Rachel Swarns, who for years fawned over Barack and Michelle Obama for the New York Times, now writes a column for the paper's Metro section, "This Working Life." On Monday she penned an open letter to liberal actor/activist Adam Baldwin in defense of a left-wing group which tied up traffic in mid-town Manhattan in the name of a $15-an-hour "living wage," in "An Actor Backs Living-Wage Protesters (as Long as They Don’t Snarl Traffic)."
It started when actor Adam Baldwin, an angry and often vulgar leftist, complained on Twitter about being stuck in traffic.
Swarns, who works for a newspaper that covered ad nauseum Republican Gov. Chris Christie's "Bridgegate" scandal, took a different view of traffic inconvenience done in the name of a liberal cause.
As richly mockable as Baldwin is, one can't help but sympathize when he's pitted against snark-mistress former reporter Swarns, who used the freedom of her column to be even more explicitly ideological:
Dear Alec Baldwin,
I threw everything aside to write to you as soon as I heard about your troubles. You know, last week, when you stumbled across thousands of fast-food employees, home health care aides and other low-wage workers who were demonstrating in Midtown Manhattan.
You were on your way somewhere, right? Driving or biking, maybe, when you encountered those protesters calling for a $15 minimum wage? They converged on Columbus Circle as they marched to Times Square, joining tens of thousands of people around the country calling for better pay. And in that moment, as you were stuck in the traffic snarled by that rally, something touched you. Something inspired you to speak out.
Your instinct, of course, was to let loose on Twitter:
“Life in NY is hard enough as is. The goal is to not make it more so. How does clogging rush hour traffic from 59th St to 42 do any good?”
