Worst bleats of the year
Earlier this month I noted that New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. had won the Media Research Center's "quote of the year" award for unhinged liberal inanity. Sulzberger won for an apology: not the apology he should have made -- to the Times' shareholders -- but to a college graduating class, to whom he bleated:
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. You weren’t supposed to be graduating into an America fighting a misbegotten war in a foreign land. You weren’t supposed to be graduating into a world where we are still fighting for fundamental human rights, whether it’s the rights of immigrants to start a new life, or the rights of gays to marry, or the rights of women to choose. You weren’t supposed to be graduating into a world where oil still drove policy and environmentalists have to fight relentlessly for every gain. You weren’t. But you are. And for that, I’m sorry.
By no means did Sulzberger run away with the award, though. Brent Bozell, who heads the Media Research Center, points to some of the top runner-up quotes here. Linda Greenhouse, also of the Times, came in second. She complained at Harvard (something about talking to college kids must inspire guilt-soaked juvenility in aging journalists and their enablers) that the promise of '60s America was squandered as our government created "law-free zones at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Haditha and other places around the world. And let's not forget the sustained assault on women's reproductive freedom and the hijacking of public policy by religious fundamentalism." Greenhouse then revealed how all of this had caused her to weep uncontrollably through the second half of a Simon and Garfunkel concert.
CBS, with the help of ex-employee Dan Rather, gave the Times a run for its money. Rather asserted that he believes in his phony Bush National Guard memo story "absolutely." And his successor, Katie Couric, placed three quotes in the top flight (though she uttered two of them at NBC). In what I consider the "best" of three, she told Al Gore that his movie on global warning showed that he was "funny, vulnerable, disarming, and self-effacing;" noted how unfortunate it was that America didn't see that side of him in 2000; and expressed concern that global warming would cause "even Manhattan [to be] in deep water."
Most of us have good years and bad years, but the liberal MSM never fails to deliver.
