The New York Times's embrace of Barack Obama's candidacy, and its fervent defense of him against John McCain's "racist" and unfair attacks, made 2008 a particularly bias-packed year for the paper. During the 2008 campaign Times bias often came with a smile, instead of a snarl, with the Times and the rest of the mainstream media having fallen hard for Obama's "historic" candidacy (jilting its previous love, Hillary Clinton). The Times even praised the moderate maverick McCain for a while -- until he clinched the Republican nomination and became the only thing in the way of a groundbreaking victory for either a liberal woman (Clinton) or a liberal African-American (Obama).

Below are the favorite quotes from Times Watch's five Times-dissecting judges. You can read all of the worst quotes of Campaign 2008 at Times Watch.

Thomas Lifson, editor and publisher of American Thinker, and Don Luskin, publisher of the blog The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid, both chose this quote from reporter Steven Erlanger:

"On Thursday evening in a glittering Berlin, cheered by as many as 200,000 people, Mr. Obama delivered a tone poem to American and European ideals and shared history. In contrast, just before he spoke, Mr. McCain, was sitting in Schmidt's Sausage Haus und Restaurant in Columbus, Ohio, having a bratwurst, and saying grumpily that he would prefer to speak to Germans when he is president, not before." -- Steven Erlanger in a July 26 filing from Paris while covering Barack Obama's world tour.

The New York Times posted on its website Wednesday political writer Matt Bai's long profile of Barack Obama, which will be featured in the next edition of the Times Sunday Magazine.

Near the end of the 8,800-word piece, in which Bai talked to Obama on his campaign plane, the Democrat dropped a backhanded tribute to Fox News, which by his lights is not only frustrating him in the polls, but is part of a wider apparatus "designed to perpetuate" the country's "cultural schism." Obama even identified New York Times reading as a reliable signifier of effete liberalsm.

Matt Bai, a major contributing writer for the New York Times Sunday Magazine, described John McCain's service in Vietnam in his big cover profile, "The McCain Doctrines," by suggesting that McCain's five years spent isolated in a POW camp meant he didn't learn the correct liberal lessons from the Vietnam War, resulting in his support for the Iraq War.

While the Times found Sen. John Kerry's service in Vietnam gave him credibility on his opposition to the Iraq War, McCain's five years spent isolated in a POW camp has evidently cursed him with the narrow perspective of America, right or wrong.

Explaining why McCain still supports the Iraq War, Bai wrote: