The Editorial Board of the New York Times is smoking dope. This is the only conclusion I can make, that makes sense. After reading the board’s latest hallucination starring Vladimir Putin, I sat and ponder for minutes; just how the world’s most legendary newspaper went crazy. Somehow reality is turned on end, every time these media people say their piece on Russia and Putin. Today is a good day to call them out, and to question the validity of the NYT overall.

The New York Times editorial board is supposed to be a beacon of enlightened opinion, a sort of oracle of thought for the readers of the most influential print news media ever drafted. 16 people inhabit those hallowed halls in New York City, 16 journalists from a wide swath of expertise. And “Vladimir Putin’s Dangerous Obsession” is their latest and greatest contribution to astute thinking, the best and most intellectually stimulating editorial these brilliant journalists could come up with. The latest damnable Russophobic, anti-Putin rant, from well paid political trolls, it’s a big-fat-lie. Sorry, but 16 pairs of pants are on fire right now, and here’s why.

Everyone reading this by now knows, Vladimir Putin and Russia have not been the aggressor in the current West versus East circus. If Russia were the aggressor, all of Ukraine would be under the Russian flag, and there is nothing NATO or the United States could have done about it. Let’s just be real, please. But for context today, read this quote from the piece in question:

“Syria is just one arena where Mr. Putin’s obsessive quest to make Russia great again has fueled instability and reawakened political suspicions and animosities that faded after the fall of the Soviet Union.”

As we’ve shown 5,000 times, after the Soviet Union fell Washington and London never let up trying to infuse hegemonic control over states surrounding Russia. These journalists at the NYT know this, but they never mention it. And this is known as being misleading, a deceiver, even a minion. You are deceivers, ladies and gentlemen. Or either I am. So let’s see who is, and is not, shall we?

James Bennet is the editor in chief of the New York Times editorial pages. He was the president and editor in chief of The Atlantic, and also a White House correspondent, and the Jerusalem bureau chief of the newspaper, as well. Researching Bennet leads inextricably to former president, Bill Clinton, and a virtual elevation of that deceiver to the status of saint. In one piece for The Atlantic, Bennet compares Clinton to Teddy Rooseveldt. The closeness Bennet has to Clinton, the advertorial nature of The Atlantic piece toward Clinton corporate pals, it’s disgustingly pungent, stinking cronyism at its worst. If Bennet knows Clinton at all, he also knows about Bosnia, the breakup of Yugoslavia, and of Clinton’s other misdeeds. The journalist embellishes Clinton at every turn, across dozens of articles in the NYTs, The Atlantic, and on the Huffington Post too. But he tells us in this piece from back in 1998, that he knows full well what NATO has been up to. Bennet proves he is deceiving us today, when he writes about Clinton’s plan to expand NATO:

“Through a series of ever-tightening security, cultural and economic alliances, President Clinton hopes to enmesh as many nations as possible in what he has called a “web of institutions and arrangements,” that protects and guides those within “while isolating those who challenge them from the outside.”

Isolation, a “web” of institutions, the Cold War continues, even at the mighty and just New York Times….. as it was all along. Bennet goes on to describe Russia as the enemy, the country left outside in Clinton’s “historic gamble” – and historic gamble at dominating Eastern Europe, and infringing upon Russia further. I leave the rest of Mr. Bennet’s roasting on the spit to your readers. Let me move on to another sellout’s barbequing. Yes Mr. Bennet, I just called you a sellout. Punch me in the nose. You knew Clinton’s mission for NATO was expansion, and today you and your cohort blame Russia and Putin for doing exactly what your psychopaths knew they would, but only prayed they’d be stupid enough not to do.

I will skip easily over cooking board member Terry Tang, as she was a Niehman Foundation grantee, which loosely ties her in via NGOs like Google, the Knight Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, we all know Soros seed funding of media at every level, has polluted the waters entirely. Tang’s adoration for Hillary Rodham Clinton, frames her pharmacological ideals as nicely as Mr. Bennet’s prayers to husband Bill.

Robert B. Semple, Jr., now there’s a New York Times fossil, who is a demigod of the press used for policy. The editorial board cannot be telling us Vladimir Putin is the aggressor in all this, and do so without Semple knowing it is a concoction. The man covered LBJ, was the White House correspondent during the Nixon administration, and won the Pulitzer for his coverage of environmental issues during the Clinton administration. It is with this brilliant journalist I take the greatest umbrage, for he knows far better than what this latest NYTs mind number tells us. Semple understood Nixon (PDF news copy) in the now defunct Yugoslavia during the time of Tito. New age journalists don’t know beans, they are lazy, unprofessional, stupid by comparison to professionals like Semple. Please understand readers, this guy was on Richard Nixon’s calendar, alongside Billy Graham and William F. Buckley. Semple is cited by PhD. candidates as if he were Plato, where US policy toward the former Yugoslavia is concerned. If he truly believes Russia is the aggressor moving outwards today, “I will eat my hat”, as the old saying goes. But Mr. Semple’s now the Don Quxiote of environmentalism (he probably always was), and he has no qualms about blowing the whistle on sellout politicians in that realm. My question is, “Why is a world war truth not as important as a climate change one Mr. Semple?” Out of respect, I’ll leave your flesh cooked to a temperature of medium rare.

