The Thousand Injuries of the New York Times I Had Borne as I Best Could...

...but when they ventured upon insulting my intelligence, I vowed write this post. 

You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that I gave utterance to a threat.*

Goodness no. What good would that do?  

Instead, let's let Frank Bruni of the NYT say his say, during which there will be questions.

When You Don’t Have Trump to Hide Behind

There’s now space for other scandals. Witness the Lincoln Project.

Right off the blocks, you see where we're going..

In case you hadn’t noticed, the Lincoln Project — an organization as pointedly anti-Trump as any other, its rise and political relevance symbiotically tied to his — is unraveling.

It’s unraveling because one of its founders, John Weaver, was using his position to proposition young men. It’s unraveling because peers of his in the organization apparently sat on complaints about that, too pumped up by their currency as Trump slayers to let accusations against Weaver impede their mission and kill their buzz.

It’s unraveling because it can no longer hide what a financial boondoggle it was for some of its central players, who spoke of principle while lining their pockets. Yes, they made dynamite ads and an eloquent case about Trump’s betrayal of America. Their firms also made money from the hero status that they were accorded by Trump haters the world over.

All true.

And then...

But the Lincoln Project is unraveling for an additional reason. It’s unraveling because Trump is out of office, and that not only deprives the organization of its fiercest mission and tight focus. His departure also opens the political actors there — and political actors everywhere — to more scrutiny and more reproach than they received when he was still around. 

Golly.  Really?

[Trump] was also in instances a get-out-of-jail-free card. If you raged against him, your past was wiped clean. Your own preening and avarice were laundered by your denunciations of his.

To borrow from Monty Python, things finally got so bad that even the police began to sit up and take notice.

I wrote a column in July about the Lincoln Project’s founders as the quintessential NeverTrumpers, which was the designation for Republicans who had broken with their party, permanently or temporarily, because of Trump. My take on them was flattering.

I expressed some skepticism, noting that they possibly had a mix of motives...

But I cast them as patriots who knew that they’d never get their party back and had consigned themselves to that. “They’re not fighting to come in from the wilderness,” I wrote. “The wilderness is a given. They’re just fighting to get rid of this one sun-hogging, diseased redwood — or orangewood, as the case may be.”

And now, the phrase that pays:

...But like many other journalists, I didn’t get into the ugliness in some founders’ pasts, such as a 2002 ad by Rick Wilson that tied Max Cleland, a Democratic senator who lost both legs and part of one arm during his military service in Vietnam, to Osama bin Laden. (“Worse than disgraceful,” John McCain said of it at the time. “Reprehensible.”)

And again:

Also like many other journalists, I skimmed over questions about the extent to which the Lincoln Project was enriching its leaders. Some answers have recently emerged. The Lincoln Project “raised more than $87 million in the 2020 election cycle,” as Miranda Green reported in New York magazine last week, and “much of the money was paid to firms run by the Lincoln Project’s co-founders, including nearly $25 million to Summit Strategic Communications,” run by Reed Galen. A firm run by another founder, Ron Steslow, received more than $20 million...

We also know, for a fact, that the Lincoln Project met none of its own stated performance goals.  In 2020, Republican voter turnout was massively up across the board and not down from where it had been in 2016.  In every Senate race in which the Lincoln Lads targeted supposedly hanging-by-a-thread easy pickin's Republican incumbents, the Republican incumbent not only won, but won by a much higher margin than they had in their last race -- in some cases, twice as much.  

In fact, the only performance target the Lincoln Lads not only met but exceeded was their "raking in a shit ton of money from credulous Liberals"  fundraising goal.  They were great at that,  which is not surprising, considering how completely the Never Trumpers have colonized cable teevee at the expense of actual Liberals who have actually been right about the Right all along.

So, quick note to The New York Times. which they will ignore. Maybe at some point consider staffing up with some of the very, very few writers who were willing take it in the teeth for their peers by peering into the extremely repulsive and well-documented pasts of the Lincoln Lads and asking some basic questions.  

Maybe, just maybe, toss the occasional bone to the mouthy few who did not skim over the Lincoln Lads opacity and rapacity and for our troubles took no end of shit from our own "allies".

*You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will also recognize the opening sentences from The Cask of Amontillado.

No Half Measures