MICHAEL GOODWIN: DEMOCRATS REALLY DO LOVE REPUBLICANS — WHEN THEY’RE DEAD.

Even then, their bias tilted left, although their double standard has reached new depths in recent years. I believe the press corps’ lapdog approach to Barack Obama and attack-dog approach to Trump are part of why Americans have become so polarized.

Indeed, many Trump voters ­explain their support for him as a reaction to left-wing press bias and the failure of other Republicans to fight back the way Trump does.

The heydays of press hatred for Bush and McCain came during their presidential campaigns. Long before they were saluted for their late-in-life stances against Trump, Bush 41 and McCain were declared unfit to be president. 

The New York Times, which last endorsed a Republican for president in 1956, backed the hapless Michael Dukakis over Bush in 1988, and Bush went on to win in a landslide, picking up more than 53 percent of the popular vote and 426 electoral votes.

Four years later, the paper supported Bill Clinton, ripping Bush’s economic management as “exasperating” and his positions on individual rights as “infuriating.” It accused him of stoking racial resentment, of going to “radical ­extremes” in supporting right-to-life measures, and said his “capacity to govern has collapsed.”

When Bush nominated Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court in 1991, he and Thomas got the same kind of character smearing that Trump and Brett Kavanaugh got this year.

Now, in his coffin, Bush is a model of American greatness. 

Evan Thomas, who edited Newsweek during the last decades it was controlled by the Washington Post, personifies this breed of feckless DNC-MSM shills. Earlier this week, he apologized for calling Bush, a WWII fighter pilot, a “wimp” on the cover of Newsweek in 1987, but in June of 2009 praised Obama, a former Cook County machine hack, as “sort of God.”