Her heroism evokes comparisons to Ned Lamont or — dare I say it? — even Stephen Colbert. Congrats to the new gold medalist, who’ll receive for her efforts a grunt of approval from Atrios and a promotion from Z-list to Y-list in the hierarchy of lefty blogs. You did it, Deb: you’re part of the team now.

Patterico detects lefty maliciousness of a greater magnitude in recent comments by L.A. Times editor Dean Baquet. Here’s the quote:

Hiltzhik [sic] was a rare member of the Times to push back against Times critics. Dean says the Times should push back. He’s not sure that such pushback should only be online. “Newspapers don’t know how to respond to critics.”

As I read it, all Baquet’s saying is that the paper should address criticisms it believes are unfair (presumably on their op-ed page). They’ve given their critics, including Patterico himself, space in their pages before to explain what they think the Times is doing wrong. Why not give themselves some to answer?

Patterico extrapolates from the phrase “pushback” a threat of institutional vendetta against the critics and cites as proof a nasty reference to Hugh Hewitt in an op-ed column written after Baquet made his remarks. I don’t find that especially damning — there are people on the right (ahem) who have gotten nastier than that with him, and in any case I doubt any columnists over there need marching orders to take swipes at the right. If and when they start digging through Patterico’s trash, I’ll believe there’s a campaign of intimidation; as it is, I think he’s reading too much into it.

Since I’m defending Baquet, I might as well defend him on this too. Yeah, he probably expected it would happen, and indeed, he probably wanted it to happen. But you can’t fault him for European unseriousness about terrorism. Dean Baquet didn’t vote for Zapatero after the Madrid bombings. Keep the blame where it belongs.