A LONG FEATURE in the business section of this past Sunday’s New York Times tells you everything you need to know about the comfortably cushy flight the media have been providing for our leisurely First Passenger, George W. Bush.

The piece, by Richard Stevenson, is a profile of Bush’s economic team, which is pushing an ultraconservative line of dramatically lower taxes, less government spending, a privatized Social Security system, and fewer regulations.

Stevenson pays lip service to the notion that the president’s “ideological opponents” have accused him of an agenda that is “fiscally irresponsible, a payoff to its corporate patrons and an effort to repackage right-wing policies in a centrist guise.” Then Stevenson weighs in with this assessment: “But even some of the administration’s harshest critics say they have been impressed by the discipline and political touch that the president and his team have brought to pursuing their agenda, especially the tax cut.”

Hey, the White House may be populated by right-wing kooks who will wreck the economy and destroy the environment in their zeal to serve their wealthy patrons. But you’ve just got to admire how competent they are.

Sorry for the turbulence, Mr. President, but it looks like clear skies ahead. Would you like an extra pillow?

WHEN BILL Clinton took office eight years ago, he was knocked senseless before he could even get his feet under him. There was the maladroit manner in which he advanced and then abandoned his plan to let gay men and lesbians serve openly in the military; his stumbles alienated both homosexuals and homophobes. There was the controversy over his first two nominees for attorney general, Zoë Baird and Kimba Wood, both of whom withdrew over nanny-tax problems. There was even the high-priced designer haircut Clinton received on an airport runway, the subject of days’ worth of sneering commentary.

Bush, by contrast, has enjoyed a remarkably untroubled transition. Some of this is his own doing: when his first nominee for secretary of labor, Linda Chavez, was found to have a nanny problem of her own, she was cut off at the knees before she could even begin to defend herself. Bush’s lack of visibility, and the capable but colorless way his superannuated Ford-era staff has gone about setting up shop, have given the media little to do and little to report on in the way of chaos and controversy.

But chaos or no chaos, the media are supposed to subject the president to tough scrutiny. Superficially, Bush may be conducting himself in a more admirable manner than Clinton — no blowjobs in the Oval Office, no sexual-harassment suits, no unfathomable home-state financial tangles of dubious legality (after all, there’s no need to flirt with the outer boundaries of the law when you can trade on your father’s name). Still, George W. Bush, who entered office despite having lost the popular vote by a half-million ballots, is moving ahead with the most conservative agenda since Ronald Reagan became president in 1981. You’d think the media would ask some tough questions.

Now, four months into the Bush presidency, the media’s transformation from attack dog to lap dog is finally beginning to attract attention. Unfortunately, the most visible example — a piece by political reporter John Harris in the Washington Post on May 6 — attempts to divert blame away from the media and onto Hillary Rodham Clinton’s favorite bogeyman, the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. According to Harris, the principal difference between Bush’s early days and Clinton’s is that Clinton, from day one, had to contend with a mobilized corps of conservative activists — interest groups, commentators, and members of Congress — who continually sought to undermine his presidency.

“They succeeded in many ways,” Harris wrote. “One of the most important was their ability to take all manner of presidential miscues, misjudgments or controversial decisions and exploit them for maximum effect. Stories like the travel office firings flamed for weeks instead of receding into yesterday’s news. And they colored the prism through which many Americans, not just conservative ideologues, viewed Clinton. It is Bush’s good fortune that the liberal equivalent of this conservative coterie does not exist.”

Well, now. According to Harris, the reason Bush is getting better press than Clinton is that liberals are not attacking Bush the way the VRWC went after Clinton, and therefore the media have no one from whom to take dictation. As Kenneth Doran, a bankruptcy lawyer and author from Madison, Wisconsin, put it in a letter to Jim Romenesko’s MediaNews.org, Harris “sets out to defend the Washington press corps against the charge of being George W. Bush’s puppy dogs, but the result reads more like a confession.” In the webzine Slate, Joshua Micah Marshall recently blasted the Democrats’ ineffectiveness in criticizing Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott’s sleazy, politically motivated firing of the Senate parliamentarian. In a tip of the computer to John Harris, the piece was titled wanted: a vast left-wing conspiracy.

On CNN’s Reliable Sources last weekend, co-host Bernard Kalb told Harris, “John, when I first read your piece ... I thought it was brilliant. And a moment later I was smitten by a second thought, which essentially is this, and let me overstate it. Didn’t you do a portrait of the media as a stenographer for the right wing?”

Harris’s response: no, no, no.

But oh, yes, yes, yes.

THERE IS, of course, no shortage of Bush criticism in the media. The editorial and op-ed pages of the Times have attacked Bush continuously for his irresponsible tax-cut and anti-environmental positions. Even columnist Maureen Dowd, who loathes policy and is reportedly friendly with Bush’s father, has gotten into the act.

All three political weeklies — the left-liberal Nation, the moderate-liberal New Republic, and even the moderate-conservative Weekly Standard — have been on Bush like a pissed-off loan shark. The webzine Salon has produced a huge quantity of important reporting about Bush’s nominee for solicitor general, Theodore Olson, who barely escaped a perjury rap during his Reaganaut days, who has been accused of lying about his role in the Richard Mellon Scaife–financed “Arkansas Project” (aimed at digging up dirt on Clinton for publication in the right-wing American Spectator), and who helped mastermind Bush’s disingenuous legal case during the Florida recount.