Time to Move On?

"Should the Times have accepted the ad? Not without a change of headline. The executive in charge says he was influenced by the question mark, but that won't wash. He discloses rejection of a previous MoveOn ad until a doctored photo of Dick Cheney was removed. Tacky, insulting, libelous word play on anybody's name is just as unacceptable . . .

"Ordinarily, all this would be marginally interesting to media people, if the Republican attack machine had not jumped on it to divert attention from the real Iraq debate, exactly as they did in 2004 with Dan Rather's reporting on George Bush's evasion of combat service in Vietnam."

Michelle Malkin doesn't allow for the possibility that the Times simply screwed up:

"The last few, lefty defenders of the New York Times continue to delude themselves that its liberal bias is relegated to its editorial pages. No, the bias has reached full-blown metastasis."

At Pajamas Media, Roger L. Simon also sees this as ideologically driven:

"It's not often I underestimate the stuck-in-time, fuddy-duddy sixties traditionalism of the New York Times, but in this case I did.

"Not in my wildest dreams was the paper capable of deliberately giving a fifty percent advertising discount to the George Soros-supported Moveon.org for a juvenile advertisement calling General Petraeus General Betray-us, of all things.

"Despite what many had said, I had just assumed it was a business decision. The Times had ad space left over and, as everyone knows, they have economic problems . . . Quite clearly the Times' favoritism to Moveon was deliberate."

Black Five trots out an old Commie term with the headline "NYT Admits Fellow Traveler Rate":

"Nobody involved in the selling or buying of political ads is naive enough to have oopsed this. There is real money on commissions and bonuses in play and there is no way the $80-100k discount would have been left on the table. Somebody else had a client who would have paid more or split the page up and you have tons more revenue. Nope this was not a mistake, that is simply the easiest cover for the NY Times. Oh we're sorry, in the midst of a huge drought in print ad revenues, we threw away money to serve our liberal agenda."

Now for the left's counterreaction, starting with John Bruhns at Americablog:

"For the past couple weeks MoveOn.org's ad 'General Betray Us' has dominated the news and even managed to be condemned by the U.S. Senate. It has gone so far as having almost every Presidential candidate put to the 'patriotism test' by the media with questions related to their feelings toward the ad. It even got the President on record saying 'I think it's disgusting.' As if it's treason -- well America, it's not.