The 77-year-old Rosenthal, the epic and legendary czar of the Times, served as top editor there from 1969 to 1986. He helped remake and modernize the paper during those turbulent years (bringing it from two sections to four, for instance) but also earned the enmity of some who thought him cantankerous and overbearing. He wrote his column for 13 years; with its end came a surprising outpouring of admiration and affection, some of it from people he doesn’t even know.

“It has buoyed me,” he says of the response, with obvious emotion. “It’s hard to describe but I feel as if I’m soaking in a wonderful hot bath of affection. I have received very warm, lovely e-mail from foreign correspondents and other correspondents, staff members in New York and around the country. It just keeps coming in. It makes me very happy. And I’ve heard from I don’t know how many readers. I’m moved by them very much, not only by what they say but by the trouble they took to write them.”

By his own account, Rosenthal needed some buoying. “There were a few days — a couple of weeks maybe, knowing about it beforehand — when I was in considerable depression. Not clinical but depressed. And it took me time to pull out of it and I believe I have.” The fan mail helped, as did most of the editorial comment — though he objected to a New York Observer editorial that said he had trouble with former Times publisher Arthur “Punch” Sulzberger.

“Punch Sulzberger was one of the nicest and best men I’ve ever met, and probably the best publisher in modern American history,” he says. “He and I got along beautifully.

“It was because we both had the same concept of the New York Times,” he said. “He didn’t have to have long discussions. We knew what we wanted and what we didn’t want. We wanted to expand the paper, make it more interesting to more people but also keep its character. And we could almost look at each other and know what we were thinking.”

Of Punch’s son and the paper’s current publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., he declines comment. And an article in the December Vanity Fair is something else he’d rather not discuss — though it’s getting quite a bit of attention among the staff of the New York Times. David Margolick’s media piece, “Clash of the Times Men,” is a hair-raising and invective-laden recounting of the feud between Rosenthal and his successor as the paper’s top editor, Max Frankel. And it hit the newsstands less than a week after Rosenthal left the offices on 43rd Street.

In journalism as in comedy, timing is everything. Margolick (who reported on the law for the Times for 12 years and is now a contributing editor at Vanity Fair) was essentially following up on the story that had been simmering all year. Frankel, who led the Times from 1986 to 1994, savaged his predecessor in his memoirs, “The Times of My Life and My Life at the Times,” published earlier this year. He portrayed him as alternately self-promoting and self-pitying, small-minded and grandiose, and stated his sole goal as executive editor to be the “not-Abe.”

Rosenthal was uncharacteristically slow to respond — at first. But in interviews in Israeli papers (Ha’aretz and the Jerusalem Post) this spring, Rosenthal confessed to looking at his rival’s book long enough to throw it in the trash.

“I’m a city boy and I know enough that when I walk along and I see a dog shitting in the street, not to stop and examine his dung,” he told the Post. “I just walk on and forget his existence.”

As if. In Vanity Fair, Rosenthal gilded the turd, calling Frankel a “coward,” “somewhat of a liar” and “a bit of a fool.” He blamed Frankel for missing the Watergate story and criticized his editing of the Sunday paper. Other than that I guess he liked him fine.

Rosenthal regrets having responded to questions about Frankel’s book and is reluctant to talk about Margolick’s article, either. “You see what is happening here is somebody wrote a book and that book was unpleasant and unpleasant things are constantly being commented on and I’m constantly being asked to comment on a rather despicable book,” he says. “I don’t like having my career, which is not at an end, being linked to this. I can’t help it, but I certainly have no intention of dignifying it or anything. I’ve had it with this.”

By his own admission, it’s hard for him to stop. “I’m a garrulous — garrulous isn’t a word I like but I talk a lot to newspaper people … I’m a newspaper man. But at some point it gets purely ridiculous. To go on talking about a book I don’t like and a magazine piece which I dislike — but I’m not accusing him of anything. So why go on talking about it?”

