The New York Times has been notoriously squeamish about labeling waterboarding and other vicious acts of torture indulged in by the Bush Administration, and sedulously never inquired about by the Obama Administration, as “torture,” on the grounds that, well, the Bush folks said that it wasn’t torture, and the Times never takes sides in a controversy.
Yet today the Times runs a story based on the recent bus crash that took 15 lives to remark on the Chinese fondness for gambling. It’s all “rooted in tradition, opportunity and vice,” the Times explains.
Vice? Gambling is legal, in Atlantic City, at least, isn’t it? And it’s also legal to travel from New York to Atlantic City, isn’t it? So where’s the vice, other than in the mind of the Times?
The Times also carries a big thinkpiece on the current trauma in Japan, explaining that “Never has Japan’s weak, rudderless system of governing been so clearly exposed or mattered so much.”
Weak and rudderless, huh? Did you clear that with the Japanese government, Times folks?
