Whatever your preference in the New York mayoralty, you’ve been treated in the past 24 hours to a textbook takedown of Bill De Blasio by the paper of record.

Whether as suspected the Times, like the Washington Post, is sold soon for peanuts won’t matter in the upcoming Democratic primary, as the newspaper weighed in with an unusually lengthy paen to Speaker Christine Quinn and put a sniper’s bullet in De Blasio, citing unnamed colleagues who questioned his decisiveness in the Hillary Clinton senate campaign of 2000 and suggested his principle contribution during that race was to mollify Jewish voters upset with Hillary’s public embrace of Arafat’s wife.

Chastising a candidate for appealing to Jewish voters might be a first for the Times, and as a general observation coming from this newspaper the criticism will raise more than a few eyebrows around town.

Yet not content with the potential effect of this line of attack, the paper actually goes on to suggest that De Blasio’s dutiful diplomacy with the Jewish community 14 years ago has paid off in campaign lucre today. Nowhere in the article is there a singe reference to or acknowledgement of the reason that De Blasio has surged past Quinn into the lead in this contest—namely that he has given voice to the rising broad-based concern that New York as a metropolis is increasingly defined by inequality.

And certainly there is no suggestion that news organizations that have pandered to the wealthy have contributed to the present condition.

Hamilton Fish is the publisher of The Washington Spectator.