Because people keep asking, thanks to the confluence of events. On Nov. 5, the Times published Rosenthal’s last op-ed contribution, under the slightly pathetic headline “Please Read This Column!” That had been the title of his first effort in the spot, published Jan. 6, 1987. The gesture was meant to imply some closure.

He wrote of his storied career at the paper, from his humble beginnings as a stringer from City College through his assignments covering the police beat to the United Nations, Poland (for which he won a Pulitzer) to Asia. As executive editor he was credited with bringing verve to the paper’s sometimes stodgy reporting, and was at the helm when the Times (over the advice of its attorneys) decided to publish the Pentagon Papers. Susan Tifft and Alex Jones’ “The Trust,” a lively account of the family behind the paper, gives most of the credit to then-publisher Punch Sulzberger, and Frankel accuses Rosenthal of shaking in his booties, but the fact remains: Rosenthal was ready to quit if the paper balked.

On that same day, on the opposite page, an unsigned editorial gave him the gold-watch treatment, celebrating his accomplishments and wishing him well. Yet the Times’ chief rival, the Washington Post, had something to say as well. Howard Kurtz’s media column had Rosenthal complaining of his treatment in is-this-how-they-repay-me? tones. Caught while cleaning out his desk, the 56-year veteran of the Times was not going quietly — and he made it clear it wasn’t his idea. Publisher Sulzberger had told Rosenthal “‘it was time.’ What that means, I don’t know … I didn’t expect it at all.”

Rosenthal still insists he didn’t see the ax coming. “I knew when we cut back [the column to once a week from twice] we would talk about it someday in the future and have a discussion but I thought we would have a discussion.” Here he laughed. “I was not ready for it.”

But he acknowledged that he served at the publisher’s pleasure. “I never had a contract with the New York Times in 55 years,” Rosenthal said. “Never occurred to me. Even if they had offered it I would have been insulted, I guess.”

Did the Margolick story in Vanity Fair in any way precipitate Rosenthal’s forced departure (as the New York Post suggested)? Though the piece hadn’t been published yet (it hit the newsstands in New York Thursday), many Times staffers had been contacted by the writer and quite a few were quoted on the record. At an institution that has traditionally valued appearances, such a public airing of dirty laundry was bound to prove embarrassing. The publication of the Tifft-Jones book had already brought tsuris to some family members (the authors are as candid about various extramarital affairs as they are about the paper’s editorial turmoil). Could more bad press — specifically Rosenthal’s unkind assessments of Frankel (currently a columnist for the Times magazine) have tipped the scales?

The author thinks not. “He had already spoken out to a limited degree in the Israeli newspapers,” Margolick told me. “I think this must have been part of their long-range thinking. I guess every reporter likes to feel that he’s affected events but it would be unduly self-aggrandizing in this case for me to feel that way. I really don’t think this has played any role. The larger story is that Arthur is asserting his authority more aggressively and putting his stamp on the paper,” he continued. “And that transcends the situation with Abe. That’s the larger story and we can expect more of that kind of thing.”

And as Margolick intimates politely in his piece, Rosenthal’s column was hard to defend. Blustery, alternately vague and erudite, “On My Mind” (as it was called) was mocked immediately for its meandering guess-what-I’m-writing-about style (Spy parodied it as “Out of My Mind”), but the column was a bastion of conservatism on the largely liberal-leaning editorial pages.

Somewhere along the line, though, Rosenthal became a champion of oppressed peoples in other parts of the world. Persecuted Chinese Christians and genitally mutilated African women all became subjects of his concern and compassion. (Arabs in Israel were a little trickier; he went through some moral contortions in trying to reconcile the state’s treatment of both Palestinians and Jewish settlers with his ardent Zionism.)

Some detractors have argued this was merely intellectual sentimentality, to make up for his more intolerant stances as executive editor. Under his watch, gay and women’s issues were given short shrift. The paper was slow to cover the AIDS epidemic, gay reporters remained largely in the closet, and the words “gay” and “Ms.” were not allowed in Rosenthal’s Times.

