I too was appalled by this blatantly partisan editorial. The NYT, like the U.N., seems to sink lower and lower into irrelavance. I find myself anticipating exactly what they will say editorially, and exactly how they will “play” the news, and I am seldom disappointed. They stil occasionally have reat reporting (John Burns, et al.) but their shrill defense of paleoliberal positions bores the hell out of me. Like CBS and Rather, and in contrast to the likes of the Washington Post, which worked with the Rathergate stroy and added what only a great newspaper can–balance, multiple sourcing, complexity, and a sense of the story’s “arc”–tne NYT seems insensible to the fact that they are not exclusively setting the news agenda anymore. This overweening arrogance, coupled with the sneering condescension that has taken over the editoral page by degrees, makes them no longer a “must’read” but an “I’ll read it if I can get around to it.”

I was, however, even more appalled by Kerry’s smearing of Allawi–Kerry’s remarks yesterday tacked perilously close to calling Allawi a liar and a GWB apologist. Is this the Kerry who as Presidnet will be a superior diplomat to the allegedly ham-fisted and unsublte GWB? Kerry is a disaster even in facing the mild pressure of a Presidential candidate. What the hell would happen were he to go toe-to-toe witht he mullahs or Kim Jong Il? I’m not really willing to risk the future of the world on a successful resolution to JFK’s psychodrama.