posted February 24, 2007 11:01 AM            

It would be no stretch to declare the NY Times the mouthpiece of communist dictatorships past and present.

Now that Americans aren't listening to the NY Times, aren't permitting the Times and other leftist media sources to shape their opinions; I wonder to whom the communists will turn next.

Well, they do have the Hollywood radical leftists and their drooling useful idiots. And they do have their drooling political groups, like ANSWER, the Workers World Party, the so called Progressives and George Soros useful idiot groupies.

Problem is, no one who is not a drooling idiot takes a word they have to say seriously. The same could be said for the NY Times and other media sources of the far radical left.

They have been in the process of committing political and journalistic suicide for more than 60 years.

Time now to pronounce them dead.

LYING FOR FIDEL
February 24, 2007

Fifty years ago today, The New York Times ran a front-page love letter to Fidel Castro at a crucial moment in the Stalinist thug's drive to take control of the Cuban people.

Timesman Herbert Matthews' 4,400-word article disproved government claims that the rebel leader was dead. More important, it portrayed him as the popular commander of thousands of like-minded revolutionaries - and so gave Castro international stature.

Alas, the story was a tissue of lies.

Still, as former Times executive editor Max Frankel has written, it "practically invented Fidel Castro for the American people." Without it, Castro might well never have risen to power in Cuba.

Now the ailing Communist dictator is formally acknowledging the big favor he got from the Times.

The Cuban state news agency Prensa Latina reported last week that the government has unveiled a marble plaque commemorating Matthews' interview at the remote location where it took place in the Sierra Maestra mountains.

There's no denying that Matthews was infatuated with the 30-year-old revolutionary, who granted his first-ever interview to the Times. "Thousands of men and women are heart and soul with Fidel Castro and the new deal for which they think he stands," wrote Matthews.

Yet as Castro later gleefully admitted, his entire force at the time consisted of just 18 men. Matthews never caught on to the fact that he was seeing the same people, who kept going past him in circles.

That's not the only thing to which Matthews never caught on. That new deal that Castro was promising, he wrote, was "radical, democratic and therefore anti-Communist."

Indeed, long after Castro attained power and had jailed some of his former comrades, replacing them with Communists, Matthews continued to insist that Fidel had no Communist leanings.

Which no doubt is why when Frankel years later asked to interview Castro, the dictator replied that "any friend of Herbert's was also his friend."

Of course, this wasn't the first time the paper showed a soft spot in its heart for communist dictators. Back in the '30s, Walter Duranty served as an apologist for Joseph Stalin, knowingly filing false articles denying that Stalin's brutal collectiv ization policies had killed millions of Ukrainians through forced starvation.

Duranty never got a plaque or an award from Stalin - though he did win a Pulitzer Prize for his "reporting."

Actually, the Cuban plaque for Herbert Matthews is a reminder of the power of mainstream news organizations like the Times and their ability to influence history - not always for the better.