Free Republic

Longtime New York Times columnist Bob Herbert announced Friday that he was leaving The Times to contribute to a vague new progressive media endeavor. Herbert began writing for The Times in 1993. Jeremy Peters wrote in the Media Decoder section of The Times that Herbert “was known for his combative style, blunt language and progressive politics.” “I am leaving The New York Times and the rewards and rigors of daily journalism with the intent of writing more expansively and more aggressively about the injustices visited on working people, the poor and the many others in our society who find themselves...

To the streets, Americans! We need to make the US more like . . . Egypt! That's the thrust of Bob Herbert's hysterical rant in today's New York Times. His notion is that while democracy is flourishing in Egypt, it is weakening here to the extent that [emphasis added]: "we’re in serious danger of becoming a democracy in name only." Money in politics is Herbert's predictable culprit, with "the endlessly egregious Koch brothers" serving as his bogeymen-in-chief. So where does Herbert head for a solution? Why, to the late, self-described democratic socialist historian Howard Zinn, of course. Here's how Herbert...

There is a middle-class tax time bomb ticking in the Senate’s version of President Obama’s effort to reform health care. The bill that passed the Senate with such fanfare on Christmas Eve would impose a confiscatory 40 percent excise tax on so-called Cadillac health plans, which are popularly viewed as over-the-top plans held only by the very wealthy. In fact, it’s a tax that in a few years will hammer millions of middle-class policyholders, forcing them to scale back their access to medical care. Which is exactly what the tax is designed to do. The tax would kick in on...

There is a middle-class tax time bomb ticking in the Senate’s version of President Obama’s effort to reform health care. The bill that passed the Senate with such fanfare [...] would impose a confiscatory 40 percent excise tax on so-called Cadillac health plans, which are popularly viewed as over-the-top plans held only by the very wealthy. In fact, it’s a tax that in a few years will hammer millions of middle-class policyholders, forcing them to scale back their access to medical care. Which is exactly what the tax is designed to do. The tax would kick in on plans exceeding...

The big question on the domestic front right now is whether President Obama understands the gravity of the employment crisis facing the country. Does he get it? The signals coming out of the White House have not been encouraging. The Beltway crowd and the Einsteins of high finance who never saw this economic collapse coming are now telling us with their usual breezy arrogance that the Great Recession is probably over. Their focus, of course, is on data, abstractions like the gross domestic product, not the continued suffering of living, breathing human beings struggling with the nightmare of joblessness. Even...

Vice President Joe Biden told us this week that the Obama administration “misread how bad the economy was” in the immediate aftermath of the inauguration. Puh-leeze. Mr. Biden and President Obama won the election because the economy was cratering so badly there were fears we might be entering another depression. No one understood that better than the two of them. Mr. Obama tried to clean up the vice president’s remarks by saying his team hadn’t misread what was happening, but rather “we had incomplete information.” That doesn’t hold water, either. The president has got the second coming of the best...

... There is no Obama gun ban on the way. Gun control advocates are, frankly, disappointed [so far]. What’s important to grasp here is that this madness has nothing to do with hunting, which the politicians always claim to be defending, and everything to do with the use of firearms to resist policies and lawful government actions that some gun owners don’t like. In a speech in February to the Conservative Political Action Conference, the executive vice president of the N.R.A., Wayne LaPierre, said: “Our founding fathers understood that the guys with the guns make the rules.” A new book...

When a New York Times columnist says Republicans are “out of touch,” it’s like Kim Jong-Il, the midget mental patient who runs North Korea, or Holocaust-denier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad saying someone needs a good dose of reality.

Does anyone know where George W. Bush is? You don’t hear much from him anymore. The last image most of us remember is of the president ducking a pair of size 10s that were hurled at him in Baghdad. We’re still at war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Israel is thrashing the Palestinians in Gaza. And the U.S. economy is about as vibrant as the 0-16 Detroit Lions. But hardly a peep have we heard from George, the 43rd. When Mr. Bush officially takes his leave in three weeks (in reality, he checked out long ago), most Americans will be content...

