I guess it's particularly hard to pin the "Liberal Media Conspiracy" label on The Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Times. It isn't helping the Right that the "mainstream media" seems to actually be downplaying the story. The San Jose Mercury-News (the paper that Tom and I both read) buried the story in about four column inches on page 13A. msnbc.com has it as a single-line link on its front page, but the featured article is about Saddam's trial; ditto cnn.com. foxnews.com, of course, buried the link way down its front page, and I haven't caught a whiff of the story on Faux while channel-surfing the cable news ghetto.

OTOH, Keith Olbermann made it his theme story last night, and the San Francisco Chronicle trumpeted the news on its front page. But both have an acknowledged Liberal POV (I suspect that the Chronicle is covered by a Historical Preservation order to keep a little bit of the '60s trapped in amber for all time, just like the Berkeley and Santa Cruz Crazy Leftist™ theme parks).

Is the timing political? Well duh. It's a political issue, in the appropriately broad sense that the government of the polis is by definition political, and therefore, many things that are political are not necessarily partisan. The fulcrum of maximum leverage for a political issue is election time, so this is when you bring up this sort of thing.

It's significant that it's these particular newspapers calling for Rumsfield to resign. They're published by a private company (Gannett) and they're not Pentagon mouthpieces, so this is nothing official; but they're accepted as the media that serves the mainstream of the military community, and to some degree have legitimacy as their voice. It's understood that active-duty officers are constrained from speaking out and that Bush and Rumsfield are free to put whatever words they want in their mouths without fear of contradiction. Retired generals have spoken up, but they've been dismissed by the Right as being a disgruntled minority. All of which gives particular significance to expression of the view that Rummy must go by The Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Times.

It sure looks to me like this is the opinion of the mainstream military. I look forward to the rebuttal by the Right to try and prove otherwise.

Whenever the Right finally shows up to the party...