While I agreed with Mickey Kaus that the New York Times article didn't have any kind of smoking gun on Cheney, I disagree with his obsessive analysis of it this way:
1) The Times didn't hype it - Drudge did.
2) It was a reasonable front page story. It did have new information. It did raise new questions - not about Cheney's corruption, necessarily, but about whether he did his job as a CEO well.
3) Whitewater was a front page story too. While there wasn't anything in that story either, it sure did raise a lot of questions.
They've set up a straw man to knock it down, pretending that the Times claimed they've got the goods to lock Cheney away.
Gerth stories always read as if "there's more there..." and I'm no fan of the guy, but the Kaus-Lucianne-Drudge axis of love has invented a fantasy world in which this was presented as The Big Story and then they've gone about critiquing that spin. They're the only ones spinning it that way.
