Generally, I believe logic tends toward the good. But sometimes it takes a circuitous route. Hold on. I'll get there. First, it is important to establish the New York Times for what it actually is. It is among the top two or three newspapers in the world. It is beleaguered like all print publications. Its future is online and it has done very well, considering. It is worth subscribing to. It is in some ways encyclopedic.
Are you waiting for another shoe to drop? Here it is. The New York Times is not a liberal bastion though it has a generally liberal editorial page.
It is, as much as anything else, a daily index of how to succeed, get rich, and be presentable in society. You have to read the whole thing to appreciate the extent to which this is a true statement.
The Iraq hiccup
Then there was the NYT gullibility regarding the Cheney-Bush Iraq buildup. One would like to believe they could have made the difference, but that may be a bit unfair.
There was also an unfortunate incident in which they were taken for a ride by a reporter who managed to provide fiction as news. We are in a season of confession and culpability, but I will stop there.
My point remains that, as one of the world's top newspapers, the New York Times is perhaps the most important gauge, in the US, whether a story has legs.
For a while, I have been suggesting that the heart of the Russia matter may be that Mr. trump is chained to the Russian bear, willingly or not.
A mess
I believe they have the goods on him. I believe their Trump dossier is as thick as their Doom Hillary dossier. I do not think this began with Trump getting nominated. I think the reason Trump is both casual and pathologically petrified about Russia is that it is the most important force in his life.
Now the New York Times has published an item which not only agrees that it is among the possible truths of the Russia scandal, it also explicitly states that it is the most logical explanation of the Russia scandal. Here is the item, just out today.
The Real Russia Scandal https://t.co/ngGmo62ED1
— Stephen C. Rose (@stephencrose) December 16, 2017
The writer is a conservative columnist recently hired from a post at Murdoch's Wall Street Journal.
You have to read down to his penultimate paragraph to find this statement and I will guarantee that it will have some resonance as time goes on. "He’s vulnerable to Russian blackmail."
Not a new thought but in today's world it isn't who said it or when it was said, but where it gets published and whose eyes it reaches.
Bret Stephens, the author, calls his surmise logical, offering four demonstrable reasons why Trump is so exercised over Russia. In pursuing my stories, I always pray for a break in the Times. My thanks to reality!