Kyle Smith-- New York Post Resident Crackpot

The caricature on the lower left is Grimm, who the Daily News just reported is announcing his resignation from Congress tomorrow or Wednesday

The NY Post's right-wing film critic is an entertaining, witty writer-- but a crackpot lamed and blinkered by his own sick, twisted ideology. He flies into rages when normal people point out that right-wing politics-- ultimately fascism-- can only be explained as pathology. Using the word "crazy" to explain "rightists" drives him insane. Last summer, he vomited it all up for his Post readers in a deranged screed attacking historian Rick Perlstein's newest book, The Invisible Bridge, which conservatives hate because of all the unvarnished, sacrilegious truth about Saint Ronnie-- and because wrote in a Rolling Stone column that "Loony conservatives are now the Republican mainstream, the dominant force in the GOP."

One of these words is not like the others (or maybe they’re all pretty much the same-- you make the call): Loon, nutjob, crank, wingnut, whackjob, cuckoo, crackpot, dingbat, wacko, conservative.

Can’t spot the outlier? You might be a liberal. Because even among the Very Serious and Highly Respected voices on the left, “conservative” and “crazy” are synonyms.

A recent example: A highly acclaimed book that examines the conservative movement in the 1970s, Rick Perlstein’s The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan. The book is the kind of thing that liberals praise as an evenhanded portrait of the Right. You know, kinda like how Super Size Me was totally fair about McDonald’s.

One liberal dissenter, Sam Tanenhaus, writing in The Atlantic, describes the book as implying “contempt not just for Nixon but for the public that eventually elected him president twice, the second time in one of the biggest landslides in history. For Perlstein, the mere fact of a President Nixon is explicable only as pathology. . . . Perlstein describes the centrist Nixon as the sole author of ‘the fracturing of America,’ who feasted on middle-American fears . . . even as he turned the federal government into a private militia.”

...Yet Perlstein is a liberal’s idea of “balanced” and someone who “doesn’t condescend” (Frank Rich, in his New York Times Book Review rave).

What about the liberal writers who make no pretense whatsoever of understanding their ideological opposites? Here’s a partial list of the hundreds of conservatives who have been labeled “wingnut” by Salon.com alone: Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts, Justice Antonin Scalia, columnist Jonah Goldberg, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (and his predecessor Eric Cantor), the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, Sen. Marco Rubio and Gov. Chris Christie.

If these people and institutions are cuckoo, then conservatism itself is crazy. And that is exactly what liberals think. (Sometimes this tendency takes eccentric form, as when liberals argue that it’s “crazy” not to panic about climate change.)

Liberals hope to tag completely mainstream conservative thought as outside the boundaries of polite discourse, but the electorate keeps refusing to comply by, for instance, electing a Congress designed to serve as a stalwart check on progressivism for 16 of last 20 years. This is baffling to liberals. How can that many Americans be batspit insane?

Remember that liberals are the ones who are always claiming to have superior powers of empathy and tolerance-- and a more sophisticated sense of science, which has shown us that conservatives are actually the ones who are better at seeing things from the other guy’s point of view. An experiment by psychologist Jonathan Haidt (sometimes called “an ideological Turing test”) asked liberals and conservatives to put themselves in the other guy’s socks for the duration of a test and ask them: How would your ideological opponent answer?

Conservatives were far better at liberals at this game, though that should have been easy to guess. When a conservative goes to the movies, picks up nearly any newspaper or watches TV news on any channel but one, he gets the liberal point of view. Liberals, especially in a place like New York, can easily seal themselves off from principled conservative thinking and many choose to do so. A result is that they haven’t a clue how conservatives think.

Liberals also kid themselves that they’re better at arguing than conservatives, but calling your opponent crazy is an appeal to emotion, not reason. It’s also a lazy schoolyard taunt, and it fails an elementary rule of debate, the prohibition of ad hominem remarks.

