BizPac Review

Boston bomber’s politics too ‘complicated’ for New York Times

April 21, 2013 by Joe Saunders 5 Comments

The spin started even before the last bodies were cold, as the professional liars of American journalism tried to fog up the ideology of the men behindBoston massacre II.

Take Saturday’s New York Times piece by graphics-editor-turned-columnist Charles Blow.

Blow somehow managed to describe Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a young man who happens to be a Muslim, who happens  to be an angry denouncer of Israel, who happens to have radically left-wing sympathies, and conflate him with a college Republican fresh out of a libertarian seminar.

(A word of warning – actually, Blow’s word of warning: “It’s complicated.” In Times-speak, that means, “nothing I’m about to say will make a hair of sense, but allow me convince you that what you’re seeing isn’t true.”)

As Blow puts it:

“His politics seemed jumbled. He was apparently a 9/11 Truther … on Election Day he retweeted a tweet from Barack Obama … But on March 20 he tweeted, ‘Evil triumphs when good men do nothing.’ This sounds like a take on a quote from Edmund Burke, who is viewed by many as the founder of modern Conservatism.”

So, Tsarnaev thought Bush rigged the Twin Towers to fall. He celebrated Obama’s re-election. But because he tweets some half-remembered quote that has become part of the cliché canon, according to Blow, his politics “seemed jumbled.”

Even as pretzel logic, it’s half-baked.

What’s interesting about this is that Blow’s column was in Saturday’s paper, meaning it was almost certainly written while “Suspect No. 2” was still running loose. The bloodshed wasn’t even over, then, before the propaganda was being written.

“To see what is in front of one’s nose requires a constant struggle,” George Orwell once wrote of the fogginess of left-wing intellectuals deliberately misshaping reality to conform to their perverse perceptions.

The New York Times — and its dishonest ilk elsewhere – work that quote backwards, though. They would have us instead struggle constantly to avoid seeing what’s directly in front of our nose.

But as the man said, “It’s complicated.”