Pete Wehner manages to find a reason to be offended by an unremarkable news report:

In a sentence that probably reveals more than the New York Times intended, reporter Annie Lowry writes, “With the victory of the Socialist candidate, François Hollande, in the French presidential election, the White House has lost one of its closest allies on the Continent, but perhaps gained one with economic policy beliefs more closely aligned with its own.”

If a writer for COMMENTARY, National Review, or The Weekly Standard made this claim, Obama’s supporters would be enraged. This would be evidence of taking the “low road,” a calumny, a slur rarely seen in the history of presidential politics.

Obama’s supporters might be enraged if a conservative said that Obama himself is a socialist. If someone told them that Obama and Hollande are more closely aligned than Obama and Sarkozy were, they would probably shrug and say, “Of course they are.” It’s not exactly breaking news that Western center-left politicians from different countries are likely to have more in common with each other than they do with politicians of the center-right. To the extent that the French presidential election was a reaction against the fiscal policies favored by Merkel and Sarkozy, it is not news that a candidate who ran against those policies would be more closely aligned to the Obama administration. After all, the administration tried and failed to persuade leading European governments to support additional stimulus spending when Obama first came into office, so it makes sense that Hollande’s anti-austerity rhetoric would put him closer to Obama than Sarkozy was. The report “reveals” what anyone paying a minimal amount of attention to U.S. and European politics over the last three years already knew.