Yesterday's Leftovers For 7/6/10: The Man Who Is Leading The Once Proud New York Times Down A Hell Hole

As everyone was certainly more than distracted on their 4th of July weekend, taking a break from the intense 24/7 grind of wondering why our country can't enact just common sense policy for the good of the collective in this nation, we received yet another stunningly and sad reminder of how far our journalism has placed itself in a continuing abyss.

It once again came at the hands of Bill Keller, the man responsible for turning the "Old Grey Lady" into the "Ov Vey Shady" with every chance his hack personality gets.

And what he uttered this weekend was frankly, as Glenn Greenwald said this weekend, "one of the more demented and reprehensible statements I've seen from a high-level media executive in some time."

I would say in all time .

Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, said the newspaper had written so much about the issue of waterboarding that “I think this Kennedy School study — by focusing on whether we have embraced the politically correct term of art in our news stories — is somewhat misleading and tendentious.”

Keller's extraordinary defecation to the name of quality journalism came from a reaction to the now renowned study from the Harvard Law School about the usage of the word "torture" becoming taboo once the Cheney/Bush Administration authorized the NYT and the Washington Toast (Post) to not called their illegal and heartless actions what they actually were..........torture.

Nevertheless, Keller is emboldened further more about why he finds it frivolous to even have such a discussion that only "the annoying hippie people with their PC's or Macs" care about:

In an e-mail message on Thursday, Mr. Keller said defenders of the practice of waterboarding, “including senior officials of the Bush administration,” insisted that it did not constitute torture.

“When using a word amounts to taking sides in a political dispute, our general practice is to supply the readers with the information to decide for themselves,” Mr. Keller wrote. “Thus we describe the practice vividly, and we point out that it is denounced by international covenants and human rights advocates as a form of torture. Nobody reading the Times’s coverage could be ignorant of the extent of the practice (much of that from information we broke) or mistake it for something benign (we usually use the word ‘brutal.’)”

But as documented by several sources over the weekend, Bill Keller and his once reputable newspaper did actually take a side in this political dispute by bowing down royally and kissing the backside of the Shrub and the Shooter.

It's probably the biggest black eye of all the black eyes we have seen from the "Ov Vey Shady" after Judy Miller, highlighting how it is a newspaper that a lot of people can't even recognize anymore.

But it signals yet another reminder to the public of the forgettable current condition of American journalism. How a guy like Keller, in his "lofty position" can make a statement that is just so disheartening to see.

This executive editor just revealed how under his leadership, the New York Times, that "beacon of liberal media", was and is basically any Administration's (and especially Republicans) PR group when it comes push to shove to go do illegal things all for the good of "no one messes with the USA when we go engage in illegal wars for 'revenge'!"

It is the intentionally rhetorical question of our present lifetime, but "Why has our journalism become so stupid and so sad?"