Just after Scott Walker bowed out of the presidential race, the New York Times headlined “Scott Walker’s Dismal Finish Is a Fitting Result, Old Foes Say”:
Where to begin with this one? You do have to love that the Times chooses to hang accusations of racism in the current GOP race on the arguments of unnamed “critics.” The rest of the article recounts criticism of Walker’s tough-on-crime campaign for a seventh district assembly seat in Milwaukee in 1990. He was 23 years old and running against a black Democrat. The sources are overwhelmingly one-sided. The details recounted are both dubious and old news.
It’s no exaggeration to say that this article would have been transparently hostile and less than illuminating even if Scott Walker were the frontrunner for the GOP nomination. But without him in the race, why bother at all? The whole endeavor reeks of a bunch of Times editors sitting around saying, “Well, the hit piece on Walker is already written, we’ll just slap a reference to his ‘dismal finish’ in the headline and pretend it’s topical.”
If the article has any purpose at all—and this is a stretch—it’s a shot across the bow of any Republican candidate who would dare point out that the crime and rioting in many American cities is pretty convincing evidence of the failure of liberal governance. Publicly desiring a state of law and order is just another racist shibboleth, and the paper of record in Bill de Blasio’s New York has declared it so.
It’s really a mystery why Republicans feel the Times has a liberal bias.
