Kudo to the Times

For many, many moons I have been wanting to throw the LA Times onto the trash heap of history, or at least cancel our subscription. But noooo, Lee wants the crossword puzzles, so it still invades my presence every day and the best I can do is throw it away unread (after Lee, “the Methodist,” does the puzzles).

Today, however, I was induced to go outside and retrieve it from the blue bin before the trash was picked up. Dennis Prager was taking on the radio about the new Times opinion section, now called Current, and how it now contains a smattering of conservative views.

Indeed, there was Dennis himself on page M2 telling about the role of the Jews as the canary in the mine shaft, warning the civilized world of impending danger. The Jewish canary senses anti-Semitism, “the most accurate predictor of an evil that humanity will have to fight.” The most recent evil is Islamism, the ideology that is “obsessed with annihilating the one Jewish state, an obsession analogous to that of the Nazis.”

Another opinion piece that I liked was by Govindini Murty explaining the Hollywood box office blues. Murty targets the Hollywood ruling liberal elites who “keep going out of their way to offend half their audience.” I would argue that it is well over half. Besides, it’s mostly garbage anyway.

I was also surprised by the “By the Numbers” column that addressed the fearsome Patriot Act. In 2004 there were 7,136 civil rights complaints to the Justice Dept. and only 1 was related to the Patriot Act. One!

So I give the LA Times one kudo.

Then I read today’s Times, just to see if they could be fair/balanced two days in a row. Too bad! Today’s editorial began with the sentence:

"The helicopter crash in Afghanistan that killed eight Navy SEALs last month was the worst single-day death toll in the proud unit's history."

Here is what Hugh Hewitt had to say.

"The crash did in fact kill eight SEALs, and it also took the lives of eight Army special operations men, and three more SEALs were dead on the ground and one wounded."

"There is no reason for an opening line so incomplete as that except that the writer, and his or her editors, didn't know what happened and couldn't be bothered to find out. The point was to bleed Bush by marrying the loss of American life in Afghanistan and British life in London and underscoring the fact that bin Laden remains on the loose. It is one thing to prove yourself a fool by employing the "diversion" argument, but it takes a knave or knaves to pimp dead heroes to try to score a political point."

I’ll take my kudo back.