Thursday December 13, 2007

READING TOO MUCH INTO IT. Ann Althouse seems to think the Times' Zev Chafets (rendered "Zeve Chafets" by her) had it in for Mike Huckabee:

The reporter, Zeve Chafets, portrays Huckabee as rather sly...

Earlier in the article, Chafets also references the devil — who, I think, appalls most NYT readers not because they fear Hell but because they fear those who concern themselves with the famous old supernatural malefactor...

Is Chafets trying to get readers to think that Huckabee is more benighted than a Liberty University professor?...

Damn! Why won't Huck give Chafets the religious nuggets he so craves?

And so forth. She may be working from her traditional assumption that all Times writers (Brooks, Tierney et alia excepted) are liberal agents out to make evangelical Republicans look bad. Chafets is actually an erstwhile Jewish World Review and New York Post scribe who has said that he is "no longer convinced" that "Most American Muslims are peaceable, law-abiding, terror-hating folks," and recently lacerated "'Bananas' Jack" Murtha. He is also the author of one of the craziest things I have ever read: a New York Daily News column in which he urged readers fight terrorism by refusing to watch scenes of atrocities in Afghanistan on the TV. ("You have a weapon that can help win this war... It flows from a piece of high-tech weaponry: the TV remote control... your living room is the combat zone, and the dirty work belongs to everybody.") And he has a book out called A Match Made in Heaven: American Jews, Christian Zionists, and One Man's Exploration of the Weird and Wonderful Judeo-Evangelical Alliance.

These were probably the sort of bona fides that got him access to Huckabee, and his access got him in the Times, an aspiration of many journalists who are not motivated by a hatred of organized religion. Whatever inspired his take on the candidate, it probably wasn't any animosity toward his evangelism. Maybe Huckabee really is that much of an ass.