Bill Keller, Red Pope of American Media
The New York Times prints All the News You're Fit to Read -- and if you're not fit to read about the reality of the "Arab Spring" (a pure New York Times fabrication, without a smidgen of fact) the NYT kindly protects you from ever knowing about the bloody realities of the Middle East today. Ahmadinejad recently calling for a second Holocaust wasn't even reported in the day's New York Times. (Yawn.)
This is called "editorial judgment," and it's exercised today by people like top editor Bill Keller, whose last week on that job begins today. Mr. Keller was in the news last week for smearing traditional religions with a very broad brush indeed -- except for head-chopping Islam, for which he has nothing but the warmest praise.
For Mr. Keller, religion is about the evilest things that normal people do. He should know, because he writes "I grew up believing that a priest could turn a bread wafer into the actual flesh of Christ." Mr. Keller is that well-worn character, the boy who "grew out" of Catholicism while acquiring what passes for sophistication in the swell set of the metropolis.
Now the New York Times, over which Mr. Keller presides as Editor-in-Chief, is the very fountainhead of Leftist propaganda in America. All the assembly line midgets of the media save time and mental fatigue by copying and pasting their headlines from the NYT, including AOL, Comcast and GOOG. The Big Media are therefore one long conga dance line, with Bill Keller as the leading hip shaker. When Keller jigs, so does ABC-NBC-Yahoo. When Keller jags, Chris Matthews is hanging on his hip bones and bumping in perfect unison.
Mr. Keller is America's Chief Minister of Propaganda, a job that used to be on the Soviet Politburo. He is the High Priest of NYT.
The word propaganda is even more ancient; propaganda is Church Latin for official Catholic dogma propagated by the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide). Yes, the one in the Vatican. In Rome. You know. The one Mr. Keller grew up believing.
The head of the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith popularly became known as the "Red Pope" in past centuries. Our Chief Leftist Propagandist therefore holds a very high religious position. Mr. Keller is The Red Pope of American Media.
Mr. Keller is a man of faith. It must be a superhuman faith, after all, in order to believe in the Gospel of the Left after a long century of one mind-bending Marxist catastrophe after another. "One hundred million" is the official total of murder victims of Marxist regimes in the 20th century, according to a team of French Marxist historians. Those mass murders are still going on in North Korea, where satellite photos have revealed death camps big enough to hold 200,000 people. Today, North Korea has yet another mass famine going, this one being so bad that even its army is starving. And Veep Joe Biden just gave official US approval to China's One Child Policy, which killed many millions of baby girls, and somewhat smaller numbers of baby boys. Luckily for Veep Joe, American feminists couldn't care less about Chinese babies. Certainly not Mo Dowd and the Ladies' Auxiliary at the New York Times.
To keep one's Faith in the Left alive in the face of such bloody realities takes a special kind of mind.
Bill Keller has such a mind. Like Blaise Pascal, he believes in Leftism because it is absurd.
Which makes it odd that Mr. Keller keeps slamming other and much nicer faiths, especially ones that demand less suspension of disbelief than his own. Like Richard Dawkins, Keller lives in the deep delusion that religion can be abolished. But the Soviets tried to kill off the Russian Orthodox Church for seventy years, with the aid of mass executions, KGB infiltration and Siberian prison camps -- and today you can find almost 90,000 news photos on Google of Vladimir Putin with the Patriarch of Moscow.
For those of you whose minds were PC-laundered since the Cold War, it was Pope John Paul II who inspired the overthrow of the Soviet Empire with the help of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, along with hundreds of millions of believers behind the Iron Curtain, even after the Bulgarian KGB almost managed to assassinate him.
Bigger Leftists than Keller have tried to kill off religion. Compared to Stalin, Keller's socialism is a sere autumn leaf blowing through Manhattan. The first real storm will blow it away, and good riddance.
Catholics can doubt their faith, but liberals can only do so if they can tolerate the wrath of the New York Times. No Catholic priest today will abuse a sinner any worse than the liberal media routinely abuse Sarah Palin, her little baby Trig, Michelle Bachmann, and other grave dangers to the Republic.
It was Justice Clarence Thomas who coined the phrase "high tech lynch mob" to describe the liberal media during his Senate hearings, and today the phrase fits better than ever.
When all the Party Line JourNOlists get together to plan tomorrow's monopoly headlines, it is Bill Keller and his ilk who decides who will hang next from that big ole' tree. Last week was Darryl Issa's turn to be the lynching victim of the week, a sort of Pulitzer Prize for good and decent people who deviate from Mr. Keller's Party Line. Then there was the "reporter" who told Michele Bachmann that if she runs for President, all her twenty-three foster children will be fair targets for Leftie mob lynchings. The NYT is just those two Mafia heavies who ring your doorbell to explain the big burglary problem in your neighborhood. It's a mafia racket.
George Orwell wrote "In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
Orwell had the guts to do that.
Bill Keller just runs the deceit machine until September 6, when Jill Abramson will ascend the crimson throne. Don't expect any change for the better. The apparat has plenty of apparatchiks.