This vicious

You'll recall my post from last Wednesday  on the new intensity of the Left's viciousness which concluded thusly:

They hate freedom, God, common sense, and human dignity. They're historically and economically illiterate.

And they are fiercely determined to take this country over.

Given the opportunity, they will trample you and me into the dust.

One last note: Trumpism is not the antidote.

Since then, we've seen two glaring examples of this new intensity.

There's the New York Times's blatant attempt to make Nikki Haley look like she got the State Department to put up expensive curtains in her apartment, when the curtains were ordered during 2016.

The Grey Lady's attempt to cover its tracks is pathetically lame, and that's because it doesn't want to see an unequivocal reversal of the public's understanding of the matter.

 As a number of people pointed out on Twitter, editors usually review articles before publication, not afterward. Remember the superiority of the “layers of fact checkers and editors” at mainstream media outlets? Good times, good times. This retraction asks readers to believe that realization of the issue came hours after the hit piece’s publication, long after readers complained about the framing of the story around Nikki Haley. The article has a publication date of September 13, although that typically means it got published late at night of that date. Regardless, it was up for at least 12 hours before the editors began to think that it might need a review.

Furthermore, this explanation is at best incomplete, and at worst substantially deceptive. The paper didn’t get new reporting that clarified Haley’s non-role in the spending decision — all they had to do is read the sixth paragraph of the original version of their own story. The editors want to pass this off a poor choice of emphasis, when the editors had every opportunity to realize the problem before publication. It was right there in the story! Discovering the problem only required reading the article for comprehension. And yet, the editors not only allowed the focus to remain on Haley, the headline writer followed suit and the image was selected to highlight it.

One more point to note, too — how did the editors reframe the story after the retraction? While the story notes that the apartment and curtain system were chosen by the Obama administration, the piece never gets around to naming the UN ambassador at the time, Samantha Power, not even to note that she would have benefited from it, as they did with Haley. 

And any respect anyone not of the Left ever had for Dianne Feinstein is surely a thing of the past in the wake of the last-minute-letter stunt attempting to smear Brett Kavanaugh.  

The aspect of this that really chills the bones is that those involved in both situations knew that the intended objects of smear are public officials of the utmost integrity. But in their estimation, Haley's defense of Israel and firm stance against Iran, and Kavanaugh's insistence on interpreting the Constitution as it was written are policies so threatening to their vision of what America ought to be transformed into that any tactic is justified to thwart them.

There's not an ounce of decency left among these people.

It is very late in the day.