WFB takes on NYT publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.’s embarrassingly bad commencement speech last month in which he “apologized” for his generation’s failure to secure “fundamental human rights” like unfettered immigration, gay marriage and abortion:

Today’s speaker was comprehensively at odds with the world he lives in. Citing his own experience as a graduate in the class of 1974, he said that he and his classmates had “entered the world committed to making it a better, safer, cleaner, more equal place. We were determined not to repeat the mistakes of our predecessors. … You weren’t supposed to be graduating into a world where we are still fighting for fundamental human rights, be it the rights of immigrants to start a new life, the rights of gays to marry, or the rights of women to choose.”
That formulation asks us to believe that certain things in philosophical and political contention oughtn’t to be contended, it being so obvious that there is only a single correct position in the matter. The graduating student was being asked to assume that the 50 million Americans who believe in tender loving care for unborn children are misbegotten in their concern, even as they were wrong to have voted for a human-rights-oriented foreign policy in Iraq. And Mr. Sulzberger should have taken just a moment to say to the graduates: At least we brought you this, a world in which a communist superpower no longer threatens freedom in the world.

Why should he have said that? Is he shutting down the New York Times?