I don’t do a lot of hand wringing about the state of contemporary journalism. I mock. I criticize. I zing, but I don’t worry about things that I can’t control. While I’ve always respected the New York Times, I’m well aware of its imperfections: from critical blacklisting (Gore Vidal cordially loathed the Gray Lady for its treatment, or lack thereof, of his work after The City and the Pillar) to allowing Judith Miller to run amuck instead of muckrake after 9/11. I’m not even going to touch the Jayson Blair mishigas, and the terrible op-ed columnists on a page that was once home to Anthony Lewis and Tom Wicker. I do, however, think they should give Maureen Dowd a blood-alcohol test before she writes her next rant about the perfidy of the Clintons. I visualize her downing 5 or 6 cocktails with Peggy Noonan before sitting down to write…

All of the preceding are the result of the Gray Lady being a large institution with both virtues and vices. There’s no excuse, however, for giving credibility to notorious right wing ratfucker, Peter Schweizer. And that is why the New York Times is malaka of the week.

Schweizer is either a highbrow James O’Keefe or lowbrow Rich Lowry. He’s oozed out of the Breitbart-o-sphere with a new book of dubious investigative journalism. I almost put the last two words in quotes but I think y’all catch my drift. I’ll let Charlie Pierce cue you into Schweizer’s take on what the dread Mark Halperin insists on calling Clintonworld and Hillaryland:

Schweizer has a long history of fudge and nonsense in service to the conservative cause. His career is a pure creature of the well-funded ideological terrarium of the modern conservative movement. His work is on behalf of something called the Government Accountability Institute, an oppo-research outfit richly funded by all the usual suspects. His book, then, starts in something of a hole, credibility-wise, at least by any standard of journalistic vetting that I ever heard of. But neither the Times nor the Post seems reluctant at all to pile into the same mud hole as Fox and Breitbart’s Mausoleum For The Chronically Unemployable.

That’s right, the NYT has crawled into  bed with the lying pukes at Fox and Breibart. I am less surprised that the WaPo is involved in this enterprise. Their role in the great WMD deception is well documented and their Fred Hiatt helmed editorial page remains a festering pustule of unrepentant warmongering. At least the Times lanced its Judith Miller boil, but Fred Hiatt is still rampant on the heights of American journalism like an ink stained Moloch. Damn, that was some flowery language but there’s something about the great WMD deception that makes me feel all hifalutin and shit.

The Times were among the primary purveyors of the Whitewater story and as Pierce put it “has had a hard-on for the Clintons” ever since. Vengeance over getting a story wrong is a lame reason to jump into bed with a ratfucker, but that’s what the Times has done here. Schweizer can now claim to be neutral, even-handed and objective because the Gray Lady says so. In a word: BOLLOCKS.

Speaking of excuses so lame that they limp, here’s what Times Washington bureau chief Carolyn Ryan told TPM:

We had access to some material in the book, but we wanted to do our own reporting.

Then why on earth didn’t you wait until the book was published? Now it looks as if they’re in collusion with Roger Ailes, and the ghost of Andrew Breitbart. The whole thing reminds me of a line from the camp classic 1966 movie The Oscar: “You lie down with pigs, you come up smelling like garbage.”

That’s what they’ve has done and that’s why the New York Times is malaka of the week.

Update: The NYT’s public editor has had more to say about the deal with the ratfucker. I’m not rescinding the malakatude crown of thorns. They also printed that dipshit anti-marriage equality op-ed by my dipshit Governor, so fuck them.