"I’ve gotten the scary feeling, for the first time in my life, that dimwittedness is not just on the march in the U.S., but that it might actually prevail." -- Bob Herbert, NYT, 9-13-08 Bob Herbert's item in today's New York Times, She's Not Ready, is not so much political analysis as a howl of MSM shock and outrage. No-o-o-o-o!, Herbert seems to cry. I can't believe this is happening to us! Meanwhile, with condescension worthy of Charlie Gibson, ABC's David Wright suggests that Palin has been in need of a "chaperone" on the campaign trail. View video.

Between this and last week’s Godwin-ing of the crowd scenes, I’m honestly curious to see where the left takes the critique next. One would think they’d either run out of cards to play or would quietly pocket the ones they have left lest they make themselves look more ridiculous, but each new day brings a fresh load of semiotic ore mined. It’s the “Ulysses� of campaign ads — the only limit on what it means is your own imagination. Still, Herbert’s reading warrants special mention, not only because it manages to be simultaneously exceedingly paranoid and pedestrian but because he...

Warning: excessive adulation of Barack Obama is harmful to the vision and and in extreme cases can even cause hallucinations. We're all familiar with how an Obamania overdose produced strange tingling sensations in Chris Matthews. A new, virulent strain of the malady has now surfaced, claiming its first victim in the person of Bob Herbert, who on live national TV claimed to see visions of the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Washington Monument where none existed. View video here.

My circle of friends lost a fine man, a husband and father of several children, to brain cancer not long ago. He fought with courage and optimism, and received fine treatment, but the disease simply proved too strong. I sympathize with the plight facing Ted Kennedy, his family and loved ones. That said, I cannot help but comment on Bob Herbert's NY Times column of this morning, Tears for Teddy. The gist is that this is but the latest of many challenges that Kennedy has faced. And it's certainly true that the senator's life has been touched by more than...

Bob Herbert: voice of reason? On economics and the role of government, no. On the dynamics of the Dem nomination race? Actually, yes. In both his TV appearances and columns, Herbert, an Army veteran who grew up largely in a comfortable New Jersey suburb, comes across as more clear-eyed and down-to-earth, less angry and ideological, than his NY Times confreres like Paul Krugman or Frank Rich. Take Herbert's column of this morning, Heading Toward the Danger Zone. My sense is that, at heart, Herbert backs Obama. But that doesn't deter the columnist from offering an unblinking assessment of the very...

"The opening of a trapdoor and the sudden snap of a hangman's noose at dawn yesterday brought an extraordinary end to a political era in Iraq." -- Opening line from The Guardian's report of the execution of Saddam, Dec. 31, 2006 "Senator Clinton never gave a second thought to opening the trap door beneath her fellow Democrat." -- Bob Herbert of the NYT, Confronting the Kitchen Sink, March 8, 2008 [emphasis added in both citations]. When Bill O'Reilly, in an impromptu response to a phone caller's question, said that he didn't want to "lynch" Michelle Obama, critics on the left...

Admission: over the course of my NewsBusting, I've actually developed a certain admiration for Bob Herbert. Not that I agree with virtually anything the NY Times columnist has to say, but that I appreciate his directness and the absence of the superfluous sarcasm that marks a number of his colleagues' work. That said, I offer up Herbert's column of this morning, "Where Are the Big Ideas?", as the epitome of wrong-headed liberal thinking. Herbert's complaint is that when it comes to the role of government, the presidential candidates aren't thinking big enough. Hillary and Obama's proposals to subject 1/7th of...

On the east and west coasts today, two liberal columnists unleashed a torrent of vitriol at Hillary and Bill Clinton. At the Los Angeles Times, contributing editor Jonathan Chait asked Is the right right on the Clintons? Consider these blistering excerpts [emphasis added]: * Something strange happened the other day. All these different people -- friends, co-workers, relatives, people on a liberal e-mail list I read -- kept saying the same thing: They've suddenly developed a disdain for Bill and Hillary Clinton. Maybe this is just a coincidence, but I think we've reached an irrevocable turning point in liberal opinion...

