Dawn Patrol Patrol