Slate’s Jack Shafer has been doggedly defending Howell Raines now for months. And part of me admires Jack’s willingness to see things from Raines’ point of view; and, to some extent, he’s right about the current piling on. (Hey, I was piling on before most of the others!) He’s also right not to despise the concept of a rough-and-ready tyrant as editor of a great newspaper. But Shafer now concedes that much of his argument is now moot, given how the NYT staff has simply lost confidence in the executive editor and that the new battery of committees amounts to a kind of suspended abdication at the top. Raines, Shafer argues, is now the NYT’s Nixon in July 1974. There’s really no way forward but out:
Having surrendered his “fear and favor” management tools, how long can Raines lead the newspaper effectively? Imagine the empty joy of running the newspaper holed up like Richard Nixon during the impeachment summer of 1974. Raines might quit next week-like a Roman-to stave off a crisis. Or he might even quit so somebody else can lead the paper back to normalcy where people can do their work instead of attend committee meetings.
Tick, tock, Arthur. Tick, tock.
THE HOUSE OF LORDS ON SPAM: Yes, some of the august members of the British Upper House got a little confused:
Lord Renton asked: “Will the Minister explain how it is that an inedible tinned food can become an unsolicited email, bearing in mind that some of us wish to be protected from having an email?”
No, that wasn’t Monty Python.
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: “There is left but one simple rule for the new upper crust: by all means prefer victims to oppressors, but always prefer oppressors to true liberators… True liberators, as we can now see, would deprive the world of victims, and thus dry up the supply of peons that constitute the new class’s constituency. This is why, even though the new class disliked Saddam Hussein, they hate Bush infinitely more. Just as Palestinian refugee camps justify the failures and secure the tenure of Arab despots, so the poor and downtrodden of the world justify the ascendancy of the new upper crust. At home, school vouchers are opposed in the teeth of the urban poor that want them, because decent education might help put an end to the urban poor who vote for upper crust leaders. The same goes for the inclusion of privatization in the Social Security portfolio, and any form of tax relief that might result in turning the majority of Americans into owners, and into people too proud to consider themselves victims. And without victims, where would Lady Bountiful be then?” – Frederick Turner, TechCentral Station.
The Dish 