The New York Times outdoes itself in this editorial. While trying manfully not to snicker at the assassination of two policemen, it can't quite get there:
Mr. de Blasio isn't going to say it, but somebody has to: With [their] acts of passive-aggressive contempt and self-pity, many New York police officers, led by their union, are squandering the department's credibility, defacing its reputation, shredding its hard-earned respect.
This from the same NYT that's done everything in its power to destroy the department's credibility, sully its reputation and shred any respect a normal person might feel for it.
But wait! There's more!
[N]one of [the officers'] grievances can justify the snarling sense of victimhood that seems to be motivating the anti-de Blasio campaign -- the belief that the department is never wrong, that it never needs redirection or reform, only reverence. This is the view peddled by union officials like Patrick Lynch... -- that cops are an ethically impeccable force with their own priorities and codes of behavior, accountable only to themselves, and whose reflexive defiance in the face of valid criticism is somehow normal.
You gotta love it when the grievance-mongering NYT, with no discernible sense of irony, writes about a "snarling sense of victimhood." Talk about living in a bubble! And here I thought academia was bad.
It's really just an afterword to note that absolutely no one has maintained that, "the department is never wrong, that it never needs redirection or reform, only reverence." There's a reason the NYT doesn't quote Officer Patrick Lynch -- he never said any such thing. Nor has anyone else.
I guess I would note at this point that the NYT is giving straw men a bad name, but it's already given so many other things a bad name that it would be gilding the proverbial lily. I mean, hello, have they hired the editorial staff away from Rolling Stone?
Then there's the next spasm, attributing to the police union the assertion that, "cops are an ethically impeccable force with their own priorities and codes of behavior, accountable only to themselves, and whose reflexive defiance in the face of valid criticism is somehow normal."
Once upon a time, in the pre-liberal McCarthyite era, what is now called "reflexive defiance" was called "dissent." But that would apply more to, ummm, the Occupy Wall Street bunch, at least when their "dissent" consisted of protesters' relieving themselves on -- ready now? -- police cars.
I could go on, but it's probably illegal to have this much fun poking at the ever-reliable mouthpiece of Amerika Stinks journalism, the Gray Lady. It is true, as I have acknowledged, that some NYT reporters (as opposed to editorial writers) have done excellent pieces, most recently on a notorious tax cheater I will not further mention. But editorials that are hateful and dishonest to the point of satire make the paper just too poisonous to pick up.
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