Sunday Smith flipped out again-- this time because Stephen Sherrill only included 3 Democrats in his list for GQ of America's Craziest Politicians. Smith went on the warpath in a sad little Post column, desperately trying to equate right-wing demons Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid, Michelle Obama, Mark Udall, Kay Hagan, Bernie Sanders and Nancy Pelosi with the actual psychopaths, like Ted Yoho, Joe Arpaio, Louie Gohmert, Steve King, Glenn Grothman, Gordon Klingenschmitt, Jody Hice, Ted Cruz, Paul LePage and Walker Walker, who Sherrill had some fun with.

Anyone who follows DWT even minimally, knows how much I detest corrupt Democratics like Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Steve Israel, but Smith's assertions of their "craziness" don't come close to any of what Sherrill was writing about. He whined, for example that Wasserman Schultz "compared Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker to a wife-beater: 'Scott Walker has given women the back of his hand. I know that is stark. That is direct. But that is reality. What Republican tea party extremists like Scott Walker are doing is they are grabbing us by the hair and pulling us back. It is not going to happen on our watch.' Wait, I’m confused, this abuse already happened, is happening but “it’s not going to happen?”

Sherrill explained that "Yes, this list is Republican-heavy, and while that may seem like standard liberal-media bias, the reality is that Democrats just aren't keeping pace right now in the crazy department. But to even the score, here's an incomplete list of crazy Dems from yesteryear: Rod Blagojevich, David Duke, at least one or two of the Kennedys, Anthony Weiner/Carlos Danger, and Jim McGreevey." [Duke, a huckster and KKK Grand Wizard, was an elected Republican state Rep. from Metairie, Louisiana, who ran for president as both a Republican and a Democrat, but it's completely fatuous to call him a Democrat-- note from Howie.] Here are sone of Sherrill's descriptions even Smith should have been laughing at:

Rep. Ted Yoho [R-Fla.]

JUST HOW CRAZY?

Claimed he sees "one side of our government, or two-thirds of it, running one hundred miles an hour toward socialism" and that conservatives like him "are like Fred and Barney in the Flintstone-mobile, trying to stop that."

ACTUAL THING HE SAID:

Explained his opposition to a proposed tanning-bed tax thusly: "I had an Indian doctor in our office the other day, very dark skin and two non-dark-skinned people, and I asked..., 'Have you ever been to a tanning booth?' And he goes, 'No, no need.' So therefore [the tax] is a racist tax, and I thought I might need to go get to a sun-tanning booth twice so that I can come out and say...I got taxed because of the color of my skin."

FUN FACT:

Is a large-animal veterinarian.

THINK OF HIM AS:

Joseph McCarthy, if he could deliver a calf.


Rep. Joe Barton [R-Tex.]

JUST HOW CRAZY?

Claimed carbon dioxide "is not a pollutant" because "I am creating it as I talk to you. It's in your Coca-Cola, your Dr Pepper, your Perrier water." Apologized to then BP CEO Tony Hayward after the White House urged BP to create a Gulf-oil-spill relief fund, saying it was "a tragedy of the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown."

FUN FACT:

Chairman emeritus of the House energy and commerce committee.

ACTUAL THING HE SAID:

Walking back on his BP remark: "If anything I said this morning has been misconstrued to the opposite effect, I want to apologize for that misconstrued misconstruction."

IN HIS DEFENSE:

British petroleum companies deserve to be represented in Congress, too.

THINK OF HIM AS:

Oil.


Rep. Glenn Grothman [R-Wis.]

JUST HOW CRAZY?

Really hates Kwanzaa, claiming in a press release that "almost no black people today care about Kwanzaa—just white left-wingers who try to shove this down black people's throats in an effort to divide Americans." Also declared that giving state workers the day off on Martin Luther King Day "is an insult to all the other taxpayers" who want to contact government offices.

IN HIS DEFENSE:

It does seem like all the stores are putting up their Kwanzaa decorations earlier and earlier every year.

ACTUAL THING HE SAID:

"Did people even know what homosexuality was in high school in 1975? I don't remember any discussion about that at the time."

THINK OF HIM AS:

The '50s.


State Rep. Gordon Klingenschmitt [R-Colo.]

