As the puffed-up Fauxgate known as "Emailgahzi" finally recedes after the NYT was compelled to walk back most if not all of their original stories on the fake scandal, one might wish to ask why this silly tale came, not from Twitchy or Breitbart or Newsmax, but the allegedly respectable New York Times.
The answer can be summed up in two words: Howell Raines.
For a more detailed version, follow me down below the fold.
Eric Boehlert, in his remembrance of the late Timesman, Anthony Lewis, takes care to note that Lewis was one of the few people at the Times who didn't join in the weird group hatred of Bill and Hillary Clinton that was fomented and encouraged by top dog Howell Raines:
What may be getting overlooked in the remembrances though, and what the Times itself neglected to mention in its otherwise thorough Lewis obituary, was the pivotal role Lewis played during the 1990s when he stood up to his own newspaper, as well as to an army of Republican partisans waging war against President Bill Clinton. Lewis wrote passionately about the mindless pursuit of the Whitewater story and the Clinton impeachment saga. As a legal scholar, Lewis was utterly appalled by the conduct of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr and his office of "thuggish deputies."
Today, pointing out the gaping holes in the Whitewater tale and the impeachment media circus might seem like common sense punditry. But at the time, and especially inside the Times, where a fever-swamp disdain for Clinton ran wild, Lewis' level-headed truth telling stood out.
As Boehlert notes, this is not to say that Lewis was a full-throated Clinton partisan; he criticized President Clinton at several points in the 1990s. But the criticism was never over stupid Fauxgates like the current one.
How did the Times get so fever swamped with regard to the Clintons? As I said earlier, the two-word answer to that is: "Howell Raines". As the NYT's editorial page editor during the 1990s, Raines' strangely and inexplicably white-hot hatred of Bill Clinton, and by extension Hillary Clinton, set the tone for how the paper covered the Clinton presidency.
Slate's Timothy "Chatterbox" Noah, himself not exactly a Clinton fan, was nevertheless repelled by how Raines' hatred was warping not just Raines' own writing, but the stance of the Times as well:
Chatterbox has always hated the orotund style of Howell Raines' editorials, which routinely attempt to hide simpleminded logic behind lapidary prose and promiscuous contempt. Such elegant smugness! Such magnificent indifference to nuance! The Times' editorials are without question more readable than they were in the pre-Raines era, when they were cautious and boring. They are also more irresponsible and annoying, in the style of Robert Bartley's Wall Street Journal editorial page (which Raines seems to regard as his stylistic--though of course not his ideological--model).
Given this predisposition, Chatterbox tore into the Times' impeachment editorial with gusto yesterday morning. Chatterbox knew that the Times editorial page has a pathological hatred of Bill Clinton far exceeding anything Chatterbox could ever muster. Chatterbox also knew that the Times editorial page had decided (or perhaps, had been told by its liberal publisher to decide) not to favor impeachment. It was an interesting challenge for Raines: two colliding beliefs that had to be explained and reconciled in the page's Homeric house style. Would the arguments be calibrated? Mightn't the writer be forced to acknowledge humility or doubt?
Of course not.
To this day, just as it has refused to do a full-on
mea culpa for serving as PNAC's most respectable megaphone in the fool's rush to invade Iraq, it not only
refuses to apologize for its part in enabling the Scaife-funded "Arkansas Project"'s attacks on the Clintons, it's doubled down on the enabling.