The New York Times, which claims to draw a clear distinction between its news articles and its commentary articles, dropped any pretense of such a distinction in its minimalist "coverage" of yesterday's dramatic effort by Rep. Dennis Kucinich to force the House to consider the impeachment of Vice President Dick Cheney.

In a small 230-word piece on Kucinich's privilege motion, and the subsequent vote to send his H Res. 333, now called H. Res. 799, to the House Judiciary Committee, after it has been consigned to limbo for over 6 months by the House leadership, the Times succeeded in dissing both Kucinich and the notion of impeaching the vice president.

As the anonymous Times reporter wrote in the lead of this hit piece:

It is hard to know which effort has longer odds, the bid by Representative Dennis J. Kucinich, Democrat of Ohio, to become president of the United State, or his bid to unseat Vice President Dick Cheney by impeaching him.

The rest of the article, which made no attempt to lay out Kucinich's blistering expose of the vice president's criminal role in presenting false evidence to the Congress and American people to justify an invasion of Iraq, and his condemnation of the vice president for the international crime of threatening war against Iran, is spent describing how House Democratic leaders and Republicans sparred over Kucinich's bill, with Republicans helping to defeat a Democratic effort to table it, and with Democrats then pushing it off the floor and over to the Judiciary Committee.