JUST HOW CRAZY?

Has repeatedly bragged about performing a gay exorcism (he's a former Navy chaplain) to rid a woman of "the foul spirit of lesbianism," and also tried to perform a long-distance exorcism on President Obama because of something about the NSA. Believes that Obamacare "causes cancer" and that Obama's former FCC chairman was driven by the Devil to "molest and visually rape your children."

ACTUAL THING HE SAID:

"Father in Heaven, we pray against the domestic enemies of the Constitution, against this demon of tyranny who is using the White House occupant, and that demonic spirit is oppressing us."

FUN FACT:

Calls himself Dr. Chaps, which is not the least bit creepy.


Rep. Jody Hice [R-Ga.]

JUST HOW CRAZY?

Claimed that "four blood moons" falling on "major Jewish holidays" could be a sign of "world-changing, -shaking type events."

IN HIS DEFENSE:

Blood moons are freaky.

ACTUAL THING HE WROTE:

Some ask the question 'How does same-sex "marriage' threaten your marriage?' The answer is similar to asking, 'How does a trashy neighborhood affect you?'"


Rep. Mark Walker [R-N.C.]

ACTUAL THING HE SAID:

He's worried Obama will refuse to leave office when his term is up: "I don't think that's out of the question. I think he's gotten pretty comfortable up there spending all of those billions of dollars on vacations for he and his family."

ALSO THIS:

"If you have foreigners who are sneaking in with drug cartels, to me that is a national threat. And if we gotta go laser or blitz somebody with a couple of fighter jets for a little while to make our point, I don't have a problem with that."

AND THIS:

"I would beg to differ that Islam is a religion of peace, because you can't have a religion of peace when you've got nearly a billion people choppin' off heads all over the country."


Governor Paul LePage [R-Me.]

JUST HOW CRAZY?

Refused to attend Martin Luther King Day activities, saying the NAACP is a "special interest." Then added, "Tell 'em to kiss my butt." Said that a Democratic state leader "claims to be for the people, but he's the first one to give it to the people without providing Vaseline." Urged a repeal of Maine's ban on the plastics chemical component BPA, claiming it wasn't dangerous and saying, "Put it in the microwave and you heat it up, it gives off a chemical similar to estrogen. So the worst case is some women may have little beards."

FUN FACT:

Was re-elected in 2014.

THINK OF HIM AS:

If Don Rickles mated with poutine.

Did St. Vincent's Hospital in NYC engineer its own bankruptcy for the sake of a real-estate killing? (Caution: It's the NY Post asking)

Plus: How I spent the earthquake

NY Post caption: St. Vincent's officials allegedly ran the now-defunct hospital's finances into the ground in order win approval to sell it off [sic].

"DA investigators are examining sky-high payments to top executives and private consultants at the hopsital . . . said multiple sources familiar with the probe. Former CEO Henry Amoroso . . . oversaw the runaway spending, which led to $1 billion in debt and bankruptcy before the hospital closed in April 2010. . . . Going broke allowed the hospital to get an OK from the state Health Department to sell to the Rudin family, which is building luxury housing on the site. Without bankruptcy, state officials would not have been permitted [sic] the hospital to shut down, the sources said."

-- from "DA eyes St. Vinny's 'go-for-broke' plan"
by Brad Hamilton, in yesterday's New York Post

by Ken

This is why you have to pay attention to sourcing. I was intrigued by this story when I stumbled across it yesterday on the handy daily local news digest site DNAinfo.com, and today I see it's been picked up by a number of sites -- now including this one. But I also note that, as far as I can tell, all reports trace back to a single source: an "exclusive" (possibly too exclusive?) report by Brad Hamilton in (ugh) yesterday's New York Post.

For example, Becker's Hospital Review's report is based on "a NY1 News report," but the report in question by the New York cable news channel was attributed entirely to . . . the New York Post! Meaning that without some kind of corroboration, it's just stuff somebody's saying.

