Daily Gut: The Pathetic Howl of Howell Raines

If you ever need to a definition for “loser,” in just two simple words, I’ve got it.

Howell Raines.

If the name doesn’t strike you as familiar, congratulations – you’re one of the many billions of people who never read the New York Times as Raines’s arrogant incompetence steadily drove it into a ditch.

In this Sunday’s Washington Post, Friday, Raines writes a sweaty editorial, lamenting the evil that is Fox News. Probably scribbling from the Unabomber’s abandoned cabin, Raines sputters like the engine of a troubled Prius, spewing…

“For the first time since the yellow journalism of a century ago, the United States has a major news organization devoted to the promotion of one political party.”

He then blames part of this on the “collapse of print newspapers,” something he was responsible for, as he turned the Times into a punchline of plagiarism. Raines resigned, inevitably, because he was more interested in advocacy, than accuracy.

Perhaps worse though, is when he writes of Fox…

“In a bygone era of fact-based commentary typified, left to right, by my late colleagues Scotty Reston and Bill Safire, these deceptions would have been given their proper label: disinformation.”

This, from a guy who helmed a paper that, back in the 30’s, featured the writings of Walter Duranty – the scumbag who won a Pulitzer for covering up the Stalinist famines that killed millions. Being in the Time’s pages – Duranty’s words were accepted as truth – which allowed many more to starve. Robert Conquest notes that the Times bosses suspected that Duranty was pumping out Stalinist propaganda, but sat on their hands.

Raines somehow flushes this from his mind, and instead pathetically tries to rally the press against Fox News. In a sad way, this is a like a man who gets beaten so badly in a fight he started, that he begins crying, “he hit me first.”

Sorry Howell, but your howl is as sad as it is self-serving. Your biases compelled you to ignore corruption in your own staff, and you lost your job. Now that you see your perceived adversaries doing what you could never do (succeed), you’re foaming.

Time to get a hobby. Put ships in a bottle. It’ll calm your nerves and you’ll end up making something nice.

Which may be the most useful thing you’ve done in years.