Powerline on the Times and McCain

John of Powerline continues to take apart the filthy New York Times’ filthy series by Deborah Sontag and Lizette Alvarez on the supposedly disproportionate number of murders committed by Iraq veterans. Even the Times now admits that there was no story there. A case can be made—I myself have felt that way for a long time—that the people who write and edit the New York Times are the lowest people in America.

And let’s also remember in passing that the Times endorsed John McCain, and that McCain sought their endorsement, the only GOP candidate to do so.

On the subject of McCain, it continues to be interesting to watch Paul of Powerline, in his low-key judicious way, discuss the Arizona egotist. While he’s not exactly against McCain, and not for him either, he does state clearly that McCain smeared Mitt Romney when he charged that Romney had urged a withdrawal from Iraq.

There is however a part of Paul’s personality that is less than judicious: his apparent pleasure at having any connection with the powerful or the famous, no matter how tangential or meaningless the connection may be. He writes:

A WORD OF THANKS to Real Clear Politics for including this post in the early morning update, and right above a piece by Caroline Kennedy (endorsing Barack Obama). I never thought my name would appear on the same page as Caroline Kennedy’s.

Now it’s possible that Paul is being ironic here, and that he finds it funny that his name would appear on the same page as that of a Kennedy, given their differences of opinion. The problem with that interpretation is that irony is not his style in general, and that irony is especially unlikely in this instance as it would be undercutting his “Thanks” to Real Clear Politics. So what this looks like to me, especially as it fits a pattern of behavior I’ve noted before (here and here are two past instances of Paul and his colleagues’ inordinate identification with the famous), is that Paul cannot suppress his thrill that on a web page listing scores of articles, his article happened to appear next to that of the unremarkable daughter of a U.S. president who died 45 years ago.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 28, 2008 02:04 AM | Send