We're starting to see the occasional disillusioned mainstream media reporter coming out of the closet. A writer in the Sunday New York Times, for example, attempts to compare Obama to Mandela, and closes his column with a damning comparison:

Mandela, above all, had a clear sense of his core principles... But tell me, do you have a clear sense of what moral purpose drives our president?

Ouch!

The writer is scornful of Time magazine's Managing Editor, Rick Stengel, who "could not resist comparing his hero [Mandela] to another tall, serene, hope-bearing son of Africa: Barack Obama"; Stengel wrote: "Whatever Mandela may or may not think of the new American president, Obama is in many ways his true successor on the world stage."

The New York Times writer responds:

A bit much, yes? Well, Stengel was hardly alone back then in awarding the American president a stature he had scarcely begun to earn. The Nobel Committee, which had awarded its peace prize to Mandela for ending the obscenity of apartheid, bestowed that honor on Obama merely for not being George W. Bush... Perhaps even Mandela... could not have lived up to the inflated expectations heaped on Obama.

This seems very encouraging until you read the byline of the "op-ed columnist." His name is Bill Keller, who was Executive Editor of the New York Times from July 2003 to September 2011.

How utterly disingenuous to say, "Stengel was hardly alone back then." Mr. Keller was right there with him, the chief Obama cheerleader, at the helm of the nation's most influential newspaper, the number one heaper of inflated expectations on the man who had not earned his stature. Mr. Keller was a professional journalist responsible for providing busy Americans with reliable political analysis, but he and his paper failed utterly because of a sycophantic fanboy crush on a "tall, serene, hope-bearing son of Africa."

It's like the journalism equivalent of the Limbaugh theorem; Obama positions himself as a Washington outsider, and the former editor of the New York Times writes withering criticism of those naive people caught up the Obama hype, as if he had nothing to do with it.