I am surprised to learn that Tonya Harding has taken up journalism.

What else explains last week’s kneecapping of Sen. John McCain by The New York Times? Obviously, the bad girl of figure skating has been given a corner office at Times headquarters.

If you missed it: The Times reported on the relationship between the senator and one Vicki Iseman, a lobbyist who, at 40, is 31 years McCain’s junior. According to the Times report, several of McCain’s top aides were concerned during his 2000 presidential campaign that the relationship might be romantic. This, because of Iseman’s habit of “turning up with” the senator at various fundraisers, dropping by his office and accompanying him when he flew on a corporate jet provided by one of her clients. The Times tells us these aides warned Iseman to leave their boss alone and also confronted McCain directly, telling him the relationship did not look right – particularly since Iseman represents companies that often have business before the Senate committee McCain chairs.

And here, there are a few things that ought to be made clear. The first is that McCain and Iseman have denied any romance. The second is that the Times offers no evidence to the contrary. The third is that the most damning allegations came from “several people involved in the campaign” who chose not to use their names.

So what are we left with? Anonymous innuendo of an affair between two adults that may or may not have happened eight years ago. Or, to put it another way: Bupkis.

Yet, this is deemed worthy of 3,100 words beginning on the front page of the nation’s newspaper of record? Oh, how the mighty have prat fallen. McCain’s campaign has accused the Times of “a hit-and-run smear;” he’s furious, and he has a right to be.

The senator was tainted by scandal almost 20 years ago when he was found to have used his influence improperly on behalf of a friend and political supporter, Charles Keating. Keating, you will recall, presided over the 1989 collapse of Lincoln Savings and Loan. The cost to taxpayers: $3 billion and change.

After which McCain was born again. Having survived the scandal, he remade himself as favoritism’s most ferocious foe, a scourge of influence-peddling and corruption. Get past the salacious innuendoes and the Times report suggests this may have been just a hypocritical pose. That’s a story that should be fleshed out and, if the facts warrant, published.

But the Times has instead published a warmed-over hash of seamy innuendo that does little more than provide ammunition to those members of the right-wing noise machine who routinely see liberal media bias in every news story that doesn’t genuflect at their ideological altar.

The thing is, this time, they might have a point.

More’s the pity. These last years have not been good to the Times. Bad enough that whole Jayson Blair thing. Then there was that “mea culpa” for the paper’s failure to challenge aggressively the Bush administration’s rationale for the Iraq war. Like most news outlets, the Times rolled over like a puppy wanting its belly scratched.

Now there’s this hit on McCain. It has roiled American journalism, put the paper on the defensive – again – and pumped money into McCain’s candidacy from conservatives (the same conservatives who couldn’t stand him two weeks ago) rallying to his side in the face of a perceived “liberal media” attack.

The New York Times has historically been the gold standard of American journalism, the most respected, the most authoritative, the most important. It owes its readers better than what it has delivered here. In the meantime, some advice for John McCain:

Watch your knees.