I'd like to you take a moment to track the progression of how journalists like to muck around with the political process without being accountable to anybody but their editorial boards.

Yesterday I was happy to go to bat for John McCain, thanks to the New York Times incredibly crass hit job. Well, today the Managing Editor of the Seattle Post Intelligencer has this to say about the NY Times' hatchet job:

Admitting that Keller was in a better position to vet the sourcing and facts than I am as, basically, a reader, let's assume that every source is solid and every fact attributed in the story to an anonymous source is true. You're still dealing with a possible appearance of impropriety, eight years ago, that is certainly unproven and probably unprovable.

Where is the solid evidence of this lobbyist improperly influencing (or bedding) McCain? I didn't see it in the half-dozen times I read the story. In paragraphs fifty-eight through sixty-one of the sixty-five-paragraph story, the Times points out two matters in which McCain took actions favorable to the lobbyist's clients -- that were also clearly consistent with his previously stated positions.

That's pretty thin beer.

And the "it must be so because it's in The New York Times" argument will never hold much water after Judith Miller and Ahmed Chalabi got done perforating it.

Consider what's happened next. Surprise -- the wave of follow-up publicity and punditry has focused hot and heavy on the angle of the postulated -- and denied -- romantic relationship, frequently comparing McCain to admitted philanderers like former New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey and former President Clinton.

For a story that dealt with the maybe, looked-like-to-some-people, nobody-knew-for-sure dalliance in an extraordinarily elliptical fashion, it sure had a lot of impact. People read between the lines just fine, thank you.

This story seems to me not to pass the smell test. It makes the innuendo of impropriety, even corruption, without backing it up. I was taught that before you run something in the newspaper that could ruin somebody's reputation, you'd better have your facts very straight indeed.

"Nailed" would be one way to describe that.

David McCumber wrote this probably hours after Jay Rosen weighed in on the whole mess.

Professor Rosen, who is considered by many the "chancellor" of new media journalism, had some pretty damaging comments about what happened over at the Grey Lady :

Thus, the Politico’s report: Asked about the impact that the allegation of adultery would have among social conservative activists, some of whom still aren’t entirely sold on McCain, Black said they would see it as “the New York Times spreading rumors and gossip. We’re going to war with the New York Times, so they’ll probably like it.” Exactly. That’s why Will Bunch at Attytood says there was a story about McCain and lobbyists to be told, but the Times didn’t want just that. “Instead, we have a big mess that has galvanized conservatives and lowered the reputation of the media one more notch in the eyes of many.”

Which is why very important to take into consideration what one of his readers suggested : The NYT couldn't have picked a better way to innoculate McCain with Teflon.

This is a brilliant observation : Now Rush Limbaugh, who has been accussing McCain of being too liberal and thus unworthy to be the GOP nominee, runs to the aid of his "less hated adversary" in order to battle the one he truly despises.

This is s the kind of event that will bring back the extreme right to the fold of the GOP and give them a reason to see their candidate win. Because now the real adversary is the "Liberal Fascism" that controls mainstream media.

And here is where Ben Smith enters, in an incredibly disappointing hit job he calls an investigative report about a once or twice social encounter between Obama and some '1960s radicals' who were once associated with the Weather Underground guerrilla group.

What's his logic? Well, there has to be a way to explain the "meteoric rise" (as if 20 years of public service were that meteoric) of a black nobody who's popular for his "middle of the ground" look at activism.

In 1995, State Senator Alice Palmer introduced her chosen successor, Barack Obama, to a few of the district’s influential liberals at the home of two well known figures on the local left: William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

While Ayers and Dohrn may be thought of in Hyde Park as local activists, they’re better known nationally as two of the most notorious – and unrepentant — figures from the violent fringe of the 1960s anti-war movement.

Now, as Obama runs for president, what two guests recall as an unremarkable gathering on the road to a minor elected office stands as a symbol of how swiftly he has risen from the Hyde Park left to a man closing in fast on the Democratic nomination for president.

Feeding into the unspoken assumption that the colored middle class is nothing but the product of iterative affirmative action opportunities, Smith tries not only to point to the white mescena that gave Obama his EEOC pass, but he also tries to find evidence that Obama 'paid back' by following in their ideological footsteps :

Neither Ayers nor the Obama campaign would describe the relationship between the two men. Dr. Young described Obama and Ayers as “friends,” but there’s no evidence their relationship is more than the casual friendship of two men who occupy overlapping Chicago political circles, and served together on the board of a Chicago foundation.

But Obama’s relationship with Ayers is an especially vivid milepost on his rise, in record time, from a local official who unabashedly reflected a very liberal district to the leader of national movement based largely on the claim that he can transcend ideological divides.

I know Ben Smith from the NYC blogging scene. He's has been a respected colleague here in our circles. It is incredibly disappointing to me that Ben not only follows the NY Times blueprint of passing gossip and anecdotal evidence as facts, but that he has created the "proof of concept" for Lisa Schiffren's racist propaganda over at the National Review's blog, The Corner.

In a mind-boggling example of mental excrecense, Ms. Schiffren finds the genetic and biological explanation for the Obama phenomena and his audasciouly arrogant black woman of a wife.

To this right-wing extremist, the black middle class is nothing but a bunch of thankless radical negroes who've robbed their way into Ivy Leaguedom; while two-breed mutants like Obama have the cherry on top : They are red-diaper babies, products of white communist shrills (preferably Jewish) and dick-thinking negroes :

Obama and I are roughly the same age. I grew up in liberal circles in New York City — a place to which people who wished to rebel against their upbringings had gravitated for generations. And yet, all of my mixed race, black/white classmates throughout my youth, some of whom I am still in contact with, were the product of very culturally specific unions. They were always the offspring of a white mother, (in my circles, she was usually Jewish, but elsewhere not necessarily) and usually a highly educated black father. And how had these two come together at a time when it was neither natural nor easy for such relationships to flourish? Always through politics. No, not the young Republicans. Usually the Communist Youth League. Or maybe a different arm of the CPUSA. But, for a white woman to marry a black man in 1958, or 60, there was almost inevitably a connection to explicit Communist politics. (During the Clinton Administration we were all introduced to then U. of Pennsylvania Professor Lani Guinier — also a half black/half Jewish, red diaper baby.)

I wish I could make this up; but if you want an excellent take on this post, go read dNa over at Two Sense.

And so enters Wonkette.

Back in 2004 people became tired with Ann Marie Cox, the woman behind Nick Denton's blog, Wonkette. It was incredible to a lot of us bloggers that this woman, who seemed to never have a paragraph bereft of an anal raping reference, could be taken seriously as a political commentator. The response given at the time was, well, she's controversial, she gets loads of page views and yet she's a journalist.

Oh, swell.

Ms. Cox left Wonkette and now is comfortably ensconced in the blinding editorial whiteness of Time Magazine's blog, The Swamp. Yet her story is relevant because it's exactly the same career path Ben Smith took when he accepted the job of 'blogger' over at the New York Observer's Politicker.

"I am not a blogger", he barked back at me once, "I am a journalist who blogs".

Oh, swell ...

Unwittingly or not, Ben Smith has fulfilled his duty. He has a hatchet job against Obama that uses the same kind of gossip and innuendo as the NY Time's anti-McCain piece. But he beat every other hachet man to the job by giving a "cloaked in communism" racist angle to the Obama storyline.

And better than that, he gets to be part of that mythical minority of 'thought manipulators' who use the lie of their professional-factual-objective reporting, to set the memes and the buzz from now until election day.

As someone who respected his work here in NYC, all I have to say is that, I honestly thought that Ben was better than that.