New York Times

Another line: “Is it possible to be objective and fair when the reporter is choosing to correct one fact over another?” Haha what? Probably?

Basically everyone on the Internet is slack-jawed and stunned by this entire thing, because, man, “should we print the truth or not” is a hilarious question to just throw out to readers.

(The “public editor” has no power or authority at the Times, for the record. It is just the Times’ phrase for “crusty old newspaper veteran who answers reader complaints about stock photo usage and anonymous sourcing by hassling editors to give him defensive quotes for his column,” or “ombudsman.” The position was created after Jayson Blair published a bunch of untrue “facts” in the newspaper. The Times eventually corrected those “facts.”)

John Heilemann made the case in August of 2010, but Bob Woodward really kicked it off by pretending a Biden-Clinton switch was “on the table” in October of 2010. That notion — supposedly — can be traced back to pollster grifter Mark Penn, which should have stopped anyone else from bringing it up ever again. But Jonathan Alter took another crack at it last October, and publishing speculation on the switch has become reliable Drudge-bait ever since.

Keller’s column frames the switch as something wished for, instead of predicting it based on the “chatter” of “insiders,” which helps make it merely stupid instead of inherently dishonest. But here are his arguments as to why it would be a good idea instead of a bizarre and desperate stunt:

One: it does more to guarantee Obama’s re-election than anything else the Democrats can do. Two: it improves the chances that, come next January, he will not be a lame duck with a gridlocked Congress but a rejuvenated president with a mandate and a Congress that may be a little less forbidding. Three: it makes Hillary the party’s heir apparent in 2016. If she sits out politics for the next four years, other Democrats (yes, Governor Cuomo, we see your hand up) will fill the void.

One: What? Prove it, maybe? Two: Haha what, again? Congress will get ungridlocked if the president switches vice presidents? To a Clinton? Three: OK, but what if Obama/Clinton loses? And if Obama wins again wouldn’t any Democrat be at a disadvantage in 2016 due to historical trends anyway, making it a “safer” bet to not be his running mate, assuming she actually wants to be president still, which is not at all a given?

But we’re not dealing with observable reality here, as the bit about Clinton’s magical power to un-gridlock Congress demonstrates. We’re in the world of vague assertions about “warmth” and “voltage.” How many electoral votes would running mate Hillary Clinton be worth? Keller never bothers to attempt to make a quantitative guess. This is the closest we get:

Moreover, even if Obama can win without Hillary, there’s a lot to be said for running up the score. If she can do in 2012 what Obama did in 2008 — animate that feeling of historic possibility — the pair can lift some House and Senate candidates along with them. One reason Republicans did so well in the 2010 Congressional elections is that they overcame the gender gap and carried women voters 51 to 49. Those voters will flock back to Hillary, the more so if the Republican ticket is locked into a culture-war agenda. So, by the way, will Hispanic voters, securing such endangered states as Florida, New Mexico, Nevada and Colorado.

Ooh, actual data! The Republicans won women in a midterm election. Hillary Clinton is a woman. So in a presidential general election, women will “flock back to Hillary.” Those women may be Republicans, voting in a Republican wave election, but they are women and so they will vote for Barack Obama if he is next to a woman on the ballot. (Though what about those Hispanics? Shouldn’t Obama replace Biden with a Hispanic woman, in this case? Or isn’t he in fact best off retaining Joe Biden, who is, after all, a white man? From Scranton? White men will “flock back” to Obama once they see that he is friends with a white person.)

The column isn’t just bad analysis — it’s also oddly condescending to Secretary Clinton! It complains that she owes “us” a vice-presidential run after she “raised our expectations” by running for president last time. It calls Clinton “the dutiful Methodist schoolgirl.”

Here’s the line that is secretly the worst:

But the idea that she should replace Joe Biden as Obama’s running mate in 2012 is something else. It has been kicking around on the blogs for more than a year without getting any traction, mainly because it has been authoritatively, emphatically dismissed by Hillary, Biden and Team Obama.

Did you see that? “Kicking around on the blogs.” That’s Keller-speak for “not worth anyone’s time until a real journalist like New York Times opinion columnist Bill Keller brought it up.” The “bloggers” kicking this idea around, as I mentioned earlier, are New York magazine political writer John Heilemann, Washington Post living legend Bob Woodward, and former Newsweek senior editor and best-selling author Jonathan Alter. Those bloggers and their crazy notions!

As a blogger, I know that my silly opinion is not as carefully considered and well-informed as that of former New York Times editor Bill Keller, who is not at all simply talking out of his ass. But even if there were any hint at all that the switch was a possibility, which there isn’t, it would be a stupid idea. Hillary Clinton is already part of the president’s Cabinet, and she and her husband will already campaign for the president’s reelection. Running mates barely nudge the numbers in presidential elections, unless they’re historically awful, which Joe Biden isn’t. The Clintons are among the most divisive figures in American politics — Hillary Clinton’s recent high approval rating has come because she’s not running for anything — and relitigating every Clinton scandal would consume the national political press for weeks if she ended up on the ticket.

The running mate switch hasn’t been successful since the Franklin Roosevelt administration, and the last time a president made a strategic switch to help win a tough reelection, it failed.

And I bet if Obama did make this stupid switch, Bill Keller would write some awful column about how desperate it made the president look. Unless he will have by then moved on to finally writing his “kids today sure are sexting each other a lot” piece.

