When Rupert Murdoch jousts with "Pinch," it's a "raging septuagenarian" against a "poofter"

New York Times chairman Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger, Jr. is hurt. It is a bite-your-lower-lip-until-your-eyes-tear hurt, a wrists-at-your-hips-well-I-never kind of hurt. He has publically been called "a girly man" by FOX impresario Rupert Murdoch.

Why, it's enough to make a grown man cry, especially one as sensitive as Pinch as he closes in on 60 years. He's complained to the FOX chief many times about the unflattering gossip regularly floated by one of the Murdoch holdings, the New York Post. But Murdoch, a bare-knuckles Australian expatriate called a "raging septuagenarian" by New York magazine, just chuckles...and lets it fly.

After all, he thinks of "young Arthur" as "a sort of poofter." That's outback, mates, for weak-kneed, weak-willed, and sissified. In Murdoch's view, there are no Bloomin' Onions on Pinch's menu.

Murdoch gets to Pinch as no one can. Of course, Pinch makes it easy, combining insufferable arrogance and dim-witted entitlement in a way that makes even reliably liberal media watchers groan. Witness the doubling of his compensation to $6 million last year while layoffs and salary cuts were the orders of the day for those at the company who traveled the wrong birth canal.