Conquest's laws and the NYT

Not just wrong, but also ignorant

Robert Conquest, the pre-eminent historian of Stalinist terror, proposed the following three laws of politics (as summarized by John Derbyshire):

"1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
2. Any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will
sooner or later become left-wing.
3. The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by
assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies."

If a law (if p, then q) is true, then its inverse (if not p, then not q) is also true.  The inverse of Conquest's first law would be something like "anyone who is not conservative about a subject must know that subject very poorly."  The NYT, which is wildly un-conservative on many subjects, and is particularly un-conservative on the subject of Christianity, today seemingly set out to demonstrate the truth of the inverse of Conquest's first law of politics with the following correction:

Correction: April 1, 2013

An earlier version of this article mischaracterized the Christian holiday of Easter. It is the celebration of Jesus’s resurrection from the dead, not his resurrection into heaven.

(By the way, did you notice the part of the correction that still requires correction?)

Well, that's all straight then

Nil nisi bonum

When Gore Vidal died a couple of days ago, he was nearly 87 years old, and so his demise could not have caught the NYT entirely by surprise.   Yet that bible of the bien-pensant, which was somehow once regarded as  "the Newspaper of Record," managed to get quite a few of the facts in Vidal's obituary wrong.  One of these falls into the TMI category, but I suppose if you're going to include that sort of thing in a family newspaper, you may as well be accurate.  The correction below :

"All the news that's fit to print," while never really true, has certainly acquired a broader meaning.

NYT: Christianity scares us

                                     I used to believe in that stuff myself

Possibly because they are shockingly ignorant about it.  Example:  Bill Keller, NYT's Executive Editor, (presumably one of the smarter ones), says Rick Santorum is "affiliated with (a) fervid subset of evangelical Christianity."

What Keller calls a "fervid subset of evangelical Christianity" is better known to many as the Catholic Church.

UPDATE:  Turns out, Keller was raised Catholic.   He attended a Catholic grammar school and high school, and, as he writes elsewhere in the above article:

"Every faith has its baggage, and every faith holds beliefs that will seem bizarre to outsiders.  I grew up believing that a priest could turn a bread wafer into the actual flesh of Christ."

Keller describes himself as "a collapsed Catholic," which, according to Keller, means "well beyond lapsed." These words were written in 2002, and the collapse must have just happened, because Keller was married in Holy Name of Jesus Church  on Manhattan's Upper West Side in 1999.

In any event, sounds like Bill Keller has forgotten more than anybody else at the NYT will ever know about Catholicism.

Let us pray to St. Francis de Sales, the patron saint of journalists, that Mr. Keller recovers the beliefs he grew up with.

It would explain why the NYT hates the Catholic Church

-it's their competition.
NYT's new editor says that in the household of her youth, the Times substituted for religion, adding "[i]f the Times said it, it was the absolute truth.”
After the demise of the World Herald Journal Tribune, we read the Times in our house, too.  Though to us it was just a newspaper, and we wished that it had comics. 
See also James Taranto's take. (link fixed)