Every thoughtful person knows the NY Times peddles shameless whoppers every single day, just as Pravda did in Soviet Moscow -- "pravda" meaning "the truth" in Russian.   In the good old USSR you didn't read Pravda for the truth.   You read it for the daily Communist Party Line, which bore no relationship to the truth -- other than to cover it up.   Then you told your friends the latest headlines, and if they laughed at the same punch lines, you knew they got the jokes, too.

Reading Pravda became an art form that allowed readers to guess who was up and who was down in the endless power struggles of the Kremlin.   Today the only use for the NYT -- other than tomorrow's fish wrap -- is to see who's up in the Only Party that matters today: the Democrats and their media.

Last week the NYT celebrated Hillary and Mayor Bill "the Red" de Blasio, who actually admits he is a Communist, and still received the wholehearted support of the New York Times.   When Manhattan inevitably goes the way of Detroit, the NYT will rely on the universal idiocy of its readers to blame the Republicans.

(Some Democrat apparatchik today is actually blaming ObamaCare's failures on the Republicans.   Never underestimate the gullibility of liberals.)

In the last four years, it was the NYT that proclaimed the Arab Spring that never existed, after a Google Veep named Walid Ghoneim started tweeting those "spontaneous" mass demonstrations in Tahrir Square from his PC in a loft in Manhattan.   It was the New York Times that gave Obama his messianic public front, in spite of annoying facts that kept cropping up.

Recently the New York Times told the world that Ayatollah Rouhani, the mass killer of 299 U.S. Marines and French soldiers in Beirut in 1981, is a peace-loving spiritual leader who deserves his own nuclear bombs to defend Iran against Israeli aggression.   Then the Times big-whoppered its deluded readers that, contrary to all the evidence, al-Qaeda had nothing to do with the Benghazi terror attack three weeks before the U.S. elections -- even though Ambassador Stevens was smuggling tons of Libyan arms to al-Qaeda rebels in Syria.

The State Department now says it all comes down to the difference between "real" AQ and "lookalike" AQ.   Like Bill Clinton, it all depends on what the meaning of "is" is.

Now that Obama can't run again (legally), it's Hillary who stands to lose from the truth about Benghazi, which is that we were sending tens of thousands of anti-aircraft missiles to al-Qaeda in Syria.   Even our dumbest voters might wonder if that was really a good idea, and the NYT has now published two back-to-back denials that AQ had anything to do with the murder of U.S. personnel in the badlands of Libya.

Those old Pravda bolsheviki could teach the NYT a couple of lessons.   Such as: if you're trying to hide the facts, don't keep Benghazi alive with two denial stories in a row.   Some readers might actually wonder if the Gray Lady doth protest too much, as Shakespeare might have said.   When the Ford Edsel became a punch line for late-night comedy, Ford wisely stopped advertising that crummy car.   The NYT does the opposite -- reminding everybody about Obama's betrayal of our troops and diplomats at Benghazi.

This is PR suicide.   But who ever thought the NYT editors had any brains? They're just Party apparatchiks.

Conservatives tend to think that our opposition is clever, when they are merely ruthless string puppets.   Great power goes together with great stupidity.

Anybody who still falls for climate scare-lines after this freezing winter is either (a) terminally brainwashed or (b) stupid beyond repair.   It's often hard to tell the difference.

When "all the news that's fit to print" turns into Moscow Pravda, the only way to read it is like the Pravda of old.   Never think this is a newspaper.   Instead, learn to decode it, the way Sigmund Freud decoded the Wiener Tagblatt (the Vienna Daily) in the Austro-Hungarian Empire around 1900: everything is a lie, and any heated denials hint at hidden truths.   All you have to do is to turn NYT headlines into their opposites.

Benghazi is Hillary's weak spot.   This is where John Kerry is most likely to start an anti-Hillary whisper campaign.   The more Benghazi denials come out, the stronger the stop-Hillary campaign will grow in the power circles of the Democratic Party.   That's how Pravda did it, and that is how the Democrats do it today.

In the absence of real news, we have to treat our phony media the way Machiavelli dealt with court rumors in Florence.   Never believe a word.   Instead, just ask, "Cui bono?" -- "Who benefits?"   It's like Texas poker, where nobody ever shows his cards.

To get real news, there is now a wealth of sources on the web.   They are worth reading -- not because they necessarily get it straight, but because they compete with each other.   George Bernard Shaw once quipped that the British trial system puts two liars (lawyers) into court, and still expects the truth to emerge.   That is a valid criticism.   But it still helps to have a trial case argued from two plausible points of view.   Competition is just as useful for web news.   We may not get the full truth, but we'll get closer than any of the monopoly Party Media.