So it probably would’ve been best for Keller to have retired to, say, write an unread memoir and join the Council on Foreign Relations instead of deciding to return to the place where his obvious, obnoxious hackishness is most apparent: The opinion page.

Oh, but while holding what could be the most powerful job in international media, what Keller really wanted to do was go back to writing! This is why, while editing the paper, he’d occasionally parachute into war zones (or early primary states) to file utterly useless news analysis pieces, which, of course, ended up on the front page of the paper, no matter the unoriginality of the observations or the tiredness of the topics.

And, fine, as I said, he was once a fine foreign reporter. What he was never, though, was a good opinion columnist. He’s got a bland style coupled with a smug voice, and absolutely no original thoughts on the major issues of the day. When Times Magazine editor Hugo Lindgren hired Keller to pen a front-of-the-book column, it was perhaps supposed to be full of banal lessons from his old days in the field, but it very quickly became “obtuse old man yells at cloud computing.”

His early, silly column on how Twitter is making us stupid was a rather blatant example of trolling, which isn’t the sort of thing the editor of the Times should be doing. Then, of course, there was the column he spent relentlessly trashing the Huffington Post for being — ugh — “aggregators,” comparing bloggers to Somalian pirates. This was an argument straight out of breathless media columns from about five to 10 years earlier, but Keller had been too busy doing his newspaper editing job at the time to share his opinion, and I guess he felt left out. He needn’t have — it turns out his opinion was shared by every single other hidebound old-school newspaper dude in the nation.

His reporters began trying to express to him how embarrassing he was being and how difficult he was making their jobs (“Times media editor Bruce Headlam and media columnist David Carr had an intervention with Keller to explain how his columns were hurting their ability to cover the industry,” New York says), which Keller, in classic hack style, took to mean that his columns had sparked “conversation,” making his efforts worthwhile and provocative instead of just stupid.

When Keller finally ended his Times Magazine gig, his 12 columns had received five corrections. “Keller’s correction rate on the column works out to 41.6 percent,” John Koblin noted. Jayson Blair’s rate “ranged from 5 to 6.3 percent.”

Keller left the Times Magazine, of course, for the Times opinion page. He has recently argued that economic recovery has been impeded by the “proliferation of blogs and social media” and written this rambling, pointless entry, which seemed like he wrote it in a half-hour while paging through the international news-briefs in the Economist. (It is, I think, supposed to be ironic? He does the stupid Maureen Dowd “edgy pop culture reference” thing and everything.)

And let us never forget Keller’s dozens of pre-editorship columns in support of the invasion of Iraq, written with the sureness of all the other morons who wrote very serious columns about how important it was that we invade Iraq to punish them for not having WMD that they weren’t going to ever be able to potentially use against us. Here are some fun lines from Bill Keller columns from before he took over as editor:

February 8, 2003: “Thanks to all these grudging allies, Mr. Bush will be able to claim, with justification, that the coming war is a far cry from the rash, unilateral adventure some of his advisers would have settled for.”
Ibid.: “Let’s imagine that the regime of Saddam Hussein begins to crumble under the first torrent of cruise missiles. The tank columns rumbling in from Kuwait are not beset by chemical warheads. There is no civilian carnage to rouse the Arab world against us. In fact, Al Jazeera shows American soldiers being welcomed by Iraqis as liberators. The illicit toxins are unearthed and destroyed. Persecuted Kurds and Shiites suppress the urge for clan vengeance.”
December 14, 2002: “How will Iraqis react to an invasion? (Many of them with an outpouring of relief, wouldn’t you think?)”

Hm, I wouldn’t think, but you did, apparently!

HACKIEST 2011 MOMENT:
His pseudo-mea culpa for being perhaps the single most prominent member of the “Liberal Hawks in Favor of Invading Iraq in Order to Make Us Feel Better About 9/11″ club, which he picked a slightly different name for when he opened its first chapter in his old Times Op-Ed column. Like other former war cheerleaders, he essentially claims to have been swallowed up by a sort of temporary mass hysteria. Keller’s sorta-apology basically proves that every antiwar thinker who said the liberal hawks were just drunk on the pathological need to lash out irrationally in order to prove that America had the biggest balls in the world was correct. “By the time of Alice’s birth I had already turned my attention to Iraq, a place that had, in the literal sense, almost nothing to do with 9/11, but which would be its most contentious consequence,” he now writes. Oh, “almost,” you still say?
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(Read the introduction here. Read the 2010 Salon Hack 30 List here.)

Everything, with Brooks, comes down to “values.” Bad things happen because of a lack of the correct “values,” and the correct “values” are essentially white upper-middle-class mid-20th-century bourgeois values. Poverty happens because the poor don’t have those values. Earthquakes happen because of a lack of those values. The sexual abuse of children happens because — you guessed it — America lost those important pre-’60s values. The abuses at Penn State, in Brooks’ worldview, went unreported because America has become “a society oriented around our inner wonderfulness.”

HACKIEST 2011 MOMENT:
That linked column on the abuses at Penn State was the sanitized version of Brooks’ comments on “Meet the Press,” in which he blamed both the failure to report the sexual abuses to the police and the riots following the firing of Joe Paterno more explicitly on “30 or 40 years” of “muddying the moral waters.” If it weren’t for women’s lib and the self-esteem movement, those kids could’ve been protected!

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(Read the introduction here. Read the 2010 Salon Hack 30 List here.)