But the portrait of him that emerges in Margolick’s story is a relatively warm one. As an editor he was often able to overcome his prejudices. A fiercely anti-communist conservative, he nevertheless pushed for the publication of the Pentagon Papers and was outraged by the U.S. government’s cozy relationship with right-wing dictators. (He also coined what even Frankel conceded was a “memorably succinct” description of the paper’s conflict-of-interest policy: “I don’t care if you fuck elephants as long as you’re not covering the circus.”)

Rosenthal is, after all, 77 years old. Russell Baker recently departed those pages as well and it’s possible that Sulzberger (as well as editorial editor Howell Raines and executive editor Joe Lelyveld) might have just wanted some fresh blood. “You’ve got to be really good to do a column and you have to be really good to not go on automatic pilot,” one veteran Times editor told me. (No one who I spoke to at the Times wished to be quoted by name.) Rosenthal’s column had been reduced, over the years, from twice to once a week and a lot of readers may have wished the paper had dropped the hammer sooner.

“The shelf-life of a columnist is much shorter than it used to be,” said Margolick. “People don’t want to listen to the same voices as long as they once did. The culture has changed. The era of Arthur Krock and James Reston is over. And the turnover is going to be a lot quicker than it used to be.”

It is doubtful anyone will enjoy the sort of latitude Abe Rosenthal did. Even writing a single column a week, he made his presence known on the 10th floor of the Times building in a variety of ways, including controlling the thermostat so that the rest of the staff sweltered or froze in rhythm with his body heat. But such eccentricities are small beer compared to his legacy. As the Times’ R.W. Apple Jr. told Margolick, “Rosenthal was not the nicest man to work for but — and there’s a major but — he may have saved the New York Times.”

The paper is clearly undergoing some changes; shifts on the editorial pages may simply be part of a larger trend. Earlier this week the Times announced it had hired Paul Krugman, an economics professor at MIT and former Slate columnist, to write a regular op-ed column. And Metro columnist Clyde Haberman was pegged by the Washington Post’s Kurtz to be Rosenthal’s replacement. As savory as that irony would be — Haberman was famously fired by Rosenthal early in the reporter’s career and told, in essence, you’ll never work at this paper again — a Times spokeswoman would not confirm that he had the job. “You will find out when the readers find out,” she said.

Meanwhile, watch for Abe Rosenthal’s byline somewhere soon. When I ask him if he’s thinking of what to do next he responds with a heartfelt, “You bet your sweet patootie I am!” There are offers, he says, people telling him he should write a book, that he owes it to history. “I don’t know about history,” he says, “but maybe I owe it to myself.”

In the meanwhile, he’s installed a fax and was trying to get his computer working when I talked to him. “Are you good on computers?” he asks me. “I thought to make this time worthwhile, aside from talking to you, I could get you to fix my computer.”

I have a tech support person who does that, I tell him. “I don’t know who’s going to do my tech now,” he sighs. “I have to learn all these new things, like how to install a fax machine and where to get stamps.”

They sell them by mail now, I tell him, prompting one last bit of wisdom.

“What’s the point of that?” he asks. “Every civilized person buys stamps only when they need them.”

But now I have a case that’s very clear for Mr. Brisbane: the Times’ story on Rick Santorum’s lies (yes, I call them lies) about John F. Kennedy’s 1960 religion speech, headlined “Santorum Makes Case for Religion in Public Square.” Since it’s the New York Times and all, I don’t expect the paper to call it a “lie.” But the story contains not one word suggesting that Santorum might be, I don’t know, misrepresenting, misremembering, distorting or otherwise being completely wrong about what JFK actually said.

