Guess what the lead story is in the New York Times today? The top right column features a hatchet job on John Kerry. Titled, “Kerry Is Pushing for Agreement in Iran Nuclear Talks,” the article portrays Kerry as an overeager Don Quixote lulled into faith in Iran because his counterpart, Javad Zarif, went to the University of Denver and they walked along the Rhone in Geneva together. Some of reporter Michael Gordon’s character slurs:

Mr. Kerry’s relentless negotiating style and determination to engage with Mr. Zarif have become part of the debate… To critics, Mr. Kerry’s eagerness is an open invitation for the Iranians to press for concessions as the talks enter the final stage. Ray Takeyh, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former State Department expert on Iran, said that given Mr. Kerry’s “inordinate attention to this issue, there is an impression that he wants this agreement more so than the Iranians.”

And that is the top story in the paper of record — a biased analysis sailing under a false flag as a news article. Why am I not reading the following “analysis” in the Times instead?

John Kerry, who has been right about just about every major foreign policy issue in the U.S. since he came out against the war in Vietnam in the early 1970s, who speaks at least one foreign language and who has lived abroad, is surely the man with the right blend of experience and wisdom to negotiate a deal with Iran.

What is Michael Gordon’s standing to raise doubts about Kerry? His wing-woman Judy Miller lost her job at the Times, but Gordon held on to his, even after a notorious and costly error. From antiwar.com:

[Gordon] is the co-author with Judith Miller of the front page NYT article planted by Dick Cheney’s minions, which claimed that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), relying on the idea that aluminum tubing being purchased by Iraq was to be used for purifying uranium… That article, entitled “Threats and Responses: The Iraqis; U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest For A-Bomb Parts,” ran on page one of the NYT on Sunday, September 8, 2002. That same day, with the newsprint barely dry, Cheney popped up on Meet the Press citing the piece and claiming that Saddam Hussein was on his way to making nukes.

And Michael Gordon is not alone on the Fight Iran beat. Jeffrey Goldberg has a new piece out called “Danger Ahead for Obama on Iran” saying that Obama is pushing a bad deal.

This is a very dangerous moment for Obama and for the world. He has made many promises, and if he fails to keep them—if he inadvertently (or, God forbid, advertently) sets Iran on the path to the nuclear threshold, he will be forever remembered as the president who sparked a nuclear-arms race in the world’s most volatile region, and for breaking a decades-old promise to Israel that the United States would defend its existence and viability as the nation-state of the Jewish people.

The Israeli press is calling Goldberg a confidante of Obama’s, and hailing his vision.

The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, a journalist considered to be close to President Barack Obama, admitted on Sunday that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has a “credible case” to make against an impending nuclear deal with Iran, an issue which Netanyahu will address in his speech before Congress on Tuesday.

And what is Jeffrey Goldberg’s standing? Here’s another man whose foreign policy record is one of nearly complete failure. He reported in the runup to the Iraq war that Saddam Hussein was going to get a nuclear weapon, writing:

there is no disagreement that Iraq, if unchecked, will have them soon, and a nuclear-armed Iraq would alter forever the balance of power in the Middle East.

These two prominent reporters did their part to push the last great war. They’re up to their old tricks.

Americans don’t want it. As Tikkun says in an ad in the New York Times today: