dcwhip

or: The NYT Successfully Unites GOP, Lights up Airwaves, and Makes Me Skip the Paper this Morning. It’s still sitting on our front stoop.  Unfortunately, no one else has taken it either.

It’s not every day I find myself defending conservative candidates and lambasting the Gray Lady, but for once, I find myself agreeing not only with the good folks at Red State - this is all much ado about nothing - but I’m waiting on EiC Bill Keller’s apology.

Last I checked, it was the job of our major media outlets to provide us with (a) news and (b) a clear approach to A. Read: It’s not the Times’ job to suggest anything. It’s their job to elucidate all which I did not yet know, every morning, with everything that’s fit to print.

And the Keller-McCain Scandal is anything but. It’s so not fit to print that I’m I’m re-dubbing it; McCain didn’t do anything close to as much scandal as Bill Keller did by publishing it - and defending it.

NPR interviewed Keller about yesterday’s story. Keller:

“He came back from Vietnam a hero, entered into public life and then was felled by the Keating Five scandal,” Keller says. “If you read his books, it was clearly a humiliating event for him. And he subsequently built his political life on themes of redemption, reform, you know, rectitude, if you will — and became the scourge of lobbyists, the champion of campaign finance reform, and so on, in Washington.”

“Yet, according to some people who knew him best, he can be surprisingly careless about his reputation,” Keller says. “And that’s what I think this, his relationship with this particular lobbyist, illustrates, although I think there’s a lot of other illustrations as well in the piece.”

I’ll tell you, Mr. Keller, exactly what this illustrates to me. That for once in my moderately young life, I’d be making my grandfather proud because I’m about to agree with Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham: drive-by-media turning on its once-favorite maverick.

The result? The NYT has now done what I thought only a Clinton campaign capable of: they’ve united the Right. Rush:

In fact, the theory last night, most people’s predictions last night was that this was going to finally rally conservatives to McCain. McCain couldn’t do it himself, but that the New York Times could and the Drive-By Media. I got some e-mails, “That’s it, Rush, I hadn’t planned on voting for McCain, but I’m going to send him some money now. I’m not going to sit here and let the New York Times destroy my candidate.”

Looky, the GOP’s got itself a candidate and they’re rallying around him. NB: It makes my stomach turn to agree with Rush Limbaugh (whose website’s banner actually features a picture of Rush himself smoking a Cuban… and yes, I’m sure they’re laughing about that).

Is that what the Times was going for? Oh, no. It’s nuance. Nuance is what they’re going for. Again, Keller:

“I think the story that emerged is actually bigger, and more important and maybe more subtle,” he says. “There’s not a big market for subtle these days but I think it’s an important story.”

Unless it’s an Op-Ed, with “opinion” big and bold before the byline, it’s not the purvey of the Times to go about discussing nuance. Reporting it, sure, with solid facts and figures that add up to more than conjectures that don’t look so good. And make no mistake. What they’re reporting is the importance of “how things look.” And I don’t know about them, but I was raised to think that it’s not how things look, but how things are that matters. And that’s something Washington needs a real injection of - reality. There’s change I can believe in.

Can they ship that to New York?