I’m getting a lot of credit on Twitter and Facebook today for my piece, but this is one of those rare times when I’d rather not be recognized, because – don’t tell my editors – what I did was easy. It took me exactly 10 seconds to Google JFK’s speech and another few minutes to read it. Then I cut and pasted Santorum’s comments next to JFK’s and voila, kids, I had a story. The Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart credited me with a “deep-dive,” and I appreciate the praise, but really, I barely got my feet wet. (The Post’s own news story wasn’t any better than the Times’; Capehart was the first person on staff to note Santorum’s distortion more than 24 hours after it aired on ABC’s “This Week.”)

I assumed I’d be late to the Santorum story because I was sick yesterday and didn’t even watch him live, I just heard about his remarks online. But I’m writing a book about the Democratic Party and Irish Catholics, and as you’d expect, there’s a little bit about Kennedy in there, and so I thought I’d take a moment to explain what Kennedy said – and how rabid anti-Catholicism, as late as 1960, made it necessary.

I made a comment last week in passing that I’d like to elaborate on here: I’ve spent a lot of time, in the book as well as on Salon, pointing out the anti-Catholic Nativism that hobbled my people and that accounts for some of our pugilism, shall we say, in the public square. But Santorum makes me realize I haven’t said enough about why some people were and still are suspicious of Catholics. His disrespectful comments about mainline Protestant churches somehow being agents of Satan is just one example of the contempt for other faiths that has gotten us in trouble over the years. I came of age after Vatican II; my parents were devout Catholic ecumenicists, attending seders at our local Jewish temple and telling the neighbors, no, we’re not supposed to blame Jews for killing Jesus anymore, and Protestants love Jesus, too. Santorum is an example of the mind-set that liberal Catholics and lapsed Catholics have been fighting in my lifetime, and he’s really a disgrace.

I don’t expect the New York Times to call him a disgrace in its news pages, but I do expect the paper to do a minimum of fact-checking, to see whether our first and only Catholic president actually said what Santorum attributes to him. There was a reserved, respectful, Timesian way to do it, and the paper missed an opportunity to reassure its readers that the paper is all about the truth, and that it’s not cowed into printing untruths by the GOP culture warriors who’ve spent decades now insisting the Times has a raging liberal bias.

I don’t mean to single out Michael Barbaro, either, who does good work, or the team of writers the Times lists as providing additional reporting at the end of the piece. Or Kit Seelye, who wrote the earlier Caucus post, on a tighter deadline, about Santorum’s remarks without fact-checking the JFK claim. I’ve always loved the singular way the paper almost always attributes mistakes, in its Corrections column, to “editing errors.” This was an editing error. Someone at some point should have said, “Hey, I know you’re on deadline – but what did JFK actually say?” It’s not vigilantism. It’s journalism.

You’re welcome, Mr. Brisbane.

He could have coasted on his one great advantage — fluency in Arabic — to beat other reporters to the story. He did not. He used it as a foundation to serve readers — and help colleagues. When I left Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam, a sizeable part of my heart was left behind with new friends who were struggling to make the country a better place. Amid the constant shifts in the chaotic post-war era, Anthony’s dispatches were the ones I relied on to give me the complete picture of what was happening around the country.

American reporters are trained to be objective. It is an ideal to aspire to, more than an achievable goal. We are human beings and those of us who cover conflicts have our emotions challenged every day. The desire to bear witness and to make readers and listeners feel what we feel is overwhelming. Sometimes this gets in the way of objectivity. Anthony, who saw more terrible things than most, managed to stay closer to that ideal than any one. That’s what makes his reporting the best and why in years to come, it will truly be seen as the first draft of history.

We published books on Iraq at the same time and shared a panel at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Mass. on Iraq. I had long since decided that objectivity was getting in the way of my reporting. It was important to let my readers know that I was angry and that my friend had died because of the criminally poor planning of the bigwigs in Washington. That emotion suffused my book. Anthony’s book was scrupulously written, you could never guess what he felt about the war.

My memory is that during the course of the conversation I pressed him about keeping his feelings about the war out of the book. He came back at me with full vigor, eloquently defending the importance of objectivity. He was a big-hearted, supremely talented man — and disciplined about the work. The panel was recorded by C-Span and you can watch Anthony and get some sense of who he was and what we have lost here.

