Easily the greatest New Jersey-by-way-of-Texas blogger on the scene, Thurman Hart has an interesting post up at The American Prospect's Midterm Madness blog about The Washington Times wading into the Senate race between Sen. Bob Menendez and Tom Kean Jr here in New Jersey. As Thurman notes, the Times claims that Kean Jr "has been helped by an unlikely Republican ally" in the New Jersey media, "which has been running stinging editorials and news stories" against Sen. Menendez. That would be interesting, if it were true.

Yet a review of the top-circulating Jersey paper, the Star-Ledger, reveals no negative news articles about Mr. Menendez at all. Furthermore, the junior senator has not even been the topic of an editorial in the last two weeks. The same goes for the New York Times. In fact, quite the contrary; both newspapers have run a number of articles that are unfavorable to Kean, and those articles and editorials critical of Menendez cited by the Washington Times actually date back to before he was appointed senator.

The Times further reports that Kean, Jr. has enjoyed a "slight edge" in "most early polls." Yet the truth is that the polls have been fairly evenly split -- with the lead switching back and forth.

To take his critique of the Moonie Times story one step further, it's notable that the two polls they cite don't really support their pro-Kean Jr claims either. The first set of numbers they offer up is from a Quinnipiac University poll that gave Sen. Menendez a lead of 40% to 36%, with a 2.9% margin of error. Remind me again, Times, how this equates to "a virtual tie," as you claim? The other poll is from Strategic Vision, which has Kean Jr leading by 32% to 30%, and a 3% MOE.  This, of course, could pretty accurately be called "a virtual tie," but it seems more or less to be an outlier. The most recent polls -- Rasmussen, which gives Kean Jr the lead, and Zogby Interactive, which Menendez leads -- are also quite tight, but ought to be taken with a grain of salt as the former is an automated telephone poll and the latter is an internet poll of people who've expressly said they'd like to be polled. Most other polls, it should be noted, have been much kinder to Menendez.

My point here, as I believe was Thurman's, is not to spin the polls one way or the other. Rather, it's to point out that this is a classic Moonie Times smear disguised as news. Not really shocking, but still worth calling attention to. The rightist smear machine is already in full gear, working to shape conventional wisdom in every state of the union, no matter the reality on the ground. The anti-Menendez "stinging editorials and news stories" are simply a figment of the rightist imaginations of Tom Kean Jr and his smear artist allies at the Times.