The Wall Street Journal published a lengthy apologia on its editorial page today that sought to distance the capitalist house organ from its longtime rival, the New York Times on the decision to publish a story on the Bush administration’s tracking of international banking transactions.

Message: Yes, we published the story, but only because the government gave it to us and said it was OK, not because those liberal agenda-driven journalists over at the Times did. They’re still bad and evil, we’re still good.

(We’d provide a link, but the Journal requires a subscription, which we don’t have. Sorry.)

Anyway, the basic story the Journal puts forward is this: The Treasury Department’s Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tony Fratto, and a host of other people, including Secretary of the Treasury John Snow, discovered the Times was asking questions about the program, and urged them not to write about it. The Times decided it was in the public interest to write about it, and went ahead. The government then decided to get “a more complete and accurate story” out, and called the Journal, which published the story along with the Times, apparently without knowing the administration had asked the Times not to publish the story.

See? Two totally different things. Except for the fact that both newspapers published the same information. On the same day. But the backstory? Totally different. The Journal just rode the coattails of the Times.

And that means the Journal can bash the Times at will! And they did, thus:

• “We suspect that the Times has tried to use the Journal as its political heatshield precisely because it knows our editors have more credibility on these matters.” (Translation: We’ve been good and dutiful supporters of the Bush administration’s war in Iraq and the corporations that are profiteering from it, and thus we would never do anything to harm it, or them.)

• “The problem with the Times is that millions of Americans no longer believe that its editors would make those calculations [balancing national security with the public interest] in anything close to good faith. We certainly don’t. On issue after issue, it has become clear that the Times believes the U.S. is not really at war, and in any case the Bush administration lacks the legitimacy to wage it.” (Translation: The Times has a point of view, which runs counter to the Journal’s, and thus cannot be trusted. But that presupposes that the Journal’s point of view is one that we should trust. Moreover, it presupposes that any decision to go to war must automatically have the support of the press, since once we’re at war, it would be wrong not to support winning that war.)

• The Journal quotes Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. giving a commencement address apologizing for allowing students to graduate into a world torn by war and the struggle for human rights, and then adds its own flourish. “Forgive us if we conclude that a newspaper led by someone who speaks this way to college seniors has a major goal of not winning the war on terror but obstructing it.”

(Translation: Forget for a moment that a “war on terror,” by definition, cannot be “won” in any meaningful sense. The Journal is accusing the publisher of the Times of treason, because he doesn’t think America should have attacked Iraq in the first place, a view that more and more people are coming to share. And given the extraordinary lengths and shifting rationale the Bush administration has offered for its Iraq misadventure, we’d say Sulzberger has a damn good point. Then again, in the Journal’s view, we’re probably traitors, too.)

In part of the Journal’s justification of itself, we learn that “at no point did Treasury officials tell us not to publish the information” and, later, “Would the Journal have published the story had we discovered it as the Times did, and had the administration asked us not to? Speaking for the editorial columns, our answer is probably not.”

And that’s the difference between the Times and the Journal: One is out digging up information and pursuing it with an eye toward keeping the public informed so people can decide for themselves if the administration is acting in the public interest, and the other is waiting for orders from that administration to publish or not.

Sure, there may come a time when a newspaper decides — after careful consideration of the issues — not to publish something. (After all, the Times broke the story of the NSA warantless wiretapping only after having held it for a year at the request of the administration.) But the normal course of business should be to find and announce the truth, not hew to the agenda of the party in power. The great irony of the Journal accusing the Times of pursuing an agenda is not lost on anybody but the Journal’s own editorial page.