For those of you who think that the new NYT boss Bill Keller’s liberalism is only found in his recent columns, sample these beauts from his error as a Moscow reporter and foreign editor:

“Watching the Supreme Soviet invent itself is a little like speed-reading the Federalist Papers.” — Moscow reporter Bill Keller in The New York Times Magazine, August 27, 1989. This from the people who choked when the Contras were compared to the founding fathers…

“It mystifies Westerners that Mikhail Gorbachev is loathed and ridiculed in his own country. This is the man who pulled the world several steps back from the nuclear brink and lifted a crushing fear from his countrymen, who ended bloody foreign adventures, liberated Eastern Europe and won for the Soviet Union at least provisional membership in the club of civilized nations. By the standards of the West (and by comparison with the incumbent, Boris Yeltsin), Mr. Gorbachev is a man of impeccable character.” — New York Times foreign editor Bill Keller reviewing Gorbachev’s memoirs, October 20, 1996.

Can you have a 40-year career in the Communist Party of the USSR — not to mention ordering the shooting of pesky separatist Lithuanians in the midst of your “perestroika” — and have an “impeccable character”?