The NY Times Does What McCain Alone Could Not

That is, galvanize the base. Conservatives aren't thrilled with McCain but we abhor the NY Times way more. This story today was nothing but a hit piece full of unproven accusations and innuendo and the Times knew it.

Infidelity is not the taboo it once was--Bubba Clinton took care of that--and Conservatives will look past it and rally around our erstwhile candidate. Had this story been presented by the New York Daily News or the Philadelphia Inquirer, it wouldn't be as big an issue, but the Times is target number one for Republicans and Conservatives meaning we will back McCain in his war against the Pinch and Keller:

"Americans are sick and tired of this kind of gutter politics, and there is nothing in this story to suggest that John McCain has ever violated the principles that have guided his career."

The McCain campaign is using a two-pronged attack to push back against the story. First, they’ll argue it was a thinly sourced piece of innuendo journalism. But McCain aides also will strike at the source, using the Times’ liberal reputation as a means of self-defense to draw sympathy from the GOP’s conservative base.

To this end, a top McCain adviser accused the paper of practicing tabloid journalism.

“It’s not every night I stay up to read the National Enquirer,” said Charlie Black, who was with other top McCain aides at the senator’s Arlington, Va., headquarters to mount the counterattack.

Black noted he had taken heat from some of his “conservative friends’ after McCain won the paper’s endorsement in January. “We’re going to go to war with them now,” Black said. “We’ll see if that hurts or helps.”

Oh it'll help for sure. If McCain wants to go to war, this is the time and place to do it. He will gain the backing of every right-wing blog and political site--sites that have been beating him up incessantly of late. If he means to go after the Times, no half-way gestures but really go full-bore after them, sites like mine and others will spend the next several months backing him up. We're an army of people who can dig and expose the Times on a daily basis and fact check the hell out of every story--even more than we currently do.

Update: Damn, that was fast.