Hugh Hewitt, contributing writer

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, often called the Lost Angeles Times or the Left Angeles Times, escapes the sort of scrutiny that Andrew Sullivan and others apply to the New York Times because the "West Coast's leading newspaper" simply doesn't matter much on the East Coast (and increasingly not so much in its own back yard).

Had the New York paper run with a front page like Sunday's LA Times did, Sullivan would have been at work for a week playing catch up. It is as though the editors had agreed on an "All setbacks, all the time" policy, regardless of the actual news from Iraq. Here are all of the headlines from Sunday's front page:

"Suicide Blast Kills 4 GIs at Checkpoint"
"Wars Take Some Nasty Turns on City Streets"
"The 101st Feels a Rush of Anxiety, Relief After First Taste of Combat"
"America's Real Enemy May Be Time"
"Allied Victory Could Sow the Seeds of a Trade Fight"
"Small Town Caught Between Two Armies"

For good measure, here are the headlines from the Sunday "Opinion" section:

"Battlefield Europe"
"A Family's Path to War" (complete with pictures of Bush the Elder and Bush the Younger so we don't miss the point)
"Too Little Shock, Not Enough Awe"
"War Diary: Room with a Grim View"
"Conflict of Necessity"
"Broken Hearts, Hateful Minds"
"Why Attack Iraq? Because We Can"
"Murderous Containment"
"Do You Shoot When the Enemy Is a 12-Year-Old?"
"Uranium Warheads May leave Both Sides a Legacy of Death for Decades"
"Three for the List of U.S. Heroes"

If actual control of the paper were handed over to Nancy Pelosi, I doubt that she could have come up with a more anti-Bush, pro-war-critic set of headlines.

Imagine if this crowd has been in control of the paper on June 18, 1944. For the benefit of the history-challenged, here is a portion of the World Book's account of Normandy:

"Eisenhower chooses Monday, June 5, 1944 as D-Day . . . Rough seas forced him to postpone D-Day until June 6. During the night, about 2,700 ships carrying landing craft and 176,000 soldiers crossed the channel. . . . D-Day took the Germans by surprise. But they fought back fiercely . . . By the end of June, 1944, about a million Allied troops had reached France. The Allied forces advanced slowly at first. The Americans struggled westward to capture the badly needed port of Cherbourg. British and Canadian soldiers fought their way to Caen. The battle for Cherbourg ended on June 27. Caen, which the British had hoped to capture on D-Day, fell on July 18. Near the end of July, the Allies finally broke through German lines into open country."

Had the Los Angeles Times today been reporting the war then, here are how the headlines might have read 12 days into the invasion:

"Hedgerow Hell: Allies Stall in Fields of Normandy"
"Cherbourg Out of Reach --Eisenhower rushing reinforcements. Did Ike underestimate the Nazis?"
"Caen: Montgomery's First Day Objective Still Under Nazi Control"
"Only Rumors of Rockets--No 'Secret Weapons' in Early Fighting"
"St. Loo in Ruins--Hundreds of French Civilians Dead As Historic Village Leveled"
"No Signs of Jewish Revolt in Warsaw--Paris Does Not Rise Up on News of Invasion."
"Germans in Berlin rally to their Fuhrer."