Still, it's tantalizing. It's hard to explain to people who don't know the area -- which is to say the lower portion of Manhattan -- how hard it was hit by the closing, after a period of protracted financial woe, of St. Vincent's Hospital, smack in the heart of Greenwich Village, in April 2010. And there's no doubt that this is extraordinarily valuable real estate that the erstwhile hospital was sucking up for no better person than, well, to serve the health care needs of the community. To heck with that!

For the record, various interested parties at least went through the motions of trying to find ways to keep the facility open as a hospital. But also for the record, the sale to the Rudin family ("whose real estate holdings are estimated at more than 10 million square feet in New York," according to the exceedingly developer-friendly New York Sun) was rammed through pretty aggressively. In April of this year Anemona Hartocollis reported in the NYT:

A plan to build a luxury housing development and an emergency medical center in Greenwich Village came a step closer to reality on Thursday as a federal bankruptcy judge approved the sale of the bankrupt St. Vincent’s Hospital Manhattan campus.

The judge, Cecelia G. Morris, approved the $260 million sale to the Rudin development family and the North Shore-Long Island Jewish hospital system despite vociferous opposition from a small group of community activists who have been arguing for the creation of a new full-service hospital on the site where St. Vincent’s had operated for more than 160 years.

One opponent, Alan J. Gerson, a former city councilman who lives in the area, asked for more time to present a rival buyer, but the judge declined.

The sale was unanimously supported by St. Vincent’s creditors, including GE Capital, who are owed about $1 billion, according to Kenneth Eckstein, the lead lawyer for St. Vincent’s. . . .

All of that said, what the Post's Brad Hamilton reported is, as I said, tantalizing, and he at least claims to have multiple apparently unnamable sources, and unnamable sources do sometimes have legitimate reasons for their unnamability. Hamilton found one person who allowed himself to be quoted, and by name -- before we return to unnamed "sources."

"This was a well-thought-out plan," said Tom Shanahan, a lawyer for a group of former St. Vincent doctors and nurses suing St. Vincent's. "They wanted out and had to justify it to the state. They were running it into the ground."

DA Cy Vance's team is looking into whether vendors double-billed for services, gave kickbacks for contracts and hired relatives of hospital employees, sources said.

Two senior administrators each got more than $1 million after leaving their jobs -- and continued to be listed as employees on tax returns.

Virginia Sweeney, the top nursing officer whose employment ended in 2006, got paid $1.3 million between 2007 and 2009. Jane Connorton, the president who left in 2004, pocketed $1 million over the next four years.

Hamilton reported that former St. Vincent's CEO Amoroso and vice chairman Jane Iannucelli "did not return calls for comment." DNAinfo.com's Liddy reported, "The DA's office did not immediately respond to an email for comment." And both the Post and DNAinfo.com were told by St. Vincent's spokeswoman that the hospital is not aware of an investigation.

Now of course it could just be that St. Vincent's was run with normal-range fiscal ineptitude and chicanery that fall within the range of standard operating practice, which under recent hospital-unfriendly financial circumstances made the operation unsustainable, and seeing the end in sight, the overseeing rats stuffed their pockets with moolah before jumping ship.

Or it could be that something a lot more dastardly went, possibly even drawing attention now from the Manhattan D.A.'s office. Since it's the fraud unit reportedly involved, it's presumably not related to the crackerjack team that masterminded the DSK, er, prosecution.


CONFIDENTIAL TO RUPERT M.:

Rupert M., do you see why it can sometimes be a disadvantage for a "news" organization to develop a reputation for propagandizing and making up stuff in its so-called reporting? It makes it kind of hard for folks with a grain of sense to take anything you "report" at face value -- even if we can assume that no phones were hacked in the reporting of the story.


HOW I SPENT THE EARTHQUAKE

"It's not nice to fool Mother Nature."

So I guess it was a little before 2 this afternoon. Hey, if I'd known it was going to be history, I'd have checked the time -- I just thought it was, well, I didn't know what the heck it was, but I considered and dismissed "earthquake" as a possibility. We don't normally have earthquakes on the 14th floor of my building in the Financial District (Lower Manhattan) of New York.

