Ex-Editor Howell Raines Lashes Out at "Petroleum Republicans" & Romney
Howell Raines, the former New York Times executive editor whose harsh management style cost him his job after the Jayson Blair fiascoin 2003, flashed more of his paranoid style of contempt for Republicans as a guest on a roundtable discussion on the PBS talk show Charlie Rose the night of Super Tuesday. 
Here's what Raines said Tuesday night, according to a Nexis transcript:
To me, the big story tonight is the inability of the Republican establishment, the corporate Republicans, the Wall Street Republicans, the petroleum Republicans, aided and abetted by the conservative talk show hosts, the inability of all of those horses to drag Mitt Romneyacross the finish line.
And what we have here is a dynamic that I think is extremely interesting. The voters from Charleston, South Carolina, to San Diego, California, across the classic Sun Belt, they are the Republican Party. And they are saying, we don't have to take the guy that Wall Street likes. We don't have to take an imitation Texan like Bush. We want our own guy. And I think they're looking at McCain and Huckabee, and I think.
In his 2006 autobiography on fly-fishing, "The One That Got Away," Raines spat on Fox News and the Republican Party:
Fox, by its mere existence, undercuts the argument that the public is starved for 'fair' news, and not just because Fox shills for the Republican Party and panders to the latest of America's periodic religious manias. The key to understanding Fox News is to grasp the anomalous fact that its consumers know its 'news' is made up....Fox Television showed us the future - outright lies and paranoid opinions packaged as news under the oversight of Rupert [Murdoch], a flagrant pirate, and Roger Ailes, an unprincipled Nixon thug who had assumed a journalistic disguise in much the same way that the intergalactic insect in Men in Black shrugged into the borrowed skin of a hapless hillbilly.
