JOHN LEO'S BLOG

That seemed true as well out on Long Island, where we spent the holiday weekend. Endless war in Iraq, missiles from North Korea, the possibility of full-blown war between the Israelis and the Palestinians, but all anybody seemed willing to talk about was the Times and its lame op-ed defense of its position, written by Executive Editor Bill Keller along with his counterpart at the Los Angeles Times, Dean Baquet. It was shocking as well as lame. Keller and Baquet actually wrote that they were not neutral in the war against terror.

Thanks, guys. It's nice to know we are on the same side.

A surprising number of moderates and liberals now casually disparage the New York Times. This is new. For years, conservatives had to shoulder this burden alone. After decades of being treated as a sort of shrine to journalism, the Times is now being called on all its faults. The front-page editorials posing as news stories now seem to be noticed by many, many people. The dumb and pointless front-page article on Bill and Hillary's marriage caused a great deal of head shaking. So does Paul Krugman's column, a natural home for inaccurate and plainly false information. Even the Fourth of July issue of the Times was irritating–the featured op-ed article argued that the Founding Fathers are famous mostly because propagandists like Parson Weems, early lionizer of George Washington, churned out so much image-making material. Note to the Times: The founders included some of the most brilliant intellects and statesman of the Enlightenment. Parson Weems didn't do it.

The lead story of the July Fourth issue–for its second appearance in that spot–was the GI allegedly responsible for the rape and murders in Iraq. Was this twice the most compelling story of the day, or is the Times just drawn to any story that makes America and the war in Iraq look bad? One wisecrack over the weekend was this: If the rape and murders had occurred in Germany in 1945, the Times would have headlined those isolated crimes, and way down in the story, reported that Berlin has fallen and the war is over.

One small asterisk to the theory that the New York Times may have been topic No. 1 all weekend in the New York area: My esteemed spouse and I had a dinner party Sunday night at which the guests talked endlessly about the TV gabfest The View and the earthshaking quarrel between Barbara Walters and Star Jones Reynolds. I was amazed. Who cares? And how did all these busy and high-powered people know so much about a talk show that goes on at 11 a.m. on weekdays, when everybody at the table was presumably hard at work doing something useful? At our last big dinner party (attention: disguised name-dropping alert), a group of movers and shakers, many of whom are very well known, spent the whole evening talking about Brad and Angelina. Who can worry about politics and war when the long-suffering Jennifer Aniston is going through so much undeserved woe?