Dartblog

When John McCain and Condoleezza Rice gave their respective commencement addresses this graduation season to mostly receptive but occasionally rude and grandstanding audiences, they didn’t try to sell any political messages. They offered hope and encouragement and apolitical counsel. In fact, they both had a common message: There are things bigger and more important than the self. A positive message, but more than that one exemplified by their very words; both turned to their disrespectful naysayers the other cheek, laughed it off, and reached for something common and higher.

Arthur Sulzberger disagrees with that approach. The New York Times publisher’s commencement address at the State University of New York at New Paltz was hardly reported on whatever, even though he flew off the handle, “apologiz[ing]” for his generation’s failure to stop the Iraq War and win the abortion, immigration, and gay marriage debates. I suppose he figured that if he wrapped his polemic in contrition, it’d be considered in fine decorum. Instead, it was tawdry.

“It wasn’t supposed to be this way. You weren’t supposed to be graduating in an America fighting a misbegotten war in a foreign land. You weren’t supposed to be graduating into a world where we are still fighting for fundamental human rights,” he said.

Aren’t you embarrassed for this man? He’s losing, and so miserably he lets it bleed into this presumptous, partisan palaver to regular New York kids just starting their adult lives. They don’t need Upper East Side preaching.