"...this effete, cowardly warmonger..."

A post by Walter C. Uhler and his letter to The Gray Lady on its stupefying decision to hire the neocon Kristol:

The final straw for me, however, was the December 30, 2007 decision by the Times to hire William Kristol (editor of the Weekly Standard) as a columnist. Although the Times calls Kristol a conservative, he is, in fact, a notorious neoconservative - a member of a political cult that many traditional conservatives disavow. Readers who noticed this Orwellian elision by the Times might also recall that in January 1998, Kristol (and Robert Kagan) wrote an Op Ed titled, "Bombing Iraq isn't Enough," which the Times was reckless enough to publish.

Reckless? Yes, because, as Robert Parry has observed: "Under principles of international law applied from Nuremberg to Rwanda, propagandists who contribute to war crimes or encourage crimes against humanity can be put in the dock alongside the actual killers." [Consortium News, Posted August 21, 2006] Simply recall that, under international law, the unprovoked invasion of another sovereign state is considered the most egregious of war crimes.

Having cancelled my subscription, I then sent the following email to the Times' Executive Editor and the VP for Circulation:

"I canceled my subscription to the New York Times -- with prejudice -- a few minutes ago. I've terminated my decades-long subscription because somebody at the Times made the immoral decision to hire William Kristol -- as close to a war criminal as a so-called "journalist" can become. You see, I can have nothing further to do with such a morally tainted newspaper. It's a matter of principle.

You might use this moment to reflect on how the reporting by Judith Miller (AKA stenography for Perle and Chalabi) and your editorial decision to delay reporting on Bush's illegal wiretaps contributed to America's poor moral standing around the world. Now, with the hiring of effete coward and warmonger Kristol, who (possessing any morals at all) can consider the Times to be anything but a whore?

I will use my website to inform my thousands of readers about your immoral decision and I will exhort them to cancel their subscriptions as well.

Sincerely,
Walter C. Uhler

And we will similarly report it to our dozens of valued readers, Walt.

After all, simply consider that, ten years after the end of World War II, the editor of Das Schwarze Korps, Nazi SS leader Gunter d'Alquen, was fined 60,000 Deutsch Marks, "deprived of all civic rights for three years and debarred from drawing an allowance or pension from public funds. He was found guilty of having played an important role in the Third Reich, of war propaganda, inciting against the churches, the Jews and foreign countries, and incitement to murder." [Wikipedia, see also Saul Friedlander, Nazi German and the Jews, Volume I, pp. 311-313]

Think about it: If you do something similarly egregious in Bush's Amerika, you get your own column at the New York Times.

I think the "newspaper of record" is fast on it its way to becoming most useful as "newspaper of puppy training". No harm in that until the pup learns to read.

The flip side, of course, is Paul Krugman and "Pops" Rich, both of whom I admire, and MoDo, for whom 'admire' is not exactly the right word. Heh. I wonder if any of them will comment on Kristol's hire.