The Wall Street Journal pretty much jumped the shark when Rupert Murdoch, king of UK sleaze and American yellow journalism, bought them. Today's comment from an editor of the Journal, James Taranto, suggesting that President Obama is a Muslim, pretty much sums up the sorry state of that once-great newspaper.
Imagine a Washington Post editor, or a New York Times editor, getting away with that kind of filth. They wouldn't. Because, for all the criticism we sometimes give them, they're still real newspapers, rather than propaganda arms of one political party.
Here is what a top Wall Street Journal editor tweeted today:
UPDATE: Taranto is now claiming, in a series of Tweets back and forth with AMERICAblog Elections' Kombiz, that all of us simply didn't understand what Taranto meant in his tweet - he was, you see, simply restating that the President had never really said he was a Muslim, Taranto now claims.
Right. First off, the tweet is obviously sarcastic on its face (sarcastic about the President's denial). It's not an attempt to clarify that the President is innocent, so to speak. Second, we are to believe that the opinion editor of the Wall Street Journal is so imprecise with his written word that one might understandably misinterpret his sentence to be a racist slur against the President of the United States (it wasn't just Kombiz, a lot of us interpreted it that way). Because, you know, the Wall Street Journal editorial page editor just isn't that good with nuance in English.
That's one possibility.
The other is that he intentionally floated a racist attack against the President of the United States in his official capacity as a senior editor at the Wall Street Journal (note that his Twitter account clearly links to his workplace).