Samantha Power

Back on July 29th, the New York Times published an article that was ostensibly supposed to be a book review even as the first half of the long piece was an anti-Bush political rant. The byline was credited to Samantha Power, who is, as the Times somewhat benignly defined her, a "professor of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard." But, Power is far from a mere lefty Harvard professor because in the past she was a duly paid member of Senator Obama's staff and still to this day she is a key foreign policy adviser to his campaign for president. In fact, when Obama's shallow foreign policy experience was attacked in the press recently, she was the one who wrote a long apologia that was sent to media outlets to staunch the bleeding of the Obama campaign. Why the Times did not fully identify her as an interested party in a political campaign and instead painted her as just a "professor" is hard to understand.

So, why did the New York Times publish the work of a key adviser to a Democratic presidential candidate's foreign policy team without telling the reading public that this "professor" was a partisan operative and not just an uninterested, unbiased reviewer of books? Even Amitai Etzioni, a blogger for the left leaning Huffington Post, wondered why.