Rabid NY Times Readers

The public editor of the NY Times has to discuss the hire of conservative columnist Bill Kristol, (admitting they had 6 liberals to 1 conservative who wasn't all that conservative) right off the bat, quoting The Times' readers. Kristol wouldn't have been his choice but he is appalled:

Of the nearly 700 messages I have received since Kristol’s selection was announced — more than half of them before he ever wrote a word for The Times — exactly one praised the choice.

Rosenthal’s mail has been particularly rough. “That rotten, traiterous [sic] piece of filth should be hung by the ankles from a lamp post and beaten by the mob rather than gaining a pulpit at ANY self-respecting news organization,” said one message. “You should be ashamed. Apparently you are only out for money and therefore an equally traiterous [sic] whore deserving the same treatment.”

Such language from supposedly such a high-brow bunch. Such intolerance from supposedly peace-loving liberals. The editor says the reaction is "beyond reason". He is surprised at such rabid, frothing at the mouth liberalism--the rest of us have been hearing it for years:

Hanging someone from a lamppost to be beaten by a mob because of his ideas? And that is from a liberal, defined by Webster as “one who is open-minded.” What have we come to?

Indeed.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, the NY Times has a big front page story implying all our veterans are murderers. Reaction from Phillip Carter:

So, basically, the reporters went trolling on Lexis-Nexis and other databases to find "murder" within the same paragraph as "veteran" or "soldier," and built a front-page story around that research. They compared the pre-war numbers to the post-war numbers and found that, voila!, there's a difference. And then it looks like they cherry-picked the best anecdotes out of that research (including the ones where they could get interviews and photos) to craft a narrative which fit the data.

The article makes no attempt to produce a statistically valid comparison of homicide rates among vets to rates among the general population. Nor does it rely at all on Pentagon data about post-deployment incidents of violence among veterans. It basically just generalizes from this small sample (121 out of 1.7 million Iraq and Afghanistan vets, not including civilians and contractors) to conclude that today's generation of veterans are coming home full of rage and ready to kill.

I've got a one-word verdict on this article and its research: bullshit.