The Times has a “both sides do it” article on Obama and Romney. A taste:

Is it reasonable to start counting [job numbers] in January 2009? The economy was already shedding hundreds of thousands of jobs a month by then and none of Mr. Obama’s policies would take effect for some time. Starting the count just one month later would show a small net increase in jobs for the president’s tenure in office. Yet if he cannot be blamed for job losses in the early months of his term, can Mr. Obama be held responsible for not replacing the lost jobs more quickly?

No doubt Romney holds him responsible for that too, but that’s not the question. The question is whether to start counting job numbers for Obama starting in 2009 or 2010. The argument seems to be, 2010 makes sense, but let’s just thrown in another Romney talking point for balance.

Journalism in 2012.

To be honest, the entire article isn’t atrocious, but as with most of these kinds of articles, you read it and wonder, why does this exist? What point is it trying to make? That both sides tend to exaggerate their claims? That’s normally true, but that’s not exactly a great message to put out there when Romney’s camp has compiled a record of flagrant lies greater than any candidate in living memory. I doubt even Dick Nixon could compare to this machine. Of course, Nixon had to deal with editors like Ben Bradlee that were willing to stand up to that kind of deception when it mattered. Now, we have Bill “enhanced interrogation techniques” Keller, who with this article has finally reached self-parody, in nitpicking slight Obama exaggerations while ignoring mountains of Romney distortions like the Benen links show. God forbid they lose their access in a hypothetical Romney Administration, and be forced to actually, you know, do some investigative reporting instead of stenography.