I applaud the thousands of people, many of them poor, who traveled from around the country to protest in Jena, La., last week. But what I’d really like to see is a million angry protesters marching on the headquarters of the National Republican Party in Washington. Enough is enough. Last week the Republicans showed once again just how anti-black their party really is. The G.O.P. has spent the last 40 years insulting, disenfranchising and otherwise stomping on the interests of black Americans. Last week, the residents of Washington, D.C., with its majority black population, came remarkably close to realizing a...

Was it a planned one-two punch? On Saturday, New York Times columnist Frank Rich declared that "we have lost in Iraq." Today, in The Time Is Now, his Times colleague Bob Herbert flatly calls for surrender. No conditions, no time-table. As Herbert starkly puts it: "it is time to pull the troops out of harm’s way."Herbert says "it is wrong to continue sending fresh bodies after those already lost." He raises the "moral question" of justifying "the lives that will be lost between now and the final day of our departure." But Herbert ignores another looming moral question: the lives...

New York’s anti-cop forces have roared back to life thanks to a fatal police shooting of an unarmed man a week ago. The press is once again fawning over Al Sharpton, Herbert Daughtry, Charles Barron, and sundry other hate-mongers in and out of city government as they accuse the police of widespread mistreatment of blacks and issue barely veiled threats of riots if they do not get “justice.” The allegation that last weekend’s shooting was racially motivated is preposterous. A group of undercover officers working in a gun- and drug-plagued strip joint in Queens had good reason to believe that...

Here at NewsBusters, the last thing we'd want to do is sow discord among the liberal house columnists of the New York Times. But present purposes oblige me to let Bob Herbert know that his colleague Maureen Dowd doesn't read his column. That's the only way to explain Dowd's claim in her column this morning that the people "tut-tutting" about Barack Obama's presidential ambitions are Republicans. According to Dowd, those mean GOP types are putting Obama down because of his lack of foreign policy experience. You, mean, Maureen, as in this statement?: "In an appearance on “Meet the Press”...

Reading their respective pay-per-view columns this morning, it's a measure of just how far out Paul Krugman is on the port side of politics that his New York Times colleague Bob Herbert sounds positively moderate by comparison.In The Obama Bandwagon Herbert expresses salutary - and surprising - caution when it comes to the current outbreak of Obama-mania: "It’s a measure of how starved the country is for a sensible, appealing, intelligent, trustworthy leader that a man who until just a couple of years ago was an obscure state senator in Illinois is now suddenly, in the view of an awful...

by Mark Finkelstein August 24, 2006 - 07:32 Talk about your culture clash! A hip hop music site juxtaposes a report on Bill Cosby's condemnation of that musical genre with news of the latest criminal doings of hip hop stars. AllHipHop.com bills itself as 'The World's Most Dangerous Site.' Currently up on the site is an article reporting a recent speech in which Cosby . . . "went on the offensive against rap music." States the article: "'They put the word 'nigga' in a song, and we get up and dance to it,' Cosby said. "The two-hour Coppin State University-hosted...

by Mark Finkelstein August 17, 2006 - 07:00 Here are the facts: On 9/11, the occupants of a hotel right across from the WTC flee their rooms. A hotel security guard informs the FBI that in the room-safe of an Egyptian hotel guest, he found an aviation radio. The radio could be used to communicate with airborne pilots. The Egyptian, Abdallah Higazy, who is attending college in the US, is arrested, and undergoes tough interrogation, including suggestions that his family could be subjected to investigation by Egyptian security. After offering various implausible stories, the Egyptian admits that the radio is...

Fellow Americans, there comes a time every mans life when we must give up ourselves before we are worthy to recieve. There comes a time in this war on terror when in order to protect liberty, we have to give it up in the mean time for safty. That's right folks. Today, Americans have forsaken the creator for the creation and have decided that they would value our "civil liberties" than protecting western civilization and rich white people from the tender mercies of radical Islamic terrorists. Selfish liberals insist and whine that Bush has no right to spy on Americans...

