In 2018, The #NYT is No Place to Read Regurgitated GOP Trash-Talk About Booker and Harris | Blog#42
The New York Times’ Politics section included a piece on Cory Booker and Kamala Harris’ performance in the Kavanaugh Senate confirmation hearing. The piece, entitled, Democrats Grilling Kavanaugh Have Their Eyes on 2020, is nothing more than thinly disguised red meat.
For example, near the last quarter of the piece, this is how the two are depicted:
“For Mr. Booker and Ms. Harris, both darlings of the progressive movement, the hearings are also a chance to demonstrate fidelity to the left.”
Neither Harris nor Booker are ever referred to as progressives. That is a term that is normally applied to Klobuchar, Warren and Sanders. It’s so odd to see them referred to in this way, one has to wonder whether that stand-alone paragraph’s aim is to subliminally get the reader to classify the two as legislators to dismiss as non-mainstream Democrat.
The Kavanaugh confirmation is fraught with a long list of problems at the very top of which is the GOP’s blatant suppression of Kavanaugh paperwork that has a bearing on his nomination and future work as a Supreme Court Justice.
Senator Booker issued a total of five document dumps over the course of the day and evening, in defiance of Senate confidentiality rules. Why? Not because he’s thinking of running in 2020, but because as a Black man and a Senator, it is his duty to make public damning documents that go to Kavanaugh’s record on race. What has been published is highly problematic and the public has a right to know. Booker’s questioning of Kavanaugh was to the point:
Senator Kamala Harris has been conducting a line of questioning that indicates that Judge Kavanaugh may have been discussing the Mueller investigation with people who are retained by Donald Trump in the case. If that is so, then the public has a right to know, regardless of whether or not Harris plans to run for president in 2020.
Kavanaugh was rather cagey and defensive the day before when, as Harris pointed out, he could have simply answered no and avoided any speculation. He continued to hedge until he finally uttered the word no. Odd!
We are in 2018. Anyone and everyone with 15 minutes of fame on their record can be said to be thinking of running. So what?
The piece is full of innuendo that parrots Republican statements in protest of Democrats during the hearing and leaves the reader short on any evidence that either Harris or Booker was in any way grandstanding rather than building cases for opposing Kavanaugh’s confirmation.
While I understand that it is a newspaper’s duty to present the issues from as many perspectives as possible, it is difficult to see here what the aim is supposed to be, other than turning the public against two senators who were doing their job.
The piece makes mention of Senator Grassley only once, but not for this rather insulting interjection he made:
Again, I understand the need for perspective. But this isn’t perspective. This piece is so one-sided, incomplete, and vague that the only conclusion is that its aim is to tarnish and not elucidate. If anything, this piece belongs in the Opinion section of the paper.
Sad.
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