What the hell is going on at the New York Times?

I expect the bias. I expect Paul Krugman’s distorted op-eds, and Maureen Dowd’s incoherent babbling. I expect the pro-Palestinian, anti-American articles that flow from the Old Grey Lady in a constant stream.

What I don’t expect to find is a thinly veiled cry for an “act of God” to remove President Bush from office—in an article that describes previous assassinations of US presidents as “acts of God.”

According to Dean E. Murphy, God sometimes steps in when Democrats have lost elections—by causing assassins to kill Republican presidents.

This article really crosses the line, in a way I have not seen before: Can History Save the Democrats?

A LITTLE more than a month before he was assassinated, Abraham Lincoln stood at the east portico of the Capitol and delivered his second inaugural address. It was a brief speech with a distinctly religious message: he twice cited biblical verses, and made a dozen references to God, most strikingly in assessing the opposing sides in the Civil War. …

The address was roundly criticized in some newspapers for overstepping the bounds separating church and state. But Lincoln was using God to debunk government-by-God.

Now, with George W. Bush’s re-election, God and a newly triumphant Republican president are once again in the headlines. And there are signs that the present national divide, between the narrow but solid Republican majority and a Democratic party seemingly trapped in second place, may be hardening into a pattern that will persist for years to come.

Democrats, especially, are left to wonder: What will it take to break the pattern - an act of God?

In case you’ve missed Murphy’s point in this excerpt, he repeats it several times in the course of the article, concluding with this:

That Mr. Bush won by a relatively narrow margin matters little in a historical context, Professor Cain and others said. Lincoln, who oversaw the most radical political break in American history, was elected with just 39.8 percent of the popular vote in 1860.

Yet David R. Mayhew, a professor of political science at Yale, cautioned against reading too much into any of the numbers. Mr. Bush’s victory could be seen as extraordinary - the first time a president won re-election after failing to win the popular vote in his first term - or as commonplace, since two-thirds of presidents who have sought re-election have won.

“I think this is mostly an ebb-and-flow election,” Professor Mayhew said.

Professor Wilentz of Princeton said that even if the 2004 victory was an incremental one, that should not comfort the Democrats. He said Mr. Rove and Mr. Bush now have a chance to do what Hanna and McKinley never did: Lay the foundation for lasting Republican dominance.

“The Republicans are basically unchecked,” Professor Wilentz said. “There is no check in the federal government and no check in the world. They have an unfettered playing field.”

Until the next act of God, that is.

This is outrageous. How dare the New York Times publish something like this?