One of the few persons in the Establishment Media who wrote about the plight of the poor and less well off is stepping down from his perch at the New York Times op-ed page, Bob Herbert:
This is my last column for The New York Times after an exhilarating, nearly 18-year run. I’m off to write a book and expand my efforts on behalf of working people, the poor and others who are struggling in our society. My thanks to all the readers who have been so kind to me over the years. I can be reached going forward at bobherbert88@gmail.com.
New Yorkers remember Bob Herbert from his New York Daily News days, where he also was voice for the voiceless. He's been great always. I have always been a fan. Of course, people like Bell Curve Fifth Column Andrew Sullivan found Herbert boring. Who wants to read about poverty and people struggling to have a decent life? Pimping for the Iraq Debacle is so much more interesting and exciting. Here's my take on Bob Herbert.
It always troubled me that progressive pundits have gone out of their way to attack Herbert - see, e.g., Brad DeLong and Kevin Drum, while remaining enamored of the thoughtless bombast of Bell Curve Fifth Column Sully. Frankly, it demonstrates a vacuousness in our discourse that is extremely debilitating. We need and needed more "boring" Bob Herberts. Maybe we would not be in as bad a mess as we are in our country if instead of progressives finding Sully so interesting they had paid more attention to Bob Herbert. On the flip, one of the best Bob Herbert columns:
Thrown to the Wolves
By BOB HERBERT
Published: February 25, 2005
OTTAWA
If John Ashcroft was right, then I was staring into the malevolent, duplicitous eyes of pure evil, the eyes of a man with the mass murder of Americans on his mind. But all I could really see was a polite, unassuming, neatly dressed guy who looked like a suburban Little League coach.
If Mr. Ashcroft was right, then Maher Arar should have been in a U.S. prison, not talking to me in an office in downtown Ottawa. [. . .] In the fall of 2002 Mr. Arar, a Canadian citizen, suddenly found himself caught up in the cruel mockery of justice that the Bush administration has substituted for the rule of law in the post-Sept. 11 world. While attempting to change planes at Kennedy Airport on his way home to Canada from a family vacation in Tunisia, he was seized by American authorities, interrogated and thrown into jail. He was not charged with anything, and he never would be charged with anything, but his life would be ruined.
Mr. Arar was surreptitiously flown out of the United States to Jordan and then driven to Syria, where he was kept like a nocturnal animal in an unlit, underground, rat-infested cell that was the size of a grave. From time to time he was tortured.
[. . .] Mr. Arar is the most visible victim of the reprehensible U.S. policy known as extraordinary rendition, in which individuals are abducted by American authorities and transferred, without any legal rights whatever, to a regime skilled in the art of torture. The fact that some of the people swallowed up by this policy may in fact have been hard-core terrorists does not make it any less repugnant.
[. . .]This is a government that feels it is answerable to no one.
Thrown to the wolves. Boring wasn't it?