NYT Editorializes Against New Italian Government

The editorial page of The New York Times takes aim at Italy's nascent M5S-League government in "The Populists Take Rome." Its main purposes is to repeat previous slurs: Conte inflated his resume with universities he never attended; Di Maio is a college dropout; Salvini wears a sweatshirt (oh, my). It's exhausted and foolish. One imagines that these nameless editorial writers feel suffocated having to churn out attack after attack in defense of a status quo to which no one is devoted other than the rich and powerful.

The exhaustion is on display in the tepid concession paragraph:

Yet the new Italian government cannot be dismissed as just another in Italy’s long history of political crises. The shift of a core member of the European Union, one whose allegiance to the “European project” had not been in doubt, toward the new Central European members hostile to Brussels is a serious blow to the deeper European integration championed by President Emmanuel Macron of France and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany.

The editorial doesn't mention that Merkel is on her way out and Macron is diminishing by the day. The political center as wishfully conceived by The New York Times does not exist.