NYT Editorial Columnist, Bob Herbert It will take a new movement to bring about the changes in values and behavior needed to halt the self-destruction that is consuming so many black lives. To continue reading this article, you must be a subscriber to TimesSelect.

Jack Kelly: No shame The federal response to Katrina was not as portrayed Sunday, September 11, 2005 It is settled wisdom among journalists that the federal response to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina was unconscionably slow. Jack Kelly is national security writer for the Post-Gazette and The Blade of Toledo, Ohio (jkelly@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1476). "Mr. Bush's performance last week will rank as one of the worst ever during a dire national emergency," wrote New York Times columnist Bob Herbert in a somewhat more strident expression of the conventional wisdom. But the conventional wisdom is the opposite of the truth. Jason...

I remember the arrogance that accompanied the "shock and awe" bombing campaign that kicked off the war in Iraq more than two years ago. The war was supposed to be quick and easy, a cakewalk. The enemy, we were told, would fold like a dinner napkin. And then, in the neoconservative fantasies of some of the crazier folks in the Bush crowd, the military would gear up for an invasion of Iran. In one of the great deceptions in the history of American government, President Bush insisted to a nation traumatized by the Sept. 11 attacks that the invasion of...

  Few Men are Brave by NatureJune 2, 2005 Unnamed sources report that the NYT’s op-ed page reeks of tainted weenies.  In less time than it takes to digest a dirty water dog, the Times belched out three putridly namby-pamby “op-eds”.  The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene should rush over to the Times employee cafeteria and condemn it before any more damage is done.  What, besides an outbreak of food-poisoning, would induce the Times’ op-ed writers to put in print what should be deposited in their DEPENDS®. With the Times’ op-ed page spewing back-to-back polemic excrement from the...

Confession, they say, is good for the soul, and I have decided to end 2004 by giving mine a thorough dry-cleaning. For at least four decades, we conservatives have complained loudly that the major media in this country are biased in favor of the liberals. With the sole exception of the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal (its news pages are another matter), virtually every major source of information available to the American people has religiously followed the liberal line. The New York Times, The Washington Post, all three major television networks, and both newsmagazines (Time and Newsweek) have...

ARLINGTON, Va. The rows of simple white headstones in the broad expanses of brilliant green lawns are scrupulously arranged, and they seem to go on and on, endlessly, in every direction. It was impossible not to be moved. A soft September wind was the only sound. Beyond that was just the silence of history, and the collective memory of the lives lost in its service. Nearly 300,000 people are buried at Arlington National Cemetery, which is just across the Potomac from Washington. On Tuesday morning I visited the grave of Air Force Second Lt. Richard VandeGeer. The headstone tells us,...

"I am a Christian.... So, I have a deep faith. I'm rooted in the Christian tradition. I believe that there are many paths to the same place, and that is a belief that there is a higher power, a belief that we are connected as a people. "That there are values that transcend race or culture, that move us forward, and there's an obligation for all of us individually as well as collectively to take responsibility to make those values lived." Thus, U.S. Senate candidate for Illinois Barack Obama in a campaign contribution by Chicago Sun-Times columnist Cathleen Falsani. Obama's...

"The issues don't really matter," says one party fund-raiser. "This guy is the dream candidate." The Economist, July 15 With the June 25 announcement by conservative Republican Jack Ryan that he was dropping out of the U.S. Senate race for Illinois, and legendary Chicago Bears tight end/coach Mike Ditka's July 14 announcement that he would not serve as the sacrificial lamb of the corrupt, Illinois Republican Party leadership, the seat falls to Democrat candidate Barack Obama virtually by default. Meanwhile, in what is taking on the airs of a coronation, Obama has been chosen (while Hillary Clinton has been snubbed)...

