In Sunset Boulevard, you couldn’t help but sympathize with Norma Desmond. She made nostalgia, senility and decrepitude slightly pitiable, but also charming.
The New York Times, it’s stock value in the cellar while squirming under the thumb of a foreign robber baron, makes the same thing shabby, malodorous and pathetic.
“Banning Books in Miami,” blares their editorial headline from February 10th. “The Miami-Dade School Board’s decision is not only unconstitutional, it is counterproductive. If the ( local school) board wants to oppose the totalitarianism of the Castro regime, banning books is an odd way to go about it.”
Before wailing about “Book Banning!”any New York Times “reporter” could have picked up the phone, dialed the American Library Association and discovered, for instance, that between 1990 and 2000, more than 6,000 protests were lodged against school books in public school libraries by American parents. For every protest actually recorded, they estimate that four or five go unreported. Indeed, a Supreme Court ruling in 1982. by none other than William Brennan, wrote that local school boards had “broad discretion in the management of school affairs,” adding that if they removed a book based on it’s “educational suitability” such actions “would not be unconstitutional.”
According to the American Library Association, over the past two decades, every single year sees between 400 and 600 such schoolbook protests in the U.S., much of it over material considered “racially insensitive” as when The Adventure’s of Huckleberry Finn were yanked from an Illinois school. The Tales of uncle Remus and Little Black Sambo also bit the dust long ago.
In brief, attempted “book bannings'” identical to the one in Miami-Dade, (but involving no disrespect for Fidel Castro or Che Guevara) have occurred at a rate of over one a day for past two and half decades from sea to shining sea. In most of these the ACLU and New York Times have been conspicuously mum.
But AH! Just let those insufferable right-wing Cuban-Americans try it! Just let them attempt to besmirch the Left’s premier pin-up boys! Then the ACLU promptly blasts its bugles, their media cronies affect grave frowns, and cries of “censorship!” and “book- banning!” flood the airwaves and headlines. ”
In a way, the New York Times mimics Nora Desmond, they ache for their former days of glory—the days when every imbecility on Fidel Castro printed in the New York Times established the beltway talking points:
Whole thing here:
Excellent piece on that odious and hypocritical NY Times anti-Cuban American editorial. The Norma Desmond analogy is perfect. Let’s hope that the Old Grey [subversive and genuinely evil] Hag drops dead soon. She’s hurt so many people and doesn’t have the sense to stop even has her stocks plummet and people dump her ass for Fox News.