As per Romney, Hitchens had a scathing review:

According to the admittedly very contradictory scriptures of the New Testament, Jesus of Nazareth warned his disciples and followers that they should expect to be ridiculed and mocked for their faith. After all, how likely was it that God had decided to reveal himself to only a few illiterate peasants in a barbarous backwater? Those who elected to believe this stuff were quite rightly told to expect a hard time, and the expression "fool for God" or "fool for Christ" has been with us ever since. That concept has some dignity and nobility. Entirely lacking in dignity or nobility (or average integrity) is the well-heeled son of a gold-plated church who wants to assume the pained look of martyrdom only when he is asked if he actually believes what he says. A long time ago, Romney took the decision to be a fool for Joseph Smith, a convicted fraud and serial practitioner of statutory rape who at times made war on the United States and whose cult has been made to amend itself several times in order to be considered American at all. We do not require pious lectures on the American founding from such a man, and we are still waiting for some straight answers from him.

Left wing publications like Counterpunch devote an extraordinary amount of coverage to issues like the Settlements and spend less time on other important global issues. Is there a similar dynamic occuring in these publications?

The Washington Post "shares the political persuasion" of the Washington establishment, best exemplified (in the Senate) by John McCain and Joe Lieberman (who is, please note, no longer a member of the Democratic Party).

That consensus is contemptuous of fundamentalist rubes (as you identify) but it's moderate right and profoundly imperialist.

The Post's lack of interest in this issue is not at all shared liberalism; it's a lack of interest in exposing imperial misadventures, including those of our proxy states.

Go look around the liberal blogosphere for posts on the Post's gullible neo-con opinion editor Fred Hiatt to get some idea of how you've guessed wrong.

And Ariel Sharon was "a man of peace." But only in the sense that he wanted all opposition to Israeli dominance to end. In the same way, most American Jews oppose the settlements, but only in the sense that they want to stop being seen as moral pariahs. It's important to remember that they have never opposed the settlements enough to actually insist on ending them. (And don't even mention the subject of reparations.)

Why did it take two gentile professors to bring up the subject of the elephant in the room?

http://www.philipweiss.org/mondoweiss/2007/12/07/when-will-the-w.html#comment-67567 <p>When is the New York Times going to be called out? Has anyone noticed the nonnews there? Or the outrageous book review section that is blatantly sympathetic to the neocons? One of the best books on what is currently happening to our country, Craig Unger's Fall of the House of Bush , got a ridiculous pan by Kakutani who didn't even seem to understand what it is about. This I see continually and pervasively. The idea that there are different points of view represented at the Times is absurd.</p> When is the New York Times going to be called out? Has anyone noticed the nonnews there? Or the outrageous book review section that is blatantly sympathetic to the neocons? One of the best books on what is currently happening to our country, Craig Unger's Fall of the House of Bush , got a ridiculous pan by Kakutani who didn't even seem to understand what it is about. This I see continually and pervasively. The idea that there are different points of view represented at the Times is absurd.