“Everyone I know hopes that Barack Obama will win the presidential election.” This line appears not in a far-Left blog, but in an op-ed in today’s New York Times. It is written without irony. The author, the novelist Christopher Peters, was born and lives in Germany, and wrote the piece in German. In it, he calls into question German chancellor Angela Merkel’s opposition to Obama’s plan to speak at Brandenburg Gate.

Merkel, he contends, is driven by a “psychological” problem that causes her to like John McCain. She grew up in Soviet-dominated East Germany, you see, and like so many other leaders from Eastern Bloc countries today, she seems to have an irrational appreciation for the American Right. “The fear of being threatened by the ‘evil empire’ still runs deep in those who lived under Soviet domination,” Peters writes,”and that fear may well be connected with a longing for the ‘strong, good’ leader who will provide protection.”

Never mind the fact that Western European countries, like France and Italy, occasionally elect leaders who share Merkel’s psychosis. And never mind the serious problem I have with people who are so convinced of their beliefs that they dismiss their political opponents as psychologically troubled. The question I have is: Why is the New York Times willing to publish the opinion of someone who does not know a single person with differing political opinions from his own? Think about it: Not at work, not at the gym, not in his extended circle of friends — the man does not ever hear a single pro-McCain voice. Somehow this reminds me of the New Yorker fiasco of this past week: A publication so insulated from the world of conflicting ideas that its editors come to assume that no outsider is even reading it. Let’s see if their ombudsman has something to say on this one.