NYT Reporter John Eligon Talks 'Far-Right Republicans' in Kansas, Predicts 'Stringent Social Policies' to Come
A label-crazy New York Times report from John Eligon in Kansas City, Mo., on a kerfuffle over Obama's birth certificate featured loaded language about "far-right Republicans" pushing "stringent social policies."
Citing a wave of angry backlash, a Kansas man on Friday withdrew a petition in which he argued that President Obama should be removed from the state’s election ballot because he did not meet citizenship requirements.
The challenge filed this week by Joe Montgomery of Manhattan, Kan., prompted state election authorities to seek a certified copy of Mr. Obama’s birth certificate and reignited long-running conspiracy theories that the president was not born in the United States. The state will continue to try to obtain the birth certificate, and officials will meet on Monday as scheduled to close the case officially. But without the petition, Mr. Obama will remain on the ballot, Secretary of State Kris W. Kobach told The Associated Press.
Eligon unloaded on the "far-right" GOP deeper into the article:
This challenge to Mr. Obama comes in a state where the Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, is heavily favored, and where the electorate has shifted sharply to the right over the past couple of years. With the backing of the state’s first conservative governor in decades, Sam Brownback, several far-right Republicans defeated moderate state senators in primary elections last month, opening the way for conservatives to win control of the State Senate. Conservatives already control the House, meaning the state is expected to swing even more heavily to the right, with major tax cuts and stringent social policies.
Mr. Kobach, one of Kansas’s leading conservatives, has pushed for tougher voter identification laws, helped write Arizona’s controversial immigration law and called two years ago for Mr. Obama to release his long-form birth certificate.
Eligon is the author of perhaps the most "conservative"-label heavy story every printed in the Times. His August 6 article contained a staggering 33 uses of the word "conservative" in non-quoted material within a 1,367-word article, plus two labels in photo captions, plus the one in the headline. By contrast, the common conjunction "and" appeared a mere 27 times under the same parameters.
