It’s been a rough year. The New York Times has suffered falling profits, and now its candidate has gone bad.

The New York Times has rebuked its errant endorsee Hillary Clinton with a strongly worded editorial….

The Pennsylvania campaign, which produced yet another inconclusive result on Tuesday, was even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that preceded it.

Voters are getting tired of it; it is demeaning the political process; and it does not work. It is past time for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to acknowledge that the negativity, for which she is mostly responsible, does nothing but harm to her, her opponent, her party and the 2008 election.

[...]

On the eve of this crucial primary, Mrs. Clinton became the first Democratic candidate to wave the bloody shirt of 9/11. A Clinton television ad — torn right from Karl Rove’s playbook — evoked the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, the Cuban missile crisis, the cold war and the 9/11 attacks, complete with video of Osama bin Laden. “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen,” the narrator intoned.

Yes, we agree, it is an inflammatory ad. We note that this time the phone is not ringing at 3 a.m. — Hillary Clinton has discovered she can try to scare us without losing sleep.

If that was supposed to bolster Mrs. Clinton’s argument that she is the better prepared to be president in a dangerous world, she sent the opposite message on Tuesday morning by declaring in an interview on ABC News that if Iran attacked Israel while she were president: “We would be able to totally obliterate them.”

The editorial continues — The Low Road to Victory (and scolds Barack Obama, too, for sinking to Clinton’s level).

Photo credit: The New York Times (Obviously, in happier days.)

See also: