After dithering for three days about how to respond to Breitbart's exposure of the racism and antisemitism of its politics editor (i.e., the guy who shapes its political coverage), The New York Times finally has come up with an angle: they are victims!

You have to read the first acknowledgment of the racist tweets from senior staff editor for politics Tom Wright-Piersant that the paper published Sunday.  The headline gives away the game: "Trump Allies Target Journalists Over Coverage Deemed Hostile to White House."

It's all a plot to fight back against the New York Times' honest and reputable coverage of Trump, guided by the wise hand of the antisemite.  Seriously, that's their game:

A loose network of conservative operatives allied with the White House is pursuing what they say will be an aggressive operation to discredit news organizations deemed hostile to President Trump by publicizing damaging information about journalists.

It is the latest step in a long-running effort by Mr. Trump and his allies to undercut the influence of legitimate news reporting. Four people familiar with the operation described how it works, asserting that it has compiled dossiers of potentially embarrassing social media posts and other public statements by hundreds of people who work at some of the country's most prominent news organizations.

This angle allows the Times to adopt its habitual pose as a brave truth-teller, resisting the forces of darkness.  And the shadowy enemies are legion:

The group has already released information about journalists at CNN, The Washington Post and The New York Times — three outlets that have aggressively investigated Mr. Trump — in response to reporting or commentary that the White House's allies consider unfair to Mr. Trump and his team or harmful to his re-election prospects.

What the Times knows and is cobbling together a defense for is this:

Lib media when they find out @ArthurSchwartz and his friends have archived thousands of their old tweets and plan to release them throughout 2020 pic.twitter.com/MGpAkgEBrK

— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) August 25, 2019

The Times can't stand it that Alinsky now works for conservatives, because the establishment — almost all major institutions of media, culture, business, and education — is dominated by progressives who are fanatically resisting Trump.  Thus, we conservatives get to apply Alinsky's rules to them.  In this case, Rule #4: "Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules."

Looking up old tweets by people is not exactly brain surgery or a multi-million-dollar Fusion GPS operation.

I love & have written for @nytimes but this article & hysterical accompanying statement by the publisher are both totally bananas

OMG a couple of dudes dig up dumb tweets by your young woke staffers & you act like its Pentagon Papers 2.0

Take a Xanax for your TDS next time https://t.co/BHrDTagCfF

— Mike Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) August 25, 2019

The excuse offered by the Times for the tweets from its politics editor amounts to "boys will be boys" — which is hilarious coming in the wake of the attacks on Bret Kavanaugh for fictional accounts of misbehavior in high school:

Mr. Wright-Piersanti, 32, said the tweets, posted when he was a college student with a Twitter following consisting mostly of personal acquaintances, were "my lame attempts at edgy humor to try to get a rise out of my friends."

But he said "they're not funny, they're clearly offensive," adding, "I feel deep shame for them, and I am truly, honestly sorry that I wrote these."

He said he had forgotten about the tweets as he started a career in journalism.

"For my generation, the generation that came of age in the internet, all the youthful mistakes that you made get preserved in digital amber, and no matter how much you change and mature and grow up, it's always out there, waiting to be discovered," Mr. Wright-Piersanti said.

Like Mr. Wright-Piersanti, other targets of the pro-Trump network have been young people who grew up with social media and wrote the posts in question when they were in their teens or early 20s, in most cases before they became professional journalists.

I suppose that people who regard the Times as sacred text will buy their victim-mongering and boys will be boys excuse for blatant, repulsive Jew-hatred by the man who shapes its political coverage.  But to most of us, it is sad and also darkly hilarious.

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