Is Rupert Murdoch trying to make us feel better about newspapers' steady slide into extinction?

by Ken

I guess working for Rupert Murdoch means never having to say you're sorry -- unless maybe you do something that causes the boss to lose a chunk o' cash.

Now trust me, I fret over this Yankee season. I wish it were harder to count the number of times I've gotten home late and tuned into a game in progress, only to find the Yanks down by, say, six runs, at a time when even a one-run deficit is generally hard for them to make up.

I can even see how, under normal circumstances, the "RIP" gravestone could have been a clever way to put a punctuation mark on this disappointing season. But if there's one day when, unfortunately, you can't do it, it's when your other major story is about a lunatic walking into Arkansas Democratic Party headquarters and shooting the state party chairman.

I notice that, according to the Washington Post website, that paper's story on the Arkansas shooting was tucked away on page A4. Of course, the New York Post's front-page placement may have had something to do with its deck for the story: "Clinton friend killed." Are we to guess that if the late Bill Gwatney hadn't been "a close friend of Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton," as he's described in the story lead, his murder wouldn't have been front-page material?

With regard to the assassin's motive, we still have no more than a clue -- that he had just been fired from his job at a Target store (and not, as was being speculated yesterday in the wake of the shooting, at one of the car dealerships owned by the victim), for writing graffiti on a store wall. Naturally the fact that the guy sought out the chairman of his state Democratic Party, coming two and a half weeks after the Knoxville, Tennessee, Unitarian church shoot-up by a certified right-wing loonie apparently expressly set on murdering liberals, has a lot of us wondering if there isn't something more important about Bill Gwatney's identity than that he was "a close friend of Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton."

Are we in fact witnessing the opening rounds of a reign of violence by the brain-challenged subjects/objects/victims of the Right-Wing Noise Machine? Of course we don't know much yet about the Arkansas loony. And since he was shot dead by police returning his fire after what seems to have been a pretty wild car chase, we're not going to find out any more from him.

But the right-wing loons don't seem to have had any trouble connecting the dots. Yesterday the wingnuttiest of the blogging wingnuts were in full preemptive damage-control screech over the way we liberals were bound to exploit this latest episode. Incredibly, there were even "aren't we victims?" references to the Oklahoma City bombing, despite the facts that:

* the immediate, no-facts-based assumption by both the Right-Wing Noise Machine and its fraternal affiliate, the American Infotainment Media, was that the bombing was the work of Arabs;

* the crime was in fact perpetrated by certified American far-right-wing loonies;

* and those same media halfwits managed to fail to impress upon the country the essential connection that the bombing was in fact the work of authentic home-grown right-wing domestic terrorists.

Michelle Malkin, that useless pile of puke who seems not to have a sane or decent cell in her diseased brain, and whose only reason for drawing breath appears to be to spew lies and delusions sufficiently vast, vicious, and hate-fomenting to produce a climate of murderous rage, responded in classic Malkin-esque form yesterday, as reported by our pal Gavin M at Sadly, No:

Somebody sent me an email blaming my so-called 'hate' for this horrible act of violence against a Democrat Party liberal. Here is that person's full name and unredacted email address.

(Gavin presented this as "Shorter Michelle Malkin: I shot the Arkansas Democrat Party chairman.")

I think back to when the American Orthodox rabbis of the extreme right produced a months-long drumbeat of incitement to the assassination of Israeli Prime Minster Yitzhak Rabin, including providing biblical and talmudic justifications, even mandates, for Rabin's murder, and then threw up their hands in innocent amazement that anyone should point at them when the prime minister was assassinated by one of their faithfully ultra-Orthdox crazies. (Seen here: the Mount Herzl graves of Leah and Yitzhak Rabin.)

To return to the NYP, I can see that the sports guys who dreamed up their "RIP" for the Yankee season, complete with artwork, were so pleased with their cleverness that they just couldn't let it go. I'm sorry for them that its intended publication happened to coincide with the story of a real-life assassination. But, as they say, them's the breaks. I'm not sure how much it would have helped to move the Yankee story to the tabloid paper's back cover, which is always devoted to sports anyway -- the two covers, after all, are not only physically on the same sheet of newsprint but in effect a "set."

To be sure, there are a lot of fans who live and die with the ups and downs of the Yankees' season. Nevertheless, it's just a game. A jobless crazy man taking out his craziness on a political leader -- that's something else.

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