January 14th 2009
One More Bite At The Poisoning Fruit
T
he NY Times just can’t get over it: A moderate-right administration actually hired “right-thinking Americans” instead of flaming liberals for Justice Dept. posts. Nothing new here. Move on by, folks. But we’ll quote Eric Lichtblau’s contribution to journalistic excellence alley-mugging nonetheless:
WASHINGTON — A former senior official at the Justice Department routinely hired Republicans, Federalist Society members and “R.T.A.’s” — “Right-Thinking Americans”— for what were supposed to be nonpolitical posts and gave them plum assignments on civil rights cases, an internal department report released Tuesday found.
Lichblau’s piece exists because the assignments were in civil rights cases and, you know, all conservative Republicans are flaming racists so how much more awful can it get? But wait! There’s nothing here about racism. Lichblau’s report quotes what the report says of the target of the investigation, Bradley Schlozman, who you see there, appropriately, on the right:
… he talked about reshaping the political makeup of the Civil Rights Division and doing away with “pinko” and “crazy lib” lawyers and others he did not consider “real Americans.” In one e-mail message regarding a pool of job applicants, he wrote that “as long as I’m here, adherents of Mao’s Little Red Book need not apply.”
I don’t know about you, but Schlozman is my hero.
Here’s a challenge to Lichblau: Come back in six months (if the NYT is still around), take a look at the Obama Justice Dept.’s Civil Rights Division and try to prove to us that it’s not full of left-thinking Americans. It will be, as it should be - that’s the president’s prerogative. But Lichblau will never, ever write that story.
Take the $3.3 billion grant program to upgrade the nation’s electricity network. Please. When it was announced in April by Joe “Oh, It’s Just A Little Lie” Biden, he had a pretty simple - if grammatically challenged - explanation for the grant’s intent: “This is jobs - jobs.”