Brooks’ criticism is dead on. Letting every person with a “mic check” suggest a fundamental strategy for the movement is a recipe for disaster. Not only have existing intellectual traditions been the product of superior minds, they have stood the test of time. Anyway, how to act collectively when everyone is pursuing his own quixotic dream?

Of course, anyone who follows the debate knows the left must beware of Brooks bearing gifts. The Times’ conservative columnist is always making sensible sounding suggestions to the left, which, upon closer examination, turn out to be ticking bombs. In this case, the right has a perfectly good foundation in the libertarian tradition, Brooks reports. So it doesn’t need to reinvent its first principles .

For his friends on the left, however,  Brooks advises a simple reversion to their philosopher, Karl Marx. Now there’s a thought.  When the centrist Democrats of the filibuster-bound Senate passed a healthcare plan modeled on the Republican scheme from Massachusetts, the Republicans branded their leaders as socialists, or worse, as taking their beliefs from Paris, if not Nairobi. Imagine if they started actually quoting Karl Marx.

Fortunately, should the left be capable of giving up its endlessly proliferating individual belief systems, two schools of thought other than the return to the specter of communism would be available to them.  There is a robust utilitarian tradition, represented most recently in the work of Princeton philosopher Peter Singer, that asks people to rise to the demands of altruism. As a matter of ordinary morality, you’d pause on a walk to pull a drowning child out of a pond, Singer begins. Why would you not give up a trivial expensive treat to rescue someone starving in Africa?

Or, closer to home, living in a shelter somewhere in New York, or in Washington’s McPherson Square. The well-worked-out analysis of Singer’s argument for beneficence is a vastly better foundation for a long-term social movement than any of the slogans on OWS placards. “Tax the rich” is catchy, but dissolves when confronted with Brooks’ comrades’ libertarian first principle: “It’s my money.” Singer offers the opportunity to argue about why keeping every last penny of it when others are in real need is, well, immoral.

Another great 20th century philosopher, the late John Rawls, made a very well-worked-out argument for why it’s not “your money” at all. It’s only your money, as citizens of many less well-favored societies than the United States know, if other people are willing to refrain from killing you to get it. Otherwise, life is, famously, “solitary, POOR, nasty, brutish and short.” Rawls set forth elaborate conditions for when societies agree to let the rich keep the money without having to live behind walls topped with ground glass.

Most important, Rawls posits, inequality must also benefit the people on the bottom, e.g., by expanding the size of the pie. This was the case for much of American history, and the society was the better for it. But now that finance has replaced manufacturing as the engine of the economy, not so much. The endless claims of money movers like Mitt Romney that they are “creating jobs” reflects the deep power of Rawls’ construct. If they’re not, what is he doing with all that money? Rich people’s claims to be complying with Rawls’ condition can only go on so long in face of the robust evidence to the contrary.

Brooks is right about one thing: Ideas matter. The resurrected right has relied on the power of libertarian ideas for decades. During the same period, the left has relied on mic checks and bumper stickers (“the audacity of hope”). When we see them start to use the rich store of liberal thinking available to them, David Brooks, watch out.

These pieces were clearly written with a very specific objective in mind: to draw media attention to the supposed “education crisis” in America — a favorite topic of these publications’ elite readers, who have a vested interest in blaming the recession on the poor rather than on the economic policies that enrich the already rich. No doubt, both the Times and the Atlantic achieved their goal, with various NPR shows, cable gabfests and elite magazines spending the last week frothing over the articles’ central thesis.

The tragedy in all of this is that in both the articles and in most of the discussions that followed, few bothered to question the fundamental assumptions about education in America — and fewer still bothered to ask if “education” in the modern parlance has now become a synonym for “acquiescence.”

