Paul Craig Roberts And The Decline And Fall Of The Washington Times

In typical Beltway Conservative fashion, the WT management fell all over itself to placate the outrage of critics who are the mortal enemies of real conservatism by throwing Sam to the wolves — for daring to speak his piece and (worse) for daring to espouse authentic conservative views, which it was clear were becoming heretical.

Of course, they didn’t put it that way. What they did say was that same was "insensitive" and (no surprise) "racist".

The editorial pages began to echo the Bushie/GOP establishment line. It was becoming a "kinder, gentler" paper — unless you still believed in Reagan-ish conservatism, in which case you could feel a cold chill wafting through the building.

The national interest was out; internationalism was in. The diversity cult was taking hold, even to the extent that grossly incompetent "African American" writers were promoted to positions for which they were embarrassingly unqualified.

I began to notice something else around this time, too. As an early morning person, I usually got to the office before anyone else. The fax machine would be overflowing with "memos" from Bill Kristol, the Obergruppenfuhrer of DC neoconservatism. These amounted to Talking Points on various issues of the day. And lo and behold, the WT’s editorial positions began to echo (if not outright repeat) these Talking Points.

I also noticed that certain writers were sacrosanct. No matter how awfully and even incoherently written their stuff was, it would always be published — often, after having been completely reconstructed by one of the tireless copy editors.

Perhaps the most egregious example of this: the old CIA hack Cord Meyer — who at the time was constantly producing turgid rants urging U.S. intervention in Kosovo on behalf of the Muslims there — and everywhere else besides. Cord’s columns were often literally unreadable. But they got in, every time. Ditto the stuff produced by Ken Adelman, Douglas Feith, Frank Gaffney and a slew of like-minded Beltway neocon chickenhawks and interventionists.

Bill Buckley's columns were still used also. By this time his writing had degenerated into prolix-for-its-own-sake dreck, published chiefly because Buckley was "a name" — and supposedly, this would entrance readers, even if they couldn’t make heads or tails of the columns themselves.

Sam was long gone by now.

Joe Sobran’s columns had been dumped and PCR and Buchanan were on deck for erasure.

After 9/11, the only reason the WT continued to publish Buchanan and PCR at all was the stalwart presence of Mary Lou Forbes, who ran the still-independent Commentary Pages. Her status as a sort of eminence grise and the fact that she apparently had an ironclad contract guaranteeing her independent editorial control (a condition, rumor had it, of her going to work for the Moonies) made her fairly untouchable.

But in time even Mary Lou began to feel the pressure.

I was in her office with others on several occasions when the subject of a PCR or Buchanan column came up. It was clear — though never made explicit — that "higher ups" didn’t want to see either writer published (reportedly, then-Editor-in-Chief Wesley Pruden, whom most of us almost never saw, particularly loathed Buchanan and wanted him gone).

It was only because of Mary Lou’s commendable defense of what she called "her regulars" that they eventually got slotted in. But they became less and less "regular" — and when their columns did run, they were slotted in only after much hemming and hawing and usually on the second or back pages, or on the weekend, when circulation was much lower — away from the limelight as far as was possible.

Tod Lindberg brought in more like-minded people to form the nucleus of his staff, including Helle Bering, a Danish national, as deputy editorial page editor.

For Helle-Bering, U.S. citizenship and the notion of an American people seemed to be incidentals, if not anachronisms. Any strong attachment to either suggested a sinister nativism that might be hiding the Worst Thing Possible — "racism". Accordingly, if you said anything negative about unrestricted immigration — or, even worse, dared to suggest that perhaps different racial and ethnic groups have diverging interests and thus, political agendas — you could expect excommunication.