False Equivalence

The New York Times decides to wade into the growing Rudy Giuliani scandal regarding his campaign violating election law to fund the Dirty Tricks initiative, but they wanted to be all fair and balanced, so they framed it as some kind of Rudy vs. Hillary battle royale, calling it a "taste of '08" (apparently the primary season is over. The NYT said so!). Which I guess it is; the Democrats will marshal support legally while the Republicans will fight dirty:

Rudy versus Hillary, the West Coast edition — it’s on.

Supporters of Rudolph W. Giuliani and of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton are embroiled in their first major affray of the political season over a ballot initiative on presidential electoral votes some 2,500 miles from the pancake houses of Skaneateles, N.Y., and the fire stations of Queens.

Uh, no they're not. Rudy's people financed a bid to rig the Presidential election, and the ENTIRE DEMOCRATIC PARTY fought back. Clinton was not even the first to officially denounce it. That was Dodd, followed by Edwards. No Democrat in their right mind was backing away from this fight. By contrast, NO prominent Republican was affiliated with the initiative other than Rudy, and even he was doing it in a shady, back-channel way that is only now being revealed.

The weird thing about this article is that one senses Chris Lehane WANTS this to be set out this way, as if to push that Hillary Clinton's team was the sole defender of the Democratic Party. That may be a good clipping for him to use when he eventually joins the campaign, but it sells way short the combined efforts of the entire party apparatus, from the grassroots on up.