Last week, Time magazine rewarded Vladimir Putin for his increasingly dictatorial ways by anointing him “Person of the Year.” (There was never any chance, of course, of a pro-American European leader like Nicholas Sarkozy winning the award from a magazine whose owners also run CNN.)

Now America’s “leading news magazine” has apparently dropped its only two conservative-leaning columnists, Charles Krauthammer and William Kristol.

Asked by The New York Observer if he would have preferred to stay with the magazine, Krauthammer, a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for The Washington Post, replied that he didn’t have a choice. “It’s a hypothetical that didn’t arise,” he said.