The Republican campaign against the Times and a free press

Gene Lyons, as he so often does, hits just the right balance between recognizing that the New York Times has promoted shoddy journalism - from Whitewater to the War on Gore to Judith Miller's fake war propaganda - and realizing that the Republicans are using the Times as the bogeyman in a broader campaign against the free press.

He links to this article by Jon Carroll San Francisco Chronicle 06/29/06, in which Carroll suggests that choosing the New York Times for their accusations of treason, the Republicans had in mind that a lot of the "members of the president's base consider 'New York' to be a nifty code word for 'Jewish'."

Although I do find some plausibility in that suggestion, Lyons thinks the rabid base tends to conceive of The Enemy Within in different terms:

Anti-Semitism, as such, is old hat among True Believers on the extreme right. For years, the idea’s been percolating through the right’s well-organized propaganda apparatus that Democrats aren’t loyal Americans.

Regarding Ann Coulter’s ludicrous book, “Slander,” I once wrote that “the ‘liberal’ sins [she ] caricatures—atheism, cosmopolitanism, sexual license, moral relativism, communism, disloyalty and treason—are basically identical to the crimes of the Jews as Hitler saw them.” Michael Savage, Michael Reagan, Sean Hannity, Michelle Malkin, Rush Limbaugh and others peddle the same sterilized American update of an ancient slur. Limbaugh recently called 80 percent of Times subscribers “jihadists.” Now the Bush White House, desperate to prevail in 2006 congressional elections, has taken up the cry. Reasonable people never want to believe that extremists believe their own rhetoric. But quit kidding yourselves. This is mass psychosis. The next terrorist strike, should it happen, will be blamed on the enemy within: treasonous “liberals” who dissent from the glorious reign of George W. Bush. Unless confronted, it’s through such strategems that democracies fail and constitutional republics become dictatorships. (my emphasis)

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