Liberal and conservative as defined by the media.(Beat the press: the hand that rules the press ... rules the country--Judge Learned Hand)

Everybody loves Viktor Yushchenko, and why not? The plucky populist stared down Ukraine's corrupt oligarchs to become his country's president, surviving an attack on his life in the process. Even members of the establishment media love him. You can tell because they call him what is, to them, the highest compliment in the English language--a liberal.

"Liberal Leader From Ukraine Was Poisoned;' reads a page one, December headline in the New York Times. Most every major media outlet has described Yushchenko similarly.

But Yushchenko is no liberal in the modern American sense of the word. He supports free markets, NATO membership for Ukraine, and a closer relationship with the U.S.--staples of the American Right's agenda for Europe, and exactly the kinds of policies that drive the American and European Left crazy.

By extension, the media widely depicted the other Viktor Y--former Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, a thug who ham-handedly tried to steal the election--as the "conservative" in the race. Never mind that Yanukovych is a former Communist Party member who ran on an explicitly anti-Western platform, advocating closer ties with the Kremlin. He disdains capitalism and free trade, and throughout the campaign accused Yushchenko of being a running-dog lackey of the Yankee imperialists.

If Yanukovych is conservative, then so is the Berkeley Sociology Department. Obviously American notions of "liberal" and "conservative" don't translate well to the complicated muddle that is politics in the former Soviet Union. Yet that doesn't stop the American media from pretending as though they do. Why?

Because to the establishment press, "liberal" and "conservative" aren't so much ideological descriptions as moral ones. "Liberal" is the literary equivalent of a white hat for the good guys, while "conservative" is a black hat for the bad. In the defeated Yanukovych, media elites saw a backwards kleptocrat who rigs elections and uses his office to enrich his cronies--a real-life embodiment of their fantasy of George W. Bush. Yushchenko, on the other hand, was a man of the people, the reformer who could stir the masses to action--Howard Dean without the embarrassing shrieks.

So Yanukovych got grouped ...