Pretty clearly they wanted to do to John McCain what they did to Rudy Giuliani–start a series of stories that required constant replies and corrections whose monotonous net effect was a thousand nicks that bled the target to death. And that has become old hat. Whether it was the ad nauseam spate of daily stories that made national news out of the absence of women at the Augusta Golf Club and the Masters controversy, or the daily running commentary on Abu Ghraib, the signature trademark of the Times now is to take a particular ideological position, and then advance its advocacy by creating “news” on the front page–each subsequent day nuancing and tweaking the theme until the reader is exhausted, sighs “OK, we agree, enough already” and the desired result is achieved. What happened this time was that national outrage nuked the lead story–at least for now.