To sum up some others on the New York Times fairytale board, Francis X. Clines is so far left of left wing, he’s right. The man knows Clinton the liar and Yugoslavia killer like the back of his hand. Mira Kamdar seems convinced Hillary Clinton being female means she will help women around the world. Carol Giacomo absolutely knows about NATO’s expansion plans; she is the only writer among these exalted ones, who has outlined the move eastward repeatedly. In partial defense of Lawrence Downes, he does not seem to know, or to care about international things. Downes has only been accused of lying when it comes to Barack Obama on the national scene. Emmy and Pulitzer Prize winner, Serge Schmemann absolutely cannot be delusional about Russia’s motives for world domination. He’s as anti-Putin as they come, having been angry at mother Russia since Soviet times. Schmemann has been called everything from “Russophile scum bag” to outright liar for his incessant negative tone toward Russia. This piece, as caustic and nasty as it gets, frames the man who clearly needs another shot of vodka. This guy canonizes the likes of slain Russian Mafioso Boris Nemtsov.

Finally, the New York Times‘ editorial board has its share of passive-aggressive journalistic hangers on. Elizabeth Williamson, who is on the Congress and national politics beat, is on a mission from her god, Hillary Clinton, to try and destroy both Bernie Sanders and Trump. Jesse Wegman gets off the hook here because Greta Van Susteren has labeled him simply a “dimwit”. Teresa Tritch also gets off the “knowing” hook for simply being liberal, liberal, and single agenda (minimum wage) liberally formatted. Whatever the other board members want, she’s good to go as long as they agree on a $15 minimum wage. Ditto for Brent Staples, he just needs his cliché role as defender of the minority faithful to be intact. Culture beat representative, Anna North not only wants a Rembrandt in every home, but no guns, and by God, no Trump anywhere near the American upper crust who read her stories. Calling Putin a ruffian and dictator to such ladies, is pretty much like striking a familiar note on a Wurlitzer, or a Tennessee Williams line from The Glass Menagerie. She’ll go along, as long as the verse is poetic enough. As for Ernesto Londono, the veteran war correspondent has no excuse whatever. He does have an agenda, a liberal, LGBT, transgender rights, and ultra left, left, left wing one. This is unfortunate too, for he is gifted and connected in Latin America and elsewhere. Without a left-focused, pro-Obama policy lever, this journalist could end up being the best of them all. Vikas Bajaj seems like a straight-up, Clinton neo-con fan, who is interested in business. And Linda Cohn‘s bio tells us she pre-dates the Internet at the New York Times. This is evident, because she is invisible on the web. For all intents and purposes, the only true agnostic where anti-Russia rhetoric goes, for she cannot even be reading digital news, based on her footprint online.

So we have a kind of corporate media profile that tells us how The New York Times mass produces opinion for consumption. Much like any office space playground, the knowing thinkers on any subject, simply wade past the coffee fetchers, using their names and notoriety for purpose. If the NYTs needs some more Putin horror, the board acquiesces to whomever bears the message from up above. I can just see the junior members kowtowing like the dudes from the movie, Office Space. “Say Anna, I am going to have to ask you to come in on Saturday. We need to straighten out those TPS reports I asked you about.” Trembling in abject fear of a spoiled weekend, the junior bozos of the media world “suck it up”. As my friend from Forbes tells me, to simply put up with the bullying in order to feed the family. And so it is, the seasoned veterans who know damn well Russia is not the aggressor, they mislead everyone else with nonsensical Cold War bullshit. NATO and the forward move to Moscow end up as:

“Anxieties about Russia among NATO members in Eastern Europe had forced the alliance to make plans to deploy four combat battalions of roughly 1,000 troops each in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Two battalions will be American, one German and one British. They aren’t enough to repulse a Russian invasion, but NATO hopes they will deter Moscow from crossing alliance borders.”

Russia wanting to cross those borders is the mental fart-blossoming of nincompoops. Russia has all the territory she needs, more than she currently has infrastructure for. Estonia and the rest of these nations represent what they always did, a burden mostly. But this is a subject for another story. The story the “board” has set their names to this time, it’s a blatant signage that all those involved are on board for World War III. Not one of these people has offered in writing, one inkling of dissent to the ghastly bastardization of news we see today. And my friend, nobody at this level is just so stupid as to walk blindfolded off a cliff. May some of them wake up, before it is too late.

Phil Butler, is a policy investigator and analyst, a political scientist and expert on Eastern Europe, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.