Hillary Schmillary

Kaus has an excellent take on the New York Times' wacky reading of the conservative reaction to that new Hillary book.

NYT's Raymond Hernandez breathlessly reveals that "Republican and conservative activists are behind a vigorous campaign to promote a controversial new biography about Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton." Apparently it's advertised on a Web site that once got some money from Richard Mellon Scaife! The real story--too subtle for a paper that has to dispatch a correspondent to cover conservatives the way they'd send a foreign correspondent to India--is that the right-wing reception of the new Hillary book has been wary and remarkably hostile.

As usual, he gets the cordoned-off-from-reality New York liberal reaction almost perfectly. Almost, that is:

Printing the predictable story your readers expect to read instead of the intriguing story that's really out there is more or less the definition of "hack," no? ... [But the NYT actively ignored the previous day's Orin piece, which said the opposite and had some GOP quotes to back it up--ed Good point. That makes the NYT piece less "hack" and more ... something worse. The GOP congressional delegation could ceremoniously burn the book in the middle of McPherson Square and the NYT would ignore it and write a piece describing its insidious promotion by "Republican activists."]

The Times wouldn't ignore the book burning; they'd dually accuse conservatives of being book-burning censors and of being engaged in a plot to get people interested in it by pretending to be against it.