Thread: When the 'NY Times' Disses Arizona, It's Time to Dis Back

When 'NY Times' disses Arizona, it's time to dis back

by Doug MacEachern - Dec. 14, 2008 12:00 AM
The Arizona Republic


It is a journalism tradition.

First, the prestigious national newspaper, whose editorial pages are gospel for the cognoscenti, disses the fly-over state.

Then, the local commentator, who reads the prestigious national journal with a faithful regularity that is never returned in kind, swipes back. Do the editorialists in great Gotham even take note? They'd never let on if they did.

So, let the tradition continue. The New York Times' editorial pages last Monday took a wild, sweeping and grandly, condescendingly irrational swipe at Arizona, dismissing it as a "State of Fear" without Gov. Janet Napolitano present to curb our worst instincts.

I take issue. It's hard to decide where to begin, what with the hair-pulling mess of an argument the Times laid out. But I'll try.

I've long argued that the Times editorialists are a shallow bunch, not much deserving of the influence they wield. I've spouted this at countless cocktail parties: For sound liberal arguments - based on, you know, research - the Washington Post's editorial pages are consistently the best, in my view. Or maybe the Boston Globe's, if they wouldn't prattle on at such length.

For gaseous and predictable arguments ripped from the most recent front-page news stories and not much else, the Times is champion.

Someone in the Times editorial chambers seems to have gotten his hands on a story about Arizona Secretary of State Jan Brewer, who is next in line to assume the governorship should Napolitano become President-elect Barack Obama's Homeland Security secretary. And the story apparently mentioned that Brewer, unlike Napolitano, is a Republican. Well, that just won't do.

The Times predicts relentless horrors will be visited on illegal aliens once their staunch protector, Napolitano, is gone from the State of Fear.

Brewer will sign Republican-sponsored laws to whip and flay them. The xenophobic Minutemen will have free rein to bury anti-personnel land mines at the border. And Sheriff Joe Arpaio's deputies will sweep through neighborhoods chasing them down.

Well, I'll give them one of three.

As for how Arizona's policies toward illegal immigrants will change once Brewer is in charge, the Times observes only that Brewer "is a Republican who is expected to be far more willing to sign whatever tough immigration measures get to her desk."

"Expected" by whom, they do not say. By the editorial writers in New York who haven't a clue about life on the border, I'm guessing.

There aren't many lofts in SoHo jammed full of hapless human cargo. Central Park hasn't been hopelessly despoiled by a surging wave of humanity like Organ Pipe National Monument has been.

Republicans as a whole are split nearly down the middle on immigration policy. So, where the woman who personally nominated for president John McCain - the fellow who risked his political career in behalf of comprehensive immigration reform - stands regarding immigration law, I know not.

But let's get to the heart of the matter. The Times editorialists dread an Arizona Legislature unbound. And that is cheeky. Really, really . . . cheeky.

Two years ago, the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University law school analyzed all 50 state legislatures and concluded that Albany was "the most dysfunctional" legislative body in the nation.

Basically, the Brennan study found that democracy in New York state amounted to "three men in a room." That is, decisions impacting citizens of one of the nation's most populous states were being made almost entirely by the Senate majority leader, the Assembly speaker and the governor.

That is how New York came to have the fourth highest state and local tax burden in the country, according to the Tax Foundation's annual report for fiscal 2008. It is also how New York effectively wrecked the state market for individual and small-group health insurance in 1993 when it instituted a series of mandates that more than tripled premiums.

Granted, the dysfunction of New York government has often been a bipartisan affair. But it isn't now, and, believe it or not, the haplessness there has gotten worse as a result of Democrats taking over entirely.

After taking a 32-30 majority in the state Senate in the fall elections, New York Democratic leaders say they have given up trying to conclude a "power-sharing deal" because of too much "self-interest and personal aggrandizement," according to the new Senate president.

Space does not allow me to address the rogue's gallery of New York legislators currently behind bars or under indictment. But suffice to say that New York lawmakers would have no difficulty concluding deals with Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojovich, a Democrat.

And I'll pass on resurrecting the exploits of a New York governor much favored by the Times editorialists, Eliot Spitzer.

Yes, the Times editorial board is right that Arizona lawmakers sometimes concoct some nutty bills. Some mean-spirited stuff, too. But at least their dirty work is done in the light of day, where the whack-jobs are made to defend their handiwork.

But, as the Brennan Center reported in its damning study, the two houses of the New York Legislature voted on a combined total of more than 11,000 bills from 1997 to 2001. Ninety-five percent of those bills passed "without a word of debate."

But that must be how the Times' editorial-page fussbudgets like it. "Three men in a room" is so neat and tidy.

So unlike that dusty, messy democracy over there in . . . Arizona.

Reach the writer at 602-444-8883.

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepubli ... ern14.html

Republicans as a whole are split nearly down the middle on immigration policy.

Not true! The majority of Republican voters in this country don't support amnesty and do support tougher immigration policy.