'Love Boat' for Abortion-Affirming Feminists? The Nation Uses New York Times Cruise Blurb

October 21st, 2014 3:35 PM

In the ultimate in Occupy Wall Street hypocrisy, the hardcore lefties at The Nation magazine are hosting another Caribbean cruise in December, and using The New York Times to do it. A promotional e-mail carries the quote “The love boat for policy wonks – The New York Times.” That’s a headline...from 2008. It has this gem:

When 460 of the more ardent readers of a 142-year-old leftist weekly get together on a cruise ship, things can be a little topsy-turvy. “It’s like an S.D.S. reunion on the Love Boat,” said a guest speaker, Mary Mapes, the former CBS news producer who helped break the Abu Ghraib story among others, before being fired over her involvement in a “60 Minutes” piece on George W. Bush’s military record.

We had to snort a little that this “love boat” will be talking about taking all the shame out of the more extreme forms of birth control: “Katha Pollitt reframing the national discussion around abortion.” Her latest book "Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights" insists that abortion is "a moral right and social good." 

The cruise also features the “lead food columnist” of The New York Times, Mark Bittman, who will make the case for “why real ‘foodies’ fight harder for a good food system than for the best pork bun.”

Bittman can be counted on to work in leftist mudslinging in his food writing:

Speaking of pigs, the VP of PR for Chick-fil-A dropped dead of a heart attack the week after the chain’s latest homophobia/anti-gay marriage scandal.” –  New York Times food columnist Mark Bittman in an August 3,2012 (he later apologized).

“I stopped eating on Monday and joined around 4,000 other people in a fast to call attention to congressional budget proposals that would make huge cuts in programs for the poor and hungry....These supposedly deficit-reducing cuts — they’d barely make a dent — will quite literally cause more people to starve to death, go to bed hungry or live more miserably than are doing so now.”
— Bittman in a March 30, 2011 column.

"What causes the lack [of nutrition]? Imprisonment, torture, being stranded on a desert island, anorexia, crop failure … and both a lack of aid and bad distribution of nutrients. Some (or much) of both of these last two stem from unregulated capitalism and greed. Bad distribution is causing roughly 15 percent of the world to be overweight and 15 percent of the world to be hungry. The amount of grain being fed to industrially raised livestock in the United States alone is enough to alleviate much if not all of world hunger. The cost to the United States of extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy for one year – this is only one example, there are dozens of others — is $42 billion; the U.N.’s World Food Program spent $1.25 billion last year.” – Bittman, March 31, 2011.

If Bittman became sick and couldn’t make it, Bittman’s predecessor was Jonathan Reynolds, who uncorked this mangled monkfish metaphor in the summer of 2003: “If you see a whole monkfish at the market, you’ll find its massive mouth scarier than a shark’s. Apparently it sits on the bottom of the ocean, opens its Godzilla jaws and waits for poor unsuspecting fishies to swim right into it, not unlike the latest recipients of W’s capital-gains cuts.”