To see how this linguistic shift is occurring, reread the Times article with a critical eye. Specifically, notice that after the reporters structure their piece around Apple executives’ (unchallenged) claim that “the U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need,” there’s not a single shred of proof — empirical or otherwise — offered in support of that assertion. On the contrary, after a sweeping declaration at the top of the piece that wage and human rights differences between Chinese and American workers have little to do with offshoring, the article inadvertently goes on to prove those differentials — not skill levels and education — are the driving force behind the domestic job losses in America.

In one section of the piece, for example, the Times notes that Apple’s big Chinese factory, Foxconn, attracts American investment because “over a quarter of (the) work force lives in company barracks and many workers earn less than $17 a day” — and “many work six days a week, often spending up to 12 hours a day at the plant.” In another section of the piece, the Times notes that the cost of “building a $1,500 computer in (California) was $22 a machine … In Singapore, it was $6 … In Taiwan, $4.85.” While the Times unquestioningly forwards Apple’s impossible-to-believe explanation for these figures (“wages weren’t the major reason for the disparities”), the statistics are yet more proof that wage differences, not education, are the real offshoring motive.

The Times also quotes an Apple executive saying the company must outsource because “the entire supply chain is in China now” — and though the article doesn’t bother to mention it, that is true precisely because other factories in that supply chain have moved to China for the cheap wages and lax human rights/labor regulations. The Times later talks to Eric Saragoza, an American worker laid off by Apple, who says that Apple told him to keep his job he didn’t need to acquire more skills, but instead “to do 12-hour days, and come in on Saturdays.” And in another part of the piece, the Times quotes a former Apple executive who insists Apple was forced to move to China because there’s no “U.S. plant (that) can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms” — an admission, again, that Apple’s move to offshore isn’t about skills, but about a desire to employ a “flexible” (read: exploitable) workforce.*

In light of all this, the absurdity of the Times’ “education crisis” conclusion is obvious. Somehow, Dickensian realities are meticulously recounted, but Apple is permitted to plead helplessness without so much as a contradictory fact being mentioned — as if the company isn’t making calculated choices that are generating record profits off sweatshop conditions. China’s super-low wages and nonexistent labor, environmental and human rights protections are shown over and over again to be the driving force behind American corporate offshoring, and yet the conclusion is nonetheless that the problem for America is our education system. And somehow, that conclusion is made without the Times, the Atlantic Monthly or any part of the media echoing their stories measuring it against actual data from the American education system.

And what, pray tell, does that data say? It says that far from a drought of skilled high-tech workers forcing supposedly helpless victims like Apple to move to China, America is actually producing more of such workers than Apple and other high-tech companies are willing to employ. As I noted in a previous newspaper column (looking at yet another New York Times piece making the same education argument):

No doubt, you’ve heard (the) fairy tale from prominent politicians and business leaders who incessantly insist that our economic troubles do not emanate from neoliberals’ corporate-coddling trade, tax and deregulatory policies, but instead from an education system that is supposedly no longer graduating enough science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) experts. Indeed, this was the message of this week’s New York Times story about corporate leaders saying America isn’t producing “enough workers with the cutting-edge skills coveted by tech firms.”

As usual, it sounds vaguely logical. Except, the lore relies on the assumptions that American schools aren’t generating enough STEM supply to meet employer demand…
To know (that) supposition is preposterous is to consider a recent study by Rutgers and Georgetown University that found colleges “in the United States actually graduate many more STEM students than are hired each year.”

These facts were most recently corroborated in mind-boggling detail by the Senate testimony of Rochester Institute of Technology’s Ron Hira. But, of course, they are nowhere to be found in the Times. That’s not altogether shocking (even if it is offensive) — the Times is a newspaper whose ombudsman recently challenged the very idea that the paper’s journalists should actually fact-check statements made by its sources. It is also a newspaper that has helped construct a larger political and media consensus around what I’ve called both “The Great Education Myth” and the “Neoliberal Bait-and-Switch.”

