Don't worry that you don't read the New York Times; it's designed to misinform you

Andrew Klavan at PJ Media parses the NYT's "analysis" of Squirrel-Hair's effect on the Pubs:

"As Donald Trump Rolls Up Victories, the G.O.P. Split Widens to a Chasm," read the headline on the post-Super Tuesday analysis in the New York Times, a former newspaper. The article was typical of the Times' modern work: a house of facts with a family of lies living inside. The gloating lede — "Democrats are falling in line. Republicans are falling apart" — was fair enough. It was even hard to argue with the accompanying front-page photo. It nastily captured Trump wearing a particularly supercilious smirk — and okay, fine; though I doubt any equally representative photos of a cackling, screeching Hillary Clinton have made the paper on any page.

But throughout the rest of the piece was scattered the usual Timestuff: dishonest leftist assertions casually tossed off as fact. The Republicans' unwillingness to hold hearings on a replacement for Justice Scalia is a tactical error because it has energized the leftist base. (Ha.) The Obama economy is improving and unemployment is low. (That's not what the Democrat candidates say.) Obama has a "nearly 50 percent" approval rating. (It's closer to 46 percent, but more importantly he has plunged the nation into divisive rancor and racial violence we haven't seen in years.)

But the worst was this:

Heather Cox Richardson, a Boston College professor and the author of a new history of the Republican Party, predicts a violent rupture that cleaves the party in two: a hard-line conservatism, as embodied by Pat Buchanan, Newt Gingrich and Mr. Trump, and an old-fashioned strain of moderate Republicanism that recalls Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and Nelson Rockefeller.

If Professor Richardson thinks Donald Trump is a hard-line conservative, she should no more be writing about Republicans than I should be writing about quantum mechanics. Because she doesn't know what she's talking about.

Whooee. How much is Boston College paying this Richardson person? I don't know whether it's comforting or alarming that a hard-left east-coast "academic" is so clueless regarding the GOP fault lines. Given the rather insular audience for her remarks, and the Times piece generally, I doubt that it really spreads the meme that S-H is a rightie to any significant degree.

Still, it's important for us to reiterate at every opportunity the basic truth that S-H is not a rightie. He's not a leftie, either. He's not a racist. He's not a Christian. He's the author of his own universe, and the creature living in it, with whom he is well pleased.