Bill gets off the toilet as Jill sits on it

The Gray Lady gets a new editor who by looks appears to be the tough liberal type with  four testicles of steel and poisoned knuckles for her opponents. Barely has the new boss moved in that she gladdens the old faithfuls by convincing them that she intends to carry on the hoary New York Times tradition - that of flushing inconvenient facts down their politically correct dual flush toilet.

In the New York Times article announcing the surprise leaving of Bill Keller(kicking out?) and the anointment of  Jill Abramson there slipped in some revealing(but not really, if you know the Times) facts-

Ms. Abramson, 57, said being named executive editor was “the honor of my life” and like “ascending to Valhalla” for someone who read The Times as a young girl growing up in New York.

"In my house growing up, the Times substituted for religion,” she said. “If the Times said it, it was the absolute truth."

Now we know what religion the liberals practice. Thanks for clearing it up.

But somebody at the Times must have realized the enticing free fodder this provides to its hated right wing opponents. An open invitation to snark.You know like Peter Wehner of the Commentary magazine (the Death Star of conservatism) saying-

When Journalism Substitutes For Religion

This is a practically perfect quote from Ms. Abramson, simply in terms of giving voice to what one imagines the people who run the Times are like. She believed the Times wasn’t simply a great newspaper; the stories were written on tablets of stone. (Perhaps she viewed reporters at the Times as secular prophets and the op-ed columnists as secular apostles.) But it goes even deeper than that: the Times was a substitute for religious faith, meaning it must have provided her not simply with the news but with existential meaning and moral guidance.

For a person to have viewed (and presumably to still view, at least to some degree) a newspaper with religious reverence and its stories as sacred text is slightly weird and quite revealing. Devotion to a journalistic enterprise is one thing; cultism is quite another.

Jill Abramson’s mindset is exactly the kind conservatives assume liberals at the Times possess. To see it confirmed by her own words is, in its own way, quite useful.

and with Jay Nordlinger of the National Review (another power center of the dark side) adding his own ridicule of Jill's religious beliefs.

Can't have that, can we?

So up goes a revised version of the article with the following lines missing -

  “In my house growing up, The Times substituted for religion. If The Times said it, it was the absolute truth.”

 And no mention that it has been edited. They love transparency like their messiah Obama does. So transparent that we wouldn't notice anything. Except for the pesky right wing bloggers who are noticing.

Unfortunately for the Gray Hag(is she a lady?), the original quote has been picked up by other sources like Howard Kurtz and Politico which even gives the vanishing quote as a caption to the image of the quadruple-balled Jill-

So Jill starts where Bill left off - by using the toilet. Looks like it's going to be an overworked loo.