Andrew Rosenthal

A new Washington Post/ABC News poll with a striking finding has New York Times Editorial Page editor Andrew Rosenthal in dismay: 53 percent of self-described liberal Democrats support keeping Guantanamo Bay open. Does this mean their previous virulent opposition was not based on concern for civil liberties, but was just partisan Bush-hatred? Of course not.

Rosenthal’s Thursday morning post “Hurray for Guantanamo Bay” ignored that clear Democratic hypocrisy while making excuses for President Obama. Apparently it’s all the fault of Republicans in Congress. (Left-wing civil liberties advocate Glenn Greenwald strongly disagreed in a March 2011 op-ed for Salon.) Rosenthal wrote:

“Stop Compromising,” pleaded New York Times Editorial Page editor Andrew Rosenthal on his “Loyal Opposition” blog Wednesday morning.

Rosenthal was aggrieved to hear Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod suggest the president was open to “compromise”on the administration’s plan requiring religious institutions to violate their beliefs and cover birth control in their employees’ health insurance plans. (Apparently compromise is no longer a good thing in Washington.)

Rosenthal (pictured) urged Obama to make a more full-throated defense of the rule, pointing out that “this isn’t a theocracy.”

New York Times Editorial Page Editor Andrew Rosenthal, perhaps prodded by criticism from Bernard Goldberg on The O’Reilly Factor Thursday night, posted an update Friday afternoon to his Tuesday blog post offensively accusing House Speaker John Boehner of racism for asking Obama to delay for one night an address to Congress last September.

Unrepentant, Rosenthal berated some of his critics for being “overtly racist themselves, including bigoted references to my last name.”

Rosenthal's only regret, apparently, was that he did not mention “that racially tinged and outright racist attacks did not begin with the election of Mr. Obama,” and brought up an old favorite he had previously written about, the Willie Horton ad used in the 1988 presidential campaign against Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis. (Never mind that it was Al Gore who brought up the ad in the first place.)

Is House Speaker John Boehner an anti-Obama racist? Editorial Page editor Andrew Rosenthal all but accuses him in his Tuesday blog from Des Moines, “Nobody Likes to Talk About It, but It’s There.” (The web headline is blunter: “Republican Attacks Have Racist Undertones.”)

Actually, Rosenthal is all too happy to talk about racist Republicans if it helps Democrats politically, as he did on November 1, in one of his first blog posts: “...it was the Republicans who perfected the art of injecting racial fears into modern-day politics (remember Willie Horton in 1988?) and have conducted an unrelenting personal attack on President Obama that sometimes has not-so-subtle racial overtones.”

The New York Times Sunday Review resembles the hard-left New York Review of Books more and more with every passing week. Formerly the Week in Review, the revamped Sunday Review is lighter on news analysis from liberal Times reporters and heavier on outside essays, often with a hard-left outlook. It’s put together by veteran Times man Andrew Rosenthal, who demonstrates his "alarm" about “right-wing” Republicans at his New York Times blog “The Loyal Opposition.” This week’s target: Ronald Reagan.

Yale professor Harold Bloom’s long essay, “Will This Election Be the Mormon Breakthrough?” was devoted mostly to attacking Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon religion. But he included plenty of insults against the former president.

“Many [OWS] protesters say the lawless visitors constitute a tiny fringe and are not representative of the movement, which, they say, has espoused nonviolence and mutual aid. Some have suggested moving the kitchen area and the comfort station out of the park to discourage freeloaders from congregating there. But there are concerns that even if the criminal and antisocial elements are a small minority, they are becoming visible enough to tarnish the image of the entire group.” – From a November 6 story by Cara Buckley and Colin Moynihan.

vs.

“It was difficult, if not disingenuous, for the Tea Party groups to try to disown the behavior. They had organized the rally, and under their model of self-policing, they were responsible for the behavior of people who were there. And after saying for months that anybody could be a Tea Party leader, they could not suddenly dismiss as faux Tea Partiers those protesters who made them look bad.” – Reporter Kate Zernike on page 139 of her 2010 book “Boiling Mad – Inside Tea Party America.”

New York Times editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal, better known as James Taranto’s punching bag at Opinion Journal, has a new blog at nytimes.com, “The Loyal Opposition.” On Tuesday Rosenthal posted the provocatively titled “Herman Cain and the ‘Liberal Media,’” where he broadcasts his alarm at how “quickly the right wing jumps on an issue almost in unison,” blames Republicans for injecting racial fears into modern-day politics with Willie Horton, and even claiming the phrase "community organizer" is racist when applied to Obama.

Andrew Rosenthal may think twice before engaging in political parlay with James Taranto again. Rosenthal, the New York Times’s editorial page editor, came out on the losing end of a Twitter argument with Taranto, who puts together Opinion Journal’s Best of the Web, a Wall Street Journal project. Taranto summarized the argument in Monday's edition.

It started with an article by Slate's David Weigel shows Obama crushing GOP candidate Herman Cain among North Carolina voters, 86%-6%, barely improving on the Republican’s 2008 candidate John McCain, who got 5 percent of the black vote.

David Boies and Ted Olson, the formerly-dueling duo in the Bush-Gore 2000 recount battle now litigating for gay marriage in California, were the guests of a forum at The New York Times last week. Former Newsweek editor Charles Kaiser reflected on just how far the Times has come, so that now it is a global role model for gay-friendliness. Their news-manufacturing motto might be All the Progress That's Fit to Push:

What was even more remarkable than the spectacle of a Reagan appointee making a full-throated defense of marriage equality was the atmosphere in which this confab took place. Most of those present were gay and lesbian New Yorkers invited to the event. But in the third row sat New York Times publisher and chairman Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. , and six rows behind him was Andy Rosenthal, the editor of the Times editorial page.

For years, liberals argued that it was absurd to argue the media had a liberal bias when Washington was dominated by Republican majorities. But now, when Washington is dominated by the Democrats, some are still clinging to the odd notion that the media "bends over backwards" against the liberal-bias charge and coddles conservatives. Take Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News, and his odd logic:

This uncomfortable truth? That to accomodate the perceived notion that the news media warps things so far to the left, journalists have been playing Twister to bend over backwards to accomodate conservatives -- and tying ourselves in knots.

Exhibit A: The New York Times admits that it's easier to get on one of the most coveted pieces of real estate in American journalism, a slot on its letters-to-the-editor page, if you are a conservative. Here is what Andrew Rosenthal, the editorial page editor, said in a recent online chat:

I would defy anyone to label Maureen Dowd by party affiliation or ideology. I've known her and worked closely with her for 20 years and I can't tell you the answer to either one -- Andrew Rosenthal, editorial page editor of The New York Times

What would be worse: that when Times editorial page editor Rosenthal claims not to know Maureen Dowd's politics he's not being honest -- or that he is?