OPINION -- With the June 25 announcement by conservative Republican Jack Ryan that he was dropping out of the U.S. Senate race for Illinois, the seat falls to Democrat candidate Barack Obama virtually by default. But who is Barack Obama? Is the charming, handsome, articulate 42-year-old state senator who dominated a field of six in the March 16 Democrat primary with 53 percent of the vote, the herald of a “new kind of politics” or merely a new voice calling for the same old, racist, urban welfare politics the Democrat Party has promoted for forty years? On June 4, New...

A recent news story about a mouse born to two “mommies” [1] suggested that the feminist fantasy of parthenogenesis, in which women would bear children without any “input” from men, might someday be realized. But New York Times columnist Bob Herbert [2] went the pc feminists at the ABC one better: On June 4, he suggested that Illinois politician Barack Obama was birthed by Obama’s father, without a female (what used to be called a “mother”) playing any role in the matter. O.K., Herbert didn’t actually say that, though he’s said things just as outrageous in the past. What he...

A recent news story about a mouse born to two “mommies” suggested that the feminist fantasy of parthenogenesis, in which women would bear children without any “input” from men, might someday be realized. But New York Times columnist Bob Herbert went the pc feminists at the ABC one better: On June 4, he suggested that Illinois politician Barack Obama was birthed by Obama’s father, without a female (what used to be called a “mother”) playing any role in the matter. O.K., Herbert didn’t actually say that, though he’s said things just as outrageous in the past. What he did was...

The New York Times is outraged that President Bush failed to breach his own heavy security, and inform its reporters and editors in advance of his secret Thanksgiving trip to visit with American G.I.s in Baghdad. The President also failed to inform the al Qaeda and Baathist leaderships, respectively, of his trip. Security was so tight for the trip, since otherwise Saddam-loyalists and terrorists active in Iraq would surely have attempted to assassinate the President. On November 22, enemy fighters armed with shoulder-fired missiles hit an A-300 DHL Express freight plane in the left wing, as it took off from...

Send In The Clowns The Jayson Blair story is over. As New York cops might say to crime-scene spectators, ‘Move along, there’s nothing to see.’ I know this, because Times columnist Frank Rich told me so. On June 15 (six-and-a-half weeks after Blair’s resignation), in an essay entitled “15 Minutes Became 5 Weeks,” Rich described the Blair scandal as a “mediathon,” not unlike the coverage of Martha Stewart, for whom Rich suddenly had great sympathy. Rich defined a mediathon as "a relentless hybrid of media circus, soap opera and tabloid journalism we have come to think of as All...

Send in the Clowns The Jayson Blair story is over. As New York cops might say to crime-scene spectators, ‘Move along, there’s nothing to see.’ I know this, because Times columnist Frank Rich told me so. On June 15 (six-and-a-half weeks after Blair’s resignation), in an essay entitled “15 Minutes Became 5 Weeks,” Rich described the Blair scandal as a “mediathon,” not unlike the coverage of Martha Stewart, for whom Rich suddenly had great sympathy. Rich defined a mediathon as "a relentless hybrid of media circus, soap opera and tabloid journalism we have come to think of as All...

Jayson Blair was the Great Black Hope. The white publisher of the New York Times, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., and Sulzberger's white executive editor, Howell Raines, were intent on creating the Great African-American Reporter, and Blair was their guy. No matter, that Sulzberger and Raines were 80 years late. The Great Negro Reporter had already come and gone. George S. Schuyler (1895-1977), whose career was ended by the civil rights movement whose most trenchant critic he was, was a self-made man, who needed no white philanthropist/image-makers to invent him. But that's a story for another day. In William McGowan's excellent book,...

<p>How desperate are the Democrats? Just listen to what they have to say.</p> <p>"If you like God in government, get ready for the rapture," Bill Moyers told his PBS audience the Friday after the election. Republicans will have "monopoly control" of the government, and will "turn their radical ideology into the law of the land." This means "forcing pregnant women to surrender control over the own lives," and "using the taxing power to transfer wealth from working people to the rich," as well as "giving corporations a free hand to eviscerate the environment."</p>