Good comment, although I think discerning willfully false from honestly confused is difficult. In the long run it is probably irrelevant as well: whether we are run down by a clueless drunk driver or a psychotic murderer doesn’t make much difference in the final result. Even if the folks at the paper of record were “honestly confused” they were ideologically drunk and negligent.

I was in a public amusement park for young kids yesterday when the public address system announced a missing four year old child. This is in a very cosmopolitan area filled with people of all races, in probably not the best part of the city and immediately adjacent to a public park. The announcer told us the age, sex, hair color and a description of the child’s shirt. A visually critical piece of information would have been the child’s race, of course, but naturally we didn’t hear that. We don’t know if the child was found.

The relevance to the current context is this, though: does it really matter whether the announcer’s negligence in leaving off one of the top physical descriptors of the endangered child was self-conscious or unselfconscious? Isn’t the “unselfconscious” claim just a lame excuse for gross ideological negligence?

Matt, I would say the difference between the announcer’s behavior being negligent or deliberate, or the difference between the Times being honestly confused or willfully dishonest, is like the difference between liberalism and leftism. Liberalism and leftism are different degrees of the same thing, but sometimes the difference of degree becomes a difference of kind. When the Times did an editorial on a black man who had been shot by police and made it sound as though the cops just rolled up in their cars and began shooting, when in fact they had approached the man and then shot him in response to his perceived actions, that was not the Times being honestly confused, that was the Times deliberately suppressing the factual record. When Maureen Dowd altered a quote of President Bush to make it look as though he had said Al Qaeda was “no longer a problem,” when in fact he had said that the top Al Qaeda leaders whom we had captured or killed were no longer a problem, that was a deliberate act, not honest confusion. (The latter is proved by the fact that neither she nor the Times have retracted it.)

By the way, that’s a memorable anecdote about the amusement park. It’s one thing for media organs to suppress the race of a criminal suspect—they don’t want to stigmatize certain groups, and all that. But what possible reason would there be to suppress the race of a lost child? It’s that you’re not supposed to notice or say anything about people’s race. Race doesn’t exist. Only bad people think it does.

A conservative saying that the Times is honestly confused, is like a conservative saying that affirmative action is bad because it harms blacks. In each case, the conservative assumes that the Times’ editors, or blacks, share the same moral system as the conservative himself. The conservative assumes that we are still living in a unified country, because he needs to think that America is essentially just fine as it is. He can’t afford to face the fact that the leftist attack on America, and the black rejection of white America and its standards, have meant the end of that unified country; and that if we are to have that unified America again, we have to win it back.

Sure. I guess the reality of our situation is that we are surrounded (metaphorically) by clueless drunk drivers and psychotic murderers since liberalism dominates all respectable political discussion. It isn’t that there is no distinction between the clueless drunk drivers and the psychotic murderers; its just that stopping to make the distinction can be distracting from the more urgent matter of chambering the next round.

Matt’s point is well taken.

But remember that I was initially making the distinction between the clueless and the criminal in my response to Jenkins, because he, writing for the Wall Street Journal, believed that the New York Times was merely clueless, and therefore subject to rational correction, rather than criminal. In fact, the only clueless one here was Jenkins himself.

Which, by the way, proves my point that there really are clueless liberals as distinct from criminal leftists. :-)