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Rather predictably, the McCain campaign is responding to the New York Times story on his possible affair with an all-out attack on the New York Times. If I were him I'd do the same thing. But it's worth pointing out here that the Times isn't getting any balance points from the right for having hired Bill Kristol, the world's biggest McCain-booster, onto their op-ed page a couple months ago. Indeed, Bill Kristol's magazine, The Weekly Standard, is part of the anti-Times chorus. When Kristol's next column comes out, I imagine he, too, will be part of the anti-Times chorus. And rightly so. He hates the Times and everything it stands for, except insofar as it stands for paying him money and publishing his articles.Hiring a banal writer and an unimaginative ideologue like Kristol might have made some sense if his presence really would have legitimized the paper's reporting in the eyes of conservatives, but it's done nothing of the kind. Conservatives still hate The Times, and now, every Monday, the Times op-ed page features a poorly written, basically hackish column from Kristol. It's lose-lose.
