It started with Weekly Standard editor William Kristol coming out in a recent editorial as a Tea Partier:

We are not now quite at a founding moment, or even a re-founding moment. But we have arrived at a genuine crisis, or a set of crises, and we may well be at a decisive moment for the country.

This sense of crisis is what animates the Tea Parties. I had the pleasure of attending the “Proud to be an American July 4th Tea Party” outside Independence Hall in Philadelphia. It featured patriotic songs and speeches, and expressions of support for our troops and praise for our country. Yet the mood of patriotic gratitude was mixed with expressions of alarm from my fellow Tea Partiers about the administration now in charge of our government.

That’s bad enough. But then we learn this from a New York Times Ad Watch headlined “A Punch and a Counterpunch in Pennsylvania Senate Race.”

This hard-hitting advertisement against Representative Joe Sestak, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Pennsylvania, marks the debut of a hawkish, pro-Israel group, the Emergency Committee for Israel, led by William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard. It also serves as a shot across the bow to candidates in other states whom Mr. Kristol and his fellow neoconservatives deem insufficiently supportive of Israel.

So.

Is it really kosher for the editor of a news publication – even a “magazine of opinion” – to actively engage in advocacy? And big-bucks advocacy at that?

Just wondering.