Agent Raines: Mission Accomplished

Former New York Times executive editor Howell Raines seems to have a new gig as an opinion columnist for the Guardian. The debut piece, his reflections on the Presidential campaign season so far, has attracted much blog commentary. Initially it was seized upon by the reactionary right (Andrew Sullivan, OpinionJournal) as proof of a supposed leftist agenda that Raines must have had with him at the NYT.

But it didn't take much of a reading to see that Raines' article, while exhibiting some primitive Marxist claptrap about a deceived proletariat, was really emblematic of the elitist superficiality that caused Bill Clinton and Al Gore so many problems in the NYT's editorials and political reporting. Sullywatch was quickly on the case, and Brad DeLong has collected several critiques here.

It would be interesting to know how the Raines diatribe went down with Guardian readers; our fear is that its smugly fatalistic view of American politics found a ready audience. And in what must rank as one of Andrew Sullivan's more prophetic insights, a full two years ago, with Raines then in charge of the NYT, he wrote:

RAINES WATCH: [NYT editorial appointment] The Guardianization of the New York Times continues.

So Raines is in fact like one of those undercover operatives who has to lie low for a while after a crisis, but then can return to the fold.

And while we're looking through Sully's 2002 archives, he draws our attention to a bizarre statement by a fellow reactionary that deserves another look:

I guess he's just being honest, but Mickey Kaus says it's "intensely disappointing" that [Democratic Congressman] Condit might be legitimately cleared in the Chandra Levy investigation.

It's worth looking back at the Kaus obsession with the Condit-Chandra business just to see the level of dysfunction that he, (like Howell Raines), displays with Democratic politicians and women to which the media links them. Especially because Kaus is at it again with Alex Polier, the woman who did not have any kind of affair with John Kerry. But she has not explained herself to Mickey's satisfaction, because after all, it would be "intensely disappointing" to him if the rumour was not true. Roger Ailes (not the bald repulsive one) collects the offending quotes with appropriate commentary.