Salon’s Joan Walsh (who “used to be a socialist, I think”) is “honestly ambivalent” about whether the New York Times’s Peter Baker “was wrong” to have asked the “Are you a socialist?” question of President Obama last Friday. But, of that question Walsh writes:

Baker introduced a crazy right-wing talking point into the middle of an otherwise sober, informative interview with the president. It felt more like an ambush by Fox News than the kind of smart reporting we expect from the New York Times.