So like I said, it must have been a little before 2, and I was at my desk in my cubicle on the 14th floor of a pretty sturdily built building (at least in the 2½ years my company has been here, the building has never moved that I'm aware of), and for a while the floor and everything kind of trembled, and after awhile people sort of looked at one or another, and somebody mentioned that there had been a 5.8 earthquake in Washington. Only I didn't make out exactly what that person said; I reconstructed it later after I found out that there had been a 5.8 earthquake centered in northern Virginia, which was also reported as 5.9 or even 6.0 Online somebody joked that S&P had upgraded the earthquake from 5.8 to 6.0.

Then we were hustled into the conference room to hear our HR director, who happened to be in California (as it happens, our office manager was also out of the office -- coincidence?), via conference call tell us to do whatever we felt necessary for our safety. She also warned us about taking precautions before getting on a subway, but somebody else reported that New York Transit was reporting no service delays. (And New York Transit wouldn't kid us now, would it?)

Me, I figured if an earthquake is coming to get me, I really wouldn't know where to go to escape its clutches. I figure you're just as likely to walk into it as to escape it. When I went back to working on the InDesign file I had been working on, the computer claimed that the file was damaged. I rebooted and tried reloading it, and while the program still voiced suspicion about the file being damaged, it then accepted and saved some small changes, and the asterisk went away. So far the file seems to be OK.

And that's how I spent the earthquake. We're not used to this sort of stuff here, but believe me, I take it seriously. It's not nice to fool Mother Nature.

I HOPE MOTHER NATURE ISN'T PLANNING MORE OF THIS
SEISMIC STUFF JUST NOW. I HAVE URBAN GADDING AHEAD

Constitution Island, viewed from the West Point side

As I write, I'm getting read to leave the office for this evening's Hidden Harbor Tour of the "North" (i.e., Hudson) River waterfront, and then tomorrow I'm actually taking off work for my first look, courtesy of a tour offered jointly by SI 350 (a volunteer group promoting celebration of Staten Island's 350th birthday -- apparently someone thinks Staten Island is 350 years old; I wonder how Mother Nature feels about that) and the NYC Parks Dept., at the work-in-progress Freshkill Parks, built with huge infusions of technology, cash, and manpower on top of the old trash megadump.

The Parks Dept. has been offering tours, but I could never figure out from the website where I would have to get to, or therefore whether I could get there via public transit. This tour, however, is leaving from in front of the library in St. George, the part of Staten Island where the ferry lands -- and that I know how to find.

Then Saturday I'm actually venturing outside the five boroughs of NYC, well up the Hudson River to venture onto Constitution Island, which is opposite West Point on the west bank of the river, and is only open three weekends a summer. I'm expecting to meet up with a Shorewalkers group at the Metro North train station in Cold Spring, on the east side of the river from the island.

#

Postscript on the problem with "news" coverage Murdoch-style: Joyce Purnick recalls the New York Post takeover

"[Rupert Murdoch] never touched my copy, and his editors never touched my copy. . . . You could say I and other serious reporters at the paper, political ones, you know, they're figleafs. They could say, 'We're honest, we play it straight. Look at what Joyce wrote, look at what Mike wrote.' But it didn't matter what we wrote, because we were surrounded by propaganda for Ed Koch. You know, there were all those photos, and all those poll stories and all those headlines. . . . The paper had become a propaganda tool."

-- former New York Times writer-editor (and onetime New York Post political reporter) Joyce Purnick, yesterday on The Takeaway

by Ken

There was one thing I meant to mention in writing yesterday about what ought to be the real scandal of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp as a pretend "news" organization.

In connection with its coverage of developments in the phone-hacking scandal engulfing News Corp's U.K. operation, News International, NPR's Morning Edition included an interview with WNYC political analyst Joyce Purnick, who is best known for her many years as a writer (both reporter and columnist) and editor at the New York Times, but who was a reporter for the New York Post at the time the once-liberal paper was taken over by the Murdochites in 1976.

I don't think it's the same interview, but one that covers the same ground, which you can hear on the website of The Takeaway, WNYC's other morning news show, coproduced with PRI. Purnick has told the interviewer that the Post changed "overnight at the time, into "a Fleet Street" paper. In the interview I heard she was asked specifically whether her copy was tampered with; she covers the same ground here.

INTERVIEWER [at 4:36]: Joyce, surely Rupert Murdoch wasn't walking around the paper telling people what stories to write and encouraging them to write, I guess, nice things about Ed Koch?
JOYCE PURNICK: Well, in fact, he did often come into the newsroom in the early morning right before the paper went to print and make changes, but no, of course, he didn't personally go around and say, "Here's what you write," and in a very interesting way, he never touched my copy, and his editors never touched my copy. I was basically the chief political reporter, and I had a reputation in New York, as a pretty good one, for integrity -- and you could say I and other serious reporters at the paper, political ones, you know, they're figleafs. They could say, "We're honest, we play it straight. Look at what Joyce wrote, look at what Mike wrote." But it didn't matter what we wrote, because we were surrounded by propaganda for Ed Koch. You know, there were all those photos, and all those poll stories and all those headlines. It didn't matter that somewhere in the back of the paper or the middle of the paper I had a short story that was perfectly legitimate. It didn't matter, that's the point. The paper had become a propaganda tool.

And then the interviewer makes clear that her interest is exclusively instances of illegality, which Purnick says she's reasonably confident didn't happen. She goes on to say, "I think that the Post and other Murdoch properties push the envelope. Fox News distorts like crazy," but no, she doesn't think they break the law.

By the way, on a different Takeaway webpage I found a version of this, to which the first reader comment, from "D.L.Mc from Staten Island,NY," was:

"Fox News distorts like crazy" from a former NY Times editor - irony.

I trust it isn't necessary to break down for DWT readers why, for all the faults of the NYT, such a "comparison" is evidence of total absence of useful brain function.

#

The shrew has a point: Why should Goldman Sachs wives be treated like (shudder) "the $650 donors"?

Goldman Sachs Chairman and CEO Lloyd C. Blankfein --
his wife must be an exceptionally important person

As part of its "appeal to the common man" mission, Rupert Murdoch's New York Post occasionally practices a kind of crackpot populism that even more occasionally lands just right on just the right target. Offered for your consideration -- with no further comment from me -- is this Hamptons vignette from yesterday's Page Six. -- Ken

GOLDMAN SACHS WIVES HATE TO WAIT

August 5, 2009 --

GOLDMAN Sachs boss Lloyd Blankfein has warned his employees to avoid high-profile spending, as The Post reported -- but his wife evidently didn't get the memo.

Laura Blankfein and her friend Susan Friedman, wife of another Goldman honcho, Richard Friedman, caused a huge scene at Super Saturday in the Hamptons last weekend when they arrived at the event before the noon start time and balked at waiting in line with the other ticket-holders.

"Their behavior was obnoxious. They were screaming," said one witness. Blankfein said she wouldn't wait with "people who spend less money than me."

Another observer said the women were so impatient, it was as if they were waiting on line for a kidney transplant instead of a charitable designer clothing sale.

Friedman shouted at the event organizer, "You have lost so much money because of this . . . Why should we be treated like the $650 donors?"

Sources said Blankfein and Friedman had bought tables with blocks of tickets going for $833 apiece, as did many of the women who were waiting patiently in line, happy to raise $3.4 million for the Ovarian Cancer Research Fund.

In the end, the hot-headed duo got in at 12:03 p.m., three minutes after those who arrived before them.

No word on how much of their husbands' money they spent. But Lloyd Blankfein -- wary of bad publicity over the big bonuses he and his colleagues expect to collect at year's end -- has called for an end to conspicuous consumption.

A Goldman Sachs executive was quoted in yesterday's front-page Post story, "[Blankfein] wants to make sure we're not being seen living high on the hog." A Goldman Sachs rep did not respond to requests for comment left at the offices of both Lloyd Blankfein and Richard Friedman.

#

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.

#