Tom Scocca, The New York Observer’s increasingly sporadic media reporter, has clearly left his heart in China (where he’s writing a book, in between trips back to the city). How else to explain his uncharacteristically treacly endorsement of Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and an opinion that The New York Times is, and will remain, “the newspaper of today.” Scocca is a reliable liberal, and it could be that with his Asian distractions, not to mention the upheaval at the Observer itself, he hasn’t paid enough attention to the paper “of today” and realized how dramatically it’s veered to the far-left in just the last several years.

Claiming that “The Times has made itself into the dominant newspaper on the Web,” Scocca goes on to praise the company’s herky-jerky, trial-by-error Web experiments which, although they’ve led to some “tepid blogs” and “cornball videos” prove that when the print vs. online shakedown is over, the Times will still be the class of the field. He continues, with this stretch: “It’s easy, except it’s not. The Washington Post is a soup of cryptic links, bobbing in and out of view. Dailies in cities like Boston [presumably the Times Co.-owned Globe], Philadelphia and San Francisco are still hidden behind ‘portals’ (please resize your newspaper to fit this window).”

In fact, The Washington Post’s adaptation to the realities of declining print circulation has led to a Web product that’s not only more up-to-the-minute but easier to navigate than the Times. The latter’s political blogger, “Opinionator” Chris Suellentrop, can’t compete with the Post’s Chris Cillizza’s “The Fix” or Howard Kurtz’s pre-eight a.m. round-up of the media chatter in other newspaper and magazines. Aside from The Wall Street Journal (which, unfortunately, save the invaluable opinionjournal.com, is a paid site), the Post has emerged as America’s most reliable daily newspaper, not only because it’s a bit more centrist than the Times but also far less hysterical in the editorial and op-ed columns it chooses to publish.

Consider several Times editorials in mid-February. In “The Courage of Others’ Convictions,” (Feb. 13), the writer revels in the “gutsy” Dixie Chicks’ sweep of five Grammy awards, “in what was celebrated as a blow for freedom of speech as much as tunefulness.” Recounting lead singer Natalie Maines’ 2003 comment at a London concert that she was embarrassed that President Bush was from her home state of Texas, the editorial speculated, “Had Ms. Maines been a senator at the time, she might now be a shoo-in candidate for president.” Isn’t that a slight on Academy Award winner Michael Moore, whose fraudulent (by sentient standards, not those followed by the Times), anti-war, anti-Bush, pro-terrorist rhetoric dwarves that of Maine by a thousand-fold?

I’ve read the Times for more than 40 years now and can’t recall when the paper, and certainly not the editorial page, has taken the Grammys at all seriously. And who would, given the music industry’s horrendous record of honoring those pop, folk and rock ‘n’ roll performers in any given calendar year? Had the prerequisite of “freedom of speech” been applied a generation ago, wouldn’t Bob Dylan, the Kinks, the Last Poets, the Byrds and Phil Ochs have an attic full of trophies earned in the 1960s?

But the Chicks, well, they’re trailblazers, beating back the radio blacklisters and “reinvented itself,” while “Mr. Bush’s polls plummeted to Nixonian levels.” Some perspective from WSJ’s Holman Jenkins Jr., writing in the paper’s online “Political Diary” on Feb. 13: “Mr. Bush has better approval ratings four years after the quick overthrow of Saddam Hussein than Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman or LBJ did at this point in the wars they launched. Mr. Bush led the nation into a war and was reelected—a feat equaled by only one president in the past hundred years, FDR … The current President Bush doesn’t have the hunted look of a failed president. He doesn’t hide in the White House like a man who thinks ‘his war’ is an albatross.”

On Feb. 14, a Times editorial gave a scintilla of credit to Bush for his “multilateralism” in striking a deal (a crummy one at that, in my opinion, not much better than Bill Clinton’s more than a decade ago) with North Korea that will supposedly lead to that country’s dismantling of nukes in exchange for oil and international good will. Yet the writer, in the first paragraph, can’t resist this absurd shot: “When dealing with Pyongyang (and for that matter, the Bush administration), at lot can slip betwixt the cup and the lip.” The paper all but reprised a version of New Jersey Gov. Tom Kean’s tourism slogan from a past era: “George W. Bush and Kim Jong Il: Perfect Together.”

Again on Feb. 13, a Times editorial demonstrated how, to borrow a phrase from its Big Thinkers, “unserious” the paper is when the topic is the war on terror. The lead: “Before things get any more out of hand, President Bush needs to make his intentions toward Iran clear. And Congress needs to make it clear that this time it will be neither tricked nor bullied into supporting another disastrous war. How little this administration has learned from its failures is a constant source of amazement. It seems the bigger the failure, the less it learns.”

How many members of Congress (or for that matter, Bill Clinton, who shepherded a Senate bill in 1998 calling for regime change in Iraq) believed in the run-up to the war that WDM didn’t exist? National polls and a short-sighted administration plan for Iraq after Saddam’s removal changes everything, of course, but I wonder if Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, Hillary, et al, would raise their hands and say, much like George Romney’s ruinous statement in ’68 that he was “brainwashed,” that they were “tricked”? Wisconsin senator Russ Feingold was steadfast in his opposition to the war, but alas, for anti-war Democrats, he’s not running for president.

On Feb. 15, this time on the impasse between the House and Senate as to how to proceed on a minimum wage increase—the Senate wants the bill supplemented by tax breaks to businesses bound to be hurt by the rise in payrolls, whereas the House is far more parsimonious with such help—a Times editorial beseeches senators to find the “moral clarity” to back its own view of a promiscuously tax-happy society. The writer of this particular American Prospect companion piece was incredulous that the Senate acted “as if the midterm elections had never happened.”

Democrats, and the Times, have every reason to gloat about last November’s election outcome, but wasn’t it, at least according to pollsters and the media, the war that did in the GOP? The U.S. economy, under Bush, has flourished, and unfortunately for Republicans wasn’t even an issue a few months ago. But, according to the Times, because of the Democratic takeover of Congress, elected officials are now obliged to embrace the policies of Ted Kennedy, Charlie Rangel, Paul Krugman and Frank Rich. And this is the media outlet that Tom Scocca insists is “the newspaper of today?”