Caroline Kennedy is not only close friends with the publisher of the Times, Maureen Dowd "knows" her as well, so the senate hopeful got a love letter from the Times columnist, for sucking.

Dowd's Kennedy column

Dowd wrote that Kennedy has no qualifications, and can't talk properly. When confronted with these deficiencies in Sarah Palin, Dowd referred to the Republican vice presidential nominee's "thin résumé," called her "underqualified," a "bantamweight," and "the two-year governor of an oversized igloo."

Kennedy's government work is far thinner, but, hey, inexperience is a plus these days (four months later):

People complain that the 51-year-old Harvard and Columbia Law School grad and author is not a glib, professional pol who knows how to artfully market herself, and is someone who hasn't spent her life glad-handing, backstabbing and logrolling. I say, thank God.

But Kennedy sucks just enough at politics: There are senators who sucked worse!.

People are suddenly awfully choosy about who gets to go to the former home of Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond and Robert Torricelli.

Right, probably because New Yorkers would never have voted for those first two guys, or re-elected the third. But, hey, let's have Kennedy, because who cares about the senate, right??

None of this necessarily constitutes institutional bias on the part the paper; Dowd reserves the right to be batshit illogical about basically anyone, anytime, for any reason, such as "I know Caroline Kennedy. She's smart, cultivated, serious and unpretentious."

Confessore on Kennedy's rival

Moving on to the Times' other Kennedy item today, Nick Confessore found anonymous sources to say an aide of Kennedy rival Andrew Cuomo strongly "suggested" to vaious labor leaders and upstate officials that they not endorse Kennedy. Cuomo isn't officially campaigning for the senate seat even though he totally wants it.

The paper did something similar a few weeks ago on Bloomberg's aide politicking for Kennedy. Balance!