Dick Cheney calls out the New York Times. NYT makes small, whimpering noises in reply. It may be that there's no bottom to the lickspittle cowardice of the Times' political desk, but today's display certainly represents a nadir, for the time being at least.

In the Bush Administration's mad, up-is-down effort to spin yesterday's statement by the 9/11 commission that decisively slapped down its nearly three-year-long PR effort to link Saddam Hussein with Al Qaeda, Dick "Dick" Cheney attacked those evil libruls at the NY Times for their coverage of the hoo-ha. Today, the Times reports the flap—an unusual move for a paper whose sense of decorum generally dictates against this kind of self-mention—and on A1, no less.

President Bush and Vice President Cheney said yesterday that they remain convinced that Saddam Hussein's government had a long history of ties to Al Qaeda, a day after the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks reported that its review of classified intelligence found no evidence of a "collaborative relationship" that linked Iraq to the terrorist organization.

Mr. Bush, responding to a reporter's question about the report after a White House cabinet meeting yesterday morning, said: "The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and Al Qaeda" is "because there was a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda." ...

Last night Mr. Cheney, who was the administration's most forceful advocate of the Qaeda-Hussein links, was more pointed, repeating in detail his case for those ties and saying that The New York Times's coverage yesterday of the commission's findings "was outrageous."

"They do a lot of outrageous things," Mr. Cheney, appearing on "Capital Report" on CNBC, said of the Times, referring specifically to a four-column front page headline that read "Panel Finds No Qaeda-Iraq Tie." ... He said that newspapers, including the Times, had confused the question of whether there was evidence of Iraqi participation in Sept. 11 with the issue of whether a relationship existed between Al Qaeda and Mr. Hussein's regime.

David Sanger and Robin Toner, "Bush and Cheney Talk Strongly of Qaeda Links With Hussein"

Well, them's fightin' words, ain't they? What better opportunity to confront Cheney with the record: with the abundantly documented evidence to the contrary, and with his and his Administration's history of distortion and lying on the subject? Why else would the paper have taken this kind of notice of Cheney's accusations, if not to rebut them? Even if the Times has assigned two of its most dependably Republican-friendly stooges to the story, they can't let words like "outrageous" and "confused" just hang there, can they? They can't allow the Veep to imply that the coverage of what he later calls "the vaunted New York Times" is either "ignorant" or "malicious," can they? The paper's honor is at stake!

Alas, reader, they can and they do. This is the article's proximate response to Cheney's criticism of the Times:

Senator John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, also jumped into the debate yesterday, saying: "It is clear that President Bush owes the American people a fundamental explanation about why he rushed to war for a purpose that it now turns out is not supported by the facts. That is the finding of this commission. The war against Al Qaeda is not the war in Iraq, when it began."

Like good Times political hacks, Sanger and Toner reach for the rote partisan rebuttal. And God help us, that's it—that's all they've got! As hard as it is to believe, Sanger/Toner themselves voice no substantive critique of Cheney's position; the entirety of the direct response to Cheney in the article is this (less than compelling) Kerry quote, and a companion to it late in the piece. [At one point a critique in propria looks like it might be starting to emerge, but it's stillborn, whether from the writers' cravenness or incompetence I can't really judge. With evident half-heartedness, Sanger/Toner quote a couple of statements from the 9/11 staff report debunking specific claims of Iraq-Al Qaeda connections. They're incapable of using those statements on point, i.e. to demolish Cheney's phantom, and phony, "distinction" between supposedly valid claims of a connection and invalid claims of a specific 9/11 connection. Amazingly, they wrap up that pathetic four-graf passage by saying that Cheney's statements "expressed a slightly different view" on the evidence from the 9/11 staff!]

But hang on, it gets worse. Follow the Sanger/Toner piece across the jump to A16, henceforth to be known as the Page of Shame. Look at the headline waiting for you there, above a couple of tense pictures of Cheney and Bush on 9/11 purportedly in conference, one in the bunker and one aloft in Air Force One:

That's right, Adam Nagourney and Richard Stevenson have served up a big, juicy blowjob for Ol' Swinging Dick. Here's as much of the slurpin' and a-slobberin' as I can stand to excerpt. Pay particular attention to the way Nagourneyson, in their mythography of The Conversation, go out of their way to sneer at opposition to Cheney as an affair of extremists, of those unable to hear the mystic chords of Leadership:

When it came to making one of the most agonizing decisions any leader could imagine—ordering fighter jets to shoot civilian airliners out of the sky—George W. Bush and Dick Cheney did it together, after the most hurried of conversations in the most trying of moments.

President Bush was in his office in the forward cabin of Air Force One as he sought safety in the skies over the South on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. Vice President Cheney was hidden in the bunker beneath the White House, talking to Mr. Bush in tense telephone conversations through the most fearful and threatening moments of their terms. ...

When Mr. Cheney took office, he was widely viewed as having the steady hand of experience that could help the new president in dealing with the foreign policy and national security challenges that Mr. Bush had not faced during his one term as the governor of Texas. Aides to both men said that Mr. Cheney has served that role loyally and effectively—perhaps no time more than that morning in the bunker. It was a moment that illustrated the symbiotic relationship of these two men: vice president and president, tutor and tutored.

Democrats say Mr. Cheney has also become a polarizing figure. Opponents characterize him as a secretive and imperial vice president, who is too close to his onetime corporate associates, and who was too swift to push Mr. Bush and the White House into war with Iraq.

Yet the almost unspoken nature of the conversation that morning signaled the unusual depth of the relationship between Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, and even this week as Mr. Cheney has been under fire, aides to both men were quick to portray him as an integral part of Mr. Bush's White House and his campaign ahead.

"Extreme elements of the Democratic Party attempt to make him a lightning rod," said Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director. "But the vice president is a reassuring figure with vast amounts of experience who takes the security of this country seriously."

Nauseating, ain't it? A couple of paid Republican employees could hardly have done it better. [As it happens, The Conversation may not actually have taken place, and Cheney may have give shoot-down authorization solely on his own authority: the possibility is on the 9/11 commission record, so Nagourneyson have to mention it, but they make sure to bury it well down in the piece, so that the myth-making can proceed unencumbered.] How any of these writers manage to look genuine, independent journalists in the eye is beyond me.

Please, Dick, don't hurt us! It's at moments like this when I cringe for the Times, and think that the only real purpose in my writing this blog is to document, train-wreck style, the paper's ever-deeper slide into ignominy. What possible conclusion can today's horrors lead to, except that the editors of the most powerful newspaper in the country reflexively piss their pants whenever the Vice President barks in their direction?