably makes sense to wonder how many of them share this Mo’s “determination in life.”
It’s a question that the multi-cultis don’t like to ask.
Should we make college more expensive? I agree with Glenn’s reader. Ending subsidies would actually reduce costs, and focus academics on the people who should really be in college. But it’s going to be very hard to break the back of the politician/media/academia industrial complex. But if any time is one to do it, it’s one of fiscal austerity on the part of the government. If we can defund CPB/NPR, that would be an indication that it’s time to go after this.
I think the answers are yes, and no. This artificial distinction between “genocide” and the mass murder on a grander scale by Stalin, Mao et al is just a means to distract from the fact that Hitler was not the worst man in history, and that his depredations were actually typical of the left.