Bill Keller PO '70: Apologist for the Evil Empire's Emperor?

NewsBusters.org takes to task New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, PO '70, after he gave an interview with Pomona College's The Student Life. NewsBusters writes:

In an interview with his alma mater, Pomona College, New York Times executive editor Bill Keller most fondly remembered his Times career in the 1980s: "Probably, my favorite assignment was covering the final years of the Soviet Union, and the satisfaction was cumulative. The individual stories—examples of a society coming to terms with its history, flickers of freedom and dissent, signs of the emptiness and corruption of the old regime—added up to a sense that a society widely regarded as unreformable was on the verge of climactic change."

But at the time, we weren't so impressed with his grip on whether "freedom" was the right definition for Gorbachev's Soviet Union:

"Watching the Supreme Soviet invent itself is a little like speed-reading the Federalist Papers."
-- Moscow reporter Bill Keller in The New York Times Magazine, August 27, 1989. 

But then, Keller was quite smitten with Gorbachev, like many liberal journalists, as he declared again in 1996:

"It mystifies Westerners that Mikhail Gorbachev is loathed and ridiculed in his own country. This is the man who pulled the world several steps back from the nuclear brink and lifted a crushing fear from his countrymen, who ended bloody foreign adventures, liberated Eastern Europe and won for the Soviet Union at least provisional membership in the club of civilized nations. By the standards of the West (and by comparison with the incumbent, Boris Yeltsin), Mr. Gorbachev is a man of impeccable character."
-- New York Times foreign editor Bill Keller reviewing Gorbachev’s memoirs, October 20, 1996.

Gorbachev, we are starting to learn was, in fact, quite a dark character in the tragic play that was the final moments of the USSR. We know this because of documents taken from the Gorbachev Foundation and written about by Claire Berlinski, who writes:

... the documents cast Gorbachev in a far darker light than the one in which he is generally regarded. In one document, he laughs with the Politburo about the USSR’s downing of Korean Airlines flight 007 in 1983—a crime that was not only monstrous but brought the world very near to nuclear Armageddon. These minutes from a Politburo meeting on October 4, 1989, are similarly disturbing:

Lukyanov reports that the real number of casualties on Tiananmen Square was 3,000.
Gorbachev: We must be realists. They, like us, have to defend themselves. Three thousands . . . So what?

And a transcript of Gorbachev’s conversation with Hans-Jochen Vogel, the leader of West Germany’s Social Democratic Party, shows Gorbachev defending Soviet troops’ April 9, 1989, massacre of peaceful protesters in Tbilisi.

You will never hear anyone from Pomona ever talk about these documents. And why would you? It's not like they are after truth. But then again, when was the New York Times?

Politics at a Football Game? A. Mitch Demands I Take Down This Post

Alexander Mitchell CMC '11(?) of Ask Mitch fame got a bit ticked off with me today at the Pomona-CMC football game. He demanded that I take down this post that he says accuses him of being a racist. (I didn't accuse him of being a racist, saying only that he supports a racist policy, but whatever.)

I told him I wouldn't take it down. He said you "need" to take it down. I told him again, that I wouldn't because I think it's a fair assessment because he supports a racist policy.

He said I had better take it down or he's going to start something. I told him "go ahead." I should have told him to do his worst.