Readers will perhaps remember when La Russophobe boldly declared "Wow, the New York Times sucks!" due to the NYT's shoddy level of customer service which she personally experienced.

Now it turns out that the Times really is in trouble, and is going to impose a massive staff layoff and even reduce the physical size of the paper in order to try to keep its head above water. The ultimate cut may be that if you search this issue on Google you don't even get a Times story reporting the news.

Maybe the Times should consider instead of staff cuts and paper shrinkage abandoning the insane left-wing dogma that characterizes the drumbeat of its boring, predictable editorials. Maybe it should actually be liberal, and attack the rise of the Neo-Soviet Union (the ultimate quintessence of anti-liberal danger) rather than constantly attacking the world's most stable constitutional democracy in the United States. Or maybe even better, the paper could just drop it's absurd ideological slant entirely and just start accurately reporting the news with no editorializing of any kind, and take a few courses in customer service.

The Times editorials have always had a yearning admiration for the Soviet Union and its promised socialist paradise, and throughout the Cold War the Times was constantly placing blame for rising tensions on America's doorstep, saying its policy towards the USSR was paranoid and misguided, that Russians were just victimized by a few bad apples. Of course, when Russians freely elected a proud KGB spy as their president, the Times had considerable egg on its face, so its crazed editorial line then became an argument that Putin was a "necessary transitional figure." In other words, it chose to ignore the rise of the Neo-Soviet Union in order to shield its own reputation, perhaps the low-water mark in the paper's storied history. (The Times editorials have also committed numerous other blunders, such as lauding Jimmy Carter's laughable deal with North Korea, and the Times has yet to apologize to readers for any editorial error, in fact they are often not even acknowledged as such.) In short, the Times editorials practice the exact same kind of arrogance and insularity that they attack the Bush administration for, the height of pathetic hypocrisy. So it's not suprising that the Times now finds itself, like Russia, teetering on the brink of extinction.

The NYT is listed on the blogroll of La Russophobe and she continues to find value in the Times coverage of Russia, but the Times drops the ball on Russia far more often than it carries it for a touchdown.