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AMERICAN'S HAVE A NEGATIVE VIEW OF THE NY TIMES and they believe the Times has made an explicit effort to damage the John McCain campaign.

We've come to the point where the NY Times is a damaged brand name, it's been turning out partisan crap and calling it news for years now, and the public knows it.

THE NEW YORK TIMES and America's newsrooms appear to be an ever increasing source of the country's drunks, child molesters, and killers -- Iowahawk spots a national trend.  [background here.]

TO HEAR THE WASHINGTON POST spin it, you'd think it was a contest between John McCain and Rush Limbaugh in South Carolina -- and that Rush and the conservative movement had suffered a serious defeat at the hands of Senator Kennedy's favorite bill co-sponsor.  The WaPo certainly makes it sound like McCain had swept the Republican vote in South Carolina, in some grand turn-around from his 2000 race against George Bush.  But the facts -- ignored by the Post -- do not bare that out.  It turns out McCain lost the GOP vote to Huckabee.  In other words, he came in 2nd among Republicans, squeaking out a win with a plurality of Democrat and independent voters.  So how big was this McCain win, compared with 2000?  Not big at all. Some might even say piddling:

In 2000, running against George W. Bush and the entire Carroll Campbell machine in South Carolina, John McCain got 42% of the vote, and 240,000 votes out of 573,000 or so cast.

Tonight, he got 33% of the vote in a field where his top challengers--Romney and Giuliani--aren't even running, and 135,000 actual votes. If just the same people who voted for McCain in 2000 had voted for him today, he would have won 50+% of the South Carolina vote. That would have been truly impressive.

Instead, John McCain LOST the support of 100,000 people--and he's the winner?

Compare those numbers with the anti-Rush, pro-McCain dish served up by the Washington Post:

though McCain failed to persuade many of the old Republican power brokers, he wrapped up the Republican establishment where it counted most, South Carolina. His win Saturday underscored how different McCain's campaign has been this year compared with eight years ago .. "I think the people of South Carolina are getting to know John McCain now, a little more than they know those folks [e.g. Rush Limbaugh, et al] anymore," longtime McCain aide Mark Salter said Saturday night of the senator's old nemeses.

In fact, McCain failed to "wrap up" the Republican establishment -- former governor David Beasley endorsed Huckabee and Sen. Jim DeMint endorsed Mitt Romney.  And of course, McCain lost the Republican vote to Huckabee, and he did poorly among conservative voters, especially very conservative voters.  McCain wasn't wiped out in South Carolina, as we was in 2000, but he wasn't a titanic winner either, as the Washington Post would like you to believe.