Scrivener.net

Thursday, February 09, 2006

The sensitive to religion New York Times.

My hometown broadsheet, editorializing about Those Danish Cartoons, states that responsible newpapers like itself...
have reported on the cartoons but refrained from showing them. That seems a reasonable choice for news organizations that usually refrain from gratuitous assaults on religious symbols, especially since the cartoons are so easy to describe in words.
It then promtly illustrates its own story on the Danish cartoons by showing a picture (click the link) of the famous, or infamous, "Dung Mary"...
a collage of the Virgin Mary with cutouts from pornographic magazines and shellacked clumps of elephant dung
One guesses the editors must have felt those words weren't an adequate description, making the picture non-gratuitous.

They never cease to amaze.

As if that's not enough, the article then goes on to charge hypocrisy about the whole thing ... on the part of the Bush Adminsitration.

political hypocrisy [is] now endemic in the culture wars. Last week a State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, simultaneously condemned the cartoons as "unacceptable" and spoke up for free speech, while the Joint Chiefs of Staff were firing off a letter to The Washington Post about a cartoon it ran in which Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, in the guise of a doctor, says to a heavily bandaged soldier who has lost his arms and legs, "I'm listing your condition as 'battle hardened.'" The letter called the cartoon, by Tom Toles, "reprehensible" and offensive to soldiers.

... apparently without having a clue about itself.