There’s conceit, there’s pomposity, and then there’s the New York Times editorial board. Yesterday, the Gray Lady wiggled her well-connected bottom, cocked a leg authoritatively, and let her hotly anticipated Democratic primary endorsement rip through cyberspace. ‘In a break with convention,’ declared the board, breaking wind with tradition, ’the editorial board has chosen to endorse two separate Democratic candidates.’
What? Hold the front page! No wait, they already have!
This is big news — at least it is in the la-la land of elite legacy media. Nobody in the real world will take much notice, of course, beyond those of us who feel disgusted by the nauseating arrogance and weak-mindedness behind the paper’s feminist grandstanding. We all know, in our hearts, that the NYT‘s support for Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar will do nothing to boost their respective candidacies. If anything, it will further harm two already struggling women contenders by making them seem even more elitist and out-of-touch — another great example of the way in which perforative feminism ends up destroying that which it claims to advance. Most voters will just see two more supposedly radical progressives with whom ultra-rich New Yorkers feel comfortable.
The Times was never going to never going to endorse Bernie Sanders, of course — since he’s a radical who actually means what he says. The hostility towards him in the transcript of the board’s interview with him is palpable. In its verdict, the board said of Sanders: ‘Three years into the Trump administration, we see little advantage to exchanging one over-promising, divisive figure in Washington for another…good news, then, that Elizabeth Warren has emerged as a standard-bearer for the Democratic left.’
Never mind that Warren’s record as a standard bearer of the Democratic left is patchy, to put it mildly. She’s, er, a woman.
As for Biden, the Democratic front-runner in the polls, the board airily dismissed him with the following: ‘merely restoring the status quo will not get America where it needs to go as a society…good news, then, that Amy Klobuchar has emerged as a standard-bearer for the Democratic center.’
So there: the paper has chosen a phony lefty in Warren because it didn’t want to endorse the leading radical, Bernie Sanders, and an even phonier centrist in Klobuchar in place of Joe Biden. ‘May the best woman win,’ the board concluded, with a whimper.
The whole silliness of the Times’s intervention into the whole Democratic primary can be summed up by one exchange between Biden and the board during his Q and A session, as written up on the Times’s website. Biden says: ‘I made a big mistake in the criminal justice side when I — it’s easy to forget it now — but when, all of a sudden, crack was introduced as a great threat to the United States of America. And the guy who did it is a great guy, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, he pointed out it was coming from the Bahamas, and this was going to … ‘
The paper here interjects: ‘To clarify, Sen. Moynihan did not introduce crack to the United States.’ Dear board, thanks: where would we be without you?
The whole process behind what the paper back-pattingly called ‘The Choice’ was ridiculous. The board set up the Democratic nomination as if it were a job interview for Progress Inc. They are the bigwigs who get to decide who gets the gig. Ironically, the format of ‘The Choice’ was not unlike Donald Trump’s reality show, The Apprentice — except about a thousand times more boring, and instead of the Donald front and center, you had a group of outrageously self-important media people. No ‘You’re fired’ here: more ‘You’re endorsed, Liz, because you are a woman on the left. Oh, and so are you, Amy, because you are a woman on the center.’ James Bennet, the editorial page director, had to recuse himself from the process because his brother Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado is running in 2020. With him, apparently, went any attempt at sanity. Good news, then, that nobody much cares.
