My breakfast with the late Times editor Bill Keller

My breakfast with Bill Keller :

“   If the 2012 election were held in the newsrooms of America and pitted Sarah Palin against Barack Obama, I doubt Palin would get 10 percent of the vote. However tempting the newsworthy havoc of a Palin presidency, I’m pretty sure most journalists would recoil in horror from the idea. [Keller] ”

The name Bill Keller immediately generates in me two distinctly negative brainal pulses. Keller was until last week Executive Editor of The New York Times. Keller and New York Times publisher Putz Sulzberger were only recently the subject of this extraordinary debate: "Should they be executed for treason."  It was not hyperbole. [Disclosure:  I was in the firing squad group] Regarding Keller's latest article [The Tom and Jerry Problem],  his "horror" declaration flashes in bright lights, "Dead End Ahead." Nevertheless —  Mr. Keller: “ The evidence of Palin’s scorn for what she calls the lamestream media is abundant, but I was struck by the gratuitous quality of one remark she tossed off during that Rolling Thunder rally in Washington the Sunday before Memorial Day. When an NPR reporter asked what had brought her to the event, she replied, “It is our vets who we owe our freedom — not the politician, not the reporter — it is our vets, so that’s why we’re here.” ” Bill, what does that tell you? Why, thank you for asking Rodge.  "There’s a grain of truth and a loaf of myth  (in her obvious to me, though unstated by her, charge that ...)  "journalists are liberal elitists, that they find the Tea Party fringe ridiculous or alarming or that they are infatuated with the cerebral black liberal in the White House."  Bill, do you think there's room in these penumbra and emanations to allow for her animus being, as it is for most Americans,  because the "lamestream" are systemically corrupt; functioning as little more than cheerleader and enabler for the Democrat Party?  People who put leftist ideology before God and country? Why thank you for asking Rodge, but no you silly goose. “ Palin’s disdain goes beyond the bitterness of a public figure who has been burned by the press. Plenty of others have endured the pain of mainstream-media excoriation but have remained civil and responsive. What these politicians have in common, though, is enough confidence in the strength of their ideas to imagine that they can make a case through the press, if not actually to the press. Perhaps one key to Palin’s dislike of the news media is a streak of intellectual insecurity, or a trace of impostor syndrome. Her best defense against being found shallow is a strong offense. Another factor, I think, is that the humiliations she has endured in the media have been unusually invasive — including, at the lowest point, speculation that Palin’s youngest son, Trig, was actually born to her daughter, Bristol, and borrowed as a campaign prop. That would bring out the grizzly in any mama.  ” Bill, what's really behind this stream of bile and pus? Rodge, "A few months ago I was startled to hear my 13-year-old daughter, who has a Hillary Clinton campaign sticker on her bedroom door, say she thought Palin was 'cool.'" There there Bill.  My kids are smarter than me too.