Among other things, the Gray Lady had run a shamefully slanted and misleading piece by White House reporter Elisabeth Bumiller, "A Democratic Rallying Cry: Vote Bush out of Rove's Office," in January 2004 that peddled the Democratic campaign criticism of Rove: "Elusive to reporters, infamous for browbeating Republican operatives (and members of Congress) who displease him, Mr. Rove is the man who told Republicans they should use the war on terrorism for partisan advantage."

Interesting but untrue, as timeswatch.org revealed: "This is what Rove actually said to the Republican National Committee in January 2002: ‘We can go to the country on this issue, because they trust the Republican Party to do a better job of protecting and strengthening America's military might and thereby protecting America.'"

In an interview with The New Yorker's Nicholas Lemann that appears in the current issue, Rove explained other reasons why he looks askance at the Times.

Aside from the Times' constant drumbeat of snide and often erroneous reports about the Bush administration, Rove was especially upset about the paper's Sept. 26 story, which, he told Lemann, was No. 1 among the Times' numerous misdeeds.

The Times story trumpeted Democrats' organizational efforts, especially in Florida and Ohio, and suggested the Democrats had been vastly superior to the GOP in registering new voters.

In fact, Rove told Lemann, the GOP had probably outclassed the Democrats in all the so-called swing states except for Pennsylvania and perhaps New Mexico.

Rove complained that the Times story had relied on Democrats and groups allied with them for information for its story while seeking only pro-forma responses from the Republicans. The result was a story heavily weighted in the Democrats' favor while ignoring the facts, which disproved the Times' conclusions.

Moreover, Rove said, the Times reporter had cleverly estimated new voter registration by comparing figures for the first seven months of 2000 with figures for the same period in 2004. This, he said, slanted the story in favor of the Democrats because they hadn't begun their organization until that year, while the GOP had been busy organizing in the trenches since 2001.

A comparison of just the years 2000 and 2004 overlooked the progress that the Republicans had made during 2002 when they re-elected Jeb Bush as governor in something of a landslide despite Democratic National Chairman Terry McAuliffe's assurances that the Democrats had all but sewed up the election there. Rove added that the same intense GOP organizational efforts took place in 2003.

But that was not all. The Times employed the underhanded technique of surveying new registrants in the most heavily Democratic and Republican ZIP Codes in Florida and Ohio - an unnecessary effort in Florida, where voters register by party, and misleading in Ohio, where the Republicans were finding most of their new voters in precincts (not ZIP Codes) that had not voted heavily Republican in the past.

Rove told Lemann that he believed the Times had allowed itself to be fed its data by Democratic organizations.

Lemann makes the point that from the president on down, the Bush campaign, not surprisingly, all but ignored the self-proclaimed newspaper of record. He reports that Vice President Dick Cheney's staff, for example, "found that it had no room for the Times reporter even to travel in the press section of its plane."

Rove had taken his complaints about the Times' glaringly obvious bias directly to Bill Keller, the Times' new executive editor, who was appointed in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal, and Philip Taubman, the Times' Washington bureau chief.

Rove and White House communications guru Dan Bartlett met with the Timesmen on Oct. 22 in Florida. Rove reacted to Keller's question about what Rove thought about the Times' campaign coverage. Not much, Keller quickly found out.

Keller later told Lemann that Rove, whom he described as "ferocious," had "pounded on us for two cocktails' worth of conversation." Rove's points? "It was Bush's accomplishments we had ignored, flaws in the Kerry record that we had put inside the paper, and a number of pieces we had done looking hard at the Bush record. In their view that all amounted to arming the Kerry campaign."

Lemann notes that since the election the mainstream media are grudgingly admitting that they failed to appreciate the full dimensions of Rove's organizational efforts and misunderstood the GOP's religious base. He adds that the media resent the idea that they took sides in the election even though, as Li'l Abner would have said, "as any fool can plainly see," they did.

With the election behind him, Rove can now afford to be magnanimous, even to the Times' Bush-hating columnist Maureen Dowd, who described "conservatives and evangelicals who claim to have put their prodigal son back in office" as "a vengeful mob - revved up by rectitude - running around with torches and hatchets after heathens and pagans and infidels."

Recently he is reported to have dropped his torches and hatchets and given Dowd, who had complained to him that her Republican sister liked him better than she liked Maureen, a bouquet of flowers, including roses and carnations. He attached a card that read "Just remember, your family does love you and not everyone hates you."

Lemann concludes with the observation that "journalists in the mainstream media are starting to worry 'what if people don't believe in us, don't want us anymore?'"

Well, those people can always turn to NewsMax.com.

Editor's note: