I was in the kitchen at my wife’s parents apartment in Sanibel on New Year’s Eve, making lasagne for the masses, when my father-in-law said something from the living room about Iran hiding nuclear weapons. Was this breaking news, I wondered? What was his source?

“It’s some guy on Fox News,” he said.

I was going to say something about his unreliable source — my father-in-law was in the newspaper business his entire life and not a gullible man, though he did vote for Bush, twice — when I bit my tongue. I was getting my New York Times delivered to me in Florida over vacation to stay hooked up to my own favored information stream and I realized, with some chagrin, that credibility wise, the Times was in danger of heading into the No Spin Zone.

WMD in Iraq? Oops. Anything by Jason “Burning Down My Master’s House” Blair? Fiction. And now it turns out the paper sat on the story of Bush authorizing illegal wiretaps in the US for over a year — because the White House asked them to. And the only reason they finally ran with it after all, according to the LA Times, was because one of the reporters on the story, James Risen, was about to come out with a book that would scoop the NYT. I say “according to the LA Times” because the NYT, after trying on the mantle of transparency in the wake of the Judith Miller fiasco, has clammed up, even shutting their own ombudsman out on their mysterious reasons for sitting on a story that might have changed the course of the last election.

Who knows? Even my sometimes skeptical father-in-law might not have pulled the lever for GWB if he knew he had circumnavigated the Consitution like Nixon. The Times has deprived me of the right to make fun of Fox News, a sad development indeed.