Why I'm going to miss the New York Times Op-eds

Last week the Times announced that beginning in September it will start charging for online access to its editorial and op-ed columns. And although I sympathize with the paper's need to shore up revenues lost by its ever-shrinking dead-tree version, I believe that rather than charging for a here-to-fore free service, the Times would be better served by a better targeted advertising scheme. Be that as it may, I do not intend to pay to read someone else's opinions, no matter how well written.

Still, three op-eds from today's paper demonstrate why a subscription might be tempting.

By Bob Herbert, The Rumsfield Stain (and doesn't the title just say it all?) discusses the spectacular failures of Donald Rumsfeld's current stint as SecDef:

"In Iraq, more than 1,600 American troops have died and many thousands have been maimed in a war that Mr. Rumsfeld mishandled from the beginning and still has no idea how to win.
…
Potential recruits are staying away from the armed forces in droves… Parents from coast to coast are going out of their way to dissuade their children from joining the military.
…
The military spent decades rebuilding its reputation and regaining the respect of the vast majority of the American people after the debacle in Vietnam. Under Mr. Rumsfeld, that hard-won achievement is being reversed.
…
The insurgency in Iraq appeared to take Mr. Rumsfeld completely by surprise. He expected to win the war in a walk. Or, perhaps, a strut.

But Rummy's worst leadership failure is still just coming to light:

As if all this were not enough, there is also the grotesque and deeply shameful issue that will always be a part of Mr. Rumsfeld's legacy - the manner in which American troops have treated prisoners under their control in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. There is no longer any doubt that large numbers of troops responsible for guarding and interrogating detainees somehow loosed their moorings to humanity, and began behaving as sadists, perverts and criminals.

The catalog of confirmed atrocities is huge. Consider just one paragraph from a long and horrifying story on Friday by Tim Golden of The Times about the torture and brutal deaths of two Afghan inmates at the hands of U.S. troops:

"In sworn statements to Army investigators, soldiers describe one female interrogator with a taste for humiliation stepping on the neck of one prostrate detainee and kicking another in the genitals. They tell of a shackled prisoner being forced to roll back and forth on the floor of a cell, kissing the boots of his two interrogators as he went. Yet another prisoner is made to pick plastic bottle caps out of a drum mixed with excrement and water as part of a strategy to soften him up for questioning."

These were among the milder abuses to come to light. The continuum of bad behavior that has been a hallmark of the so-called war on terror extends from this kind of activity to incidents of extreme torture and death.

His colleague having summed up the Rumsfeld legacy, economist Paul Krugman follows by deflating the wingnut lie that Americans want to see our social safety nets dismantled:

After November's election, the victors claimed a mandate to unravel the welfare state. But the national election was about who would best defend us from gay married terrorists. At the state level, where elections were fought on bread-and-butter issues, voters sent a message that they wanted a stronger, not weaker, social safety net.

I'm not just talking about the shift in partisan alignment, in which Democrats made modest gains in state legislatures, and achieved a few startling successes. I'm also talking about specific issues, like the lopsided votes in both Florida and Nevada for constitutional amendments raising the minimum wage.

Oh my god, Americans have just turned into a nation of whiners. Why, oh why, when the economy's so good (that's what BushCorp™ and the Wall Street Journal say anyway) are so many Americans so nervous?

There's a very good reason voters, when given a chance to make a clear choice, increasingly support a stronger, not a weaker, social safety net: they need that net more than ever. Over the past 25 years the lives of working Americans have become ever less secure. Jobs come without health insurance; 401(k)'s vanish; corporations default on their pension obligations; workers lose their jobs more often, and unemployment lasts much longer than it used to.

The latest Wall Street Journal/NBC poll showed what the pollsters called an "angry electorate." By huge margins, voters think that politicians are paying too little attention to their concerns, especially health care, jobs and gas prices.

(For more on why Wall Street's flying high while your life still sucks see the Times editorial here. Its main point is that the economic factors Wall Street corporate "persons" like to see have little or no relationship to the financial requirements of actual flesh and blood humans, a point I make here)

Finally, like a sip or port after a fine meal, Bruce Wagner pens a marvelous epyllion to the vapidity of Los Angeles politics and politicians. And although I don't entirely agree with his conclusions, I none-the-less delight in the manner with which he unfolds them, to wit:

Jim Hahn and most Los Angeles mayors are like that ghostly caretaker in "The Shining." Whenever there's a new mayor, the old one says to him, just as the ghost caretaker said to Jack Nicholson in the lavatory: "You are the caretaker. You have always been the caretaker."

I read somewhere that Jim Hahn said he is planning on running again or doing something absolutely psychotic like that, but no one knows how he would even do that or why he would, and as I am writing this I am even forgetting who he is and I am trying to remember who Antonio Villaraigosa is - I keep giving him the name "Vargas" in my mind, like the illustrator who used to do those pin-up paintings for Playboy, Alberto Vargas - but now I am remembering that he's the new mayor, I either dreamed that or it's true, and all any of us can do is hope that he will do something terrible or scandalous or flat-out crazy so we may always remember who he is and not think we are seeing his picture in a group photo in "The Shining" or starting to read about him in a newspaper that no longer exists and is crumbling in our hands before we can even finish.

Man I'm gonna miss this stuff.

[x-posted at Daily Kos]