These sleights of hand simply stipulate as unchallenged, unquestioned fact that all of our economic problems can be solved with better STEM education and more STEM graduates. The idea is that this educational improvement would fix the alleged problem of high-tech companies like Apple not being able to find enough STEM workers. This myth endures even though the data indisputably proves that there is no such dearth of STEM worker supply — indeed, we are already producing more STEM graduates than the domestic economy can employ, meaning the only worker shortage that exists in America is a shortage of workers willing to toil at slave wages with no labor or human rights. But, alas, those facts don’t matter because the Great Education Myth isn’t about economic reality — it is an instrument of propaganda designed to distract attention from the tax and trade policies that allow companies like Apple to make so much money off the current system of exploitation.

So that gets us back to the key question of whether the term “education” is effectively being redefined? In all of the elite media’s stories about offshoring and the STEM “education crisis,” does the term “education” no longer mean “learning a set of skills”? Does it in practice now mean American workers learning not new technological crafts, but learning to quietly accept the wage, labor and human rights standards of China — the standards we thankfully improved after our own crushing Industrial Age a century ago? In short, does “education” now mean “teaching American workers to be subservient”?

The answer, almost certainly, is yes, because that’s the only way that the media and political establishment’s entire “education crisis” meme makes any logical sense.

The fact is, while our cash-starved schools would obviously benefit from more resources, and while better schools clearly couldn’t hurt our society, there’s no empirical, data-based reason to believe that improving our schools would reverse the trend of America losing high-tech jobs to slave-labor nations like China. Without a change in tax and tariff-free trade policies that economically incentivize companies like Apple to keep moving production to cheap labor havens overseas, the only “education” that will bring those jobs back is the kind that indoctrinates high-tech American workers to compete with Chinese workers by accepting the horrific labor conditions those Chinese workers experience. Based on the New York Times’ own reporting on Apple, that means an education system in America that teaches our workers to simply accept being paid $17 a day, to work six days a week in 12-hour shifts and to live in crowded dormitories so that they can be stampeded into the factory at any hour of the day. It means, in short, an education system that tells Eric Saragoza to shut up and accept the employer’s draconian demands.

Not surprisingly, the curriculum for this new education system is already being championed by the very political and media realms that originally constructed the Great Education Myth. In Congress, a group of senators is proposing to eliminate overtime protections for vast swaths of the America’s high-tech workforce in the name of competing with China. In state legislatures, lawmakers are looking to weaken child labor statutes, also in the name of competition. And on the New York Times Op-Ed page, Thomas Friedman implies that Americans are lazy and declares that “average is over” and that “everyone needs to find their extra” — elite-speak for the notion that Americans, who already log some of the longest workdays in the world and who are already among the planet’s most productive laborers, must work even harder than they already do.

In beginning to construct this kind of pedagogy, our mandarins are not coincidentally promoting a key part of the educational ideology of their Chinese counterparts. No, not the part of that ideology that is focused on training high-tech workers — the part that prioritizes obedience. Indeed, as my friend Michael Levy recounts in his terrific book “Kosher Chinese,” that educational method teaches Chinese workers never to question their station, demand basic rights or ask for better conditions.

That same ethos is now being proudly promoted here at home. Should we accept it — and the redefinition of “education” that comes with it — we may end up bringing a few jobs back, but we will have reversed the very labor, wage and environmental progress that once defined our basic concept of human rights — and America itself.

*It’s important to note that the Times did eventually publish this follow-up piece to its original article about Apple and offshoring. The follow-up piece looks more closely at how Apple mistreats its workers in China, and that kind of scrutiny is certainly necessary and laudable. However, the fact that the Times made the decision to separate the later piece on labor rights from the earlier article on Apple’s employment decisions implies that the two issues — worker exploitation and offshoring — are separate, when in fact they are inextricably intertwined. That kind of distinction is a real problem. Indeed, pretending that these two issues are wholly different topics (as Apple and other high-tech executives so often do) perpetuates the deceptive notion that exploitation is just a “liberal” feel-goody concern while business practices are more serious, dispassionate, non-ideological decisions. But only when these issues are looked at in aggregate will we be able to start having an honest debate about how globalization really works.

Mencken could recall no such excitement. “The unanimous opinion of all the journalists that I know, excluding a few Liberals who are obviously somewhat balmy,” he added “… is that since the days of the national Thors and Wotans, no politician who was not out for himself, and himself alone, has ever drawn the breath of life in the United States.”

Alas, such attitudes went out of fashion with snap-brim fedoras, smoke-filled rooms and bottles of rye in desk drawers. Today’s national political reporters have attended fancy colleges, regard their professional affiliations as valuable status symbols, hence give every sign of identifying more with Washington courtiers and political professionals than the great unwashed.

To the extent they may share Mencken’s exuberant disdain for hoodwinker and hoodwinked alike, ambitious reporters are well-advised to keep it to themselves. As a career strategy, thoughtful circumspection is advised. The uphill path to a sinecure on “Meet the Press” must be trodden carefully.

Many readers, for example, can probably identify a name-brand journalist such as Judith Miller, who fell into disrepute for parroting Bush administration propaganda about Saddam Hussein’s WMD. But can you name anybody whose skeptical reporting made them famous? No, you cannot.

Columnists have more leeway, but even there it’s safer (and easier) to stick to anodyne topics such as dorky clothes, bad hair, which candidate resembles what character in “Pride and Prejudice,” and who mistreats his dog. To me, it’s significant that an honorable exception like Paul Krugman — my nominee for progressive MVP — is not a product of newsroom culture.

So now comes New York Times “public editor” Arthur Brisbane with maybe the most disingenuous question of the year: Should Times reporters be “truth vigilantes”? When politicians lie, should reporters call them out?

And if so, how?

Brisbane’s two columns on the subject drew widespread astonishment and hilarity from readers and journalists alike — partly because journalists love talking about ourselves as much as the average Hollywood starlet. They also drew a sharp rebuke from Times editor Jill Abramson, who insisted that the “kind of rigorous fact-checking and truth-testing you describe is a fundamental part of our job as journalists.”

Abramson gave instances of the newspaper supplying proper context for politicians’ statements such as Mitt Romney’s preposterous charge that President Obama wants “to replace our merit-based society with an entitlement society.” (Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge. Know what he means?) She said that the Times reported that “the largest entitlement programs — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid — were all enacted before Mr. Obama entered grade school.”

Of course, that’s not what Romney’s really saying. Look, as somebody who spent more than a decade waging a quixotic war of words against the New York Times over its role in the Whitewater hoax, the subsequent “War on Gore,” and its shameful (and acknowledged) role in “catapulting the propaganda” that led the U.S. to invade Iraq, I have two observations.

First, the Times has rebounded since those dark days of 2003. Far less unmediated government propaganda and make-believe scandal characterizes its news columns. Abramson’s 2011 appointment as executive editor gives further reason for optimism.

Second, the answer to Brisbane’s real question — exactly how reporters are supposed to go about calling Mitt Romney a liar — has no good answer. Because the more forcefully it’s done, the more the GOP candidate’s apt to like it.

Take Romney’s oft-repeated charge that Obama goes around apologizing for America. The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler did this one to a fare-thee-well, showing conclusively that the allegation is completely false — an absurd mix of misrepresented circumstances, doctored quotes, etc. And it took him 1,800 words.

And who read them? Certainly nobody who’d already swallowed the lie on Fox News, Rush Limbaugh or any of a hundred right-wing websites. So the Washington Post says it’s a lie. Well, they would, wouldn’t they? The Times agrees? Even better.

Romney’s not talking to reporters, but over and through them, seeking not nuanced news stories, but five-second video clips and TV ads. Reporters who ask confrontational questions can be ignored, or worse, made characters in the story. Well-paid operatives can make their editors’ lives miserable.

The uncomfortable truth is that no newspaper today has the power and moral authority the New York Times so thoughtlessly squandered, and it ain’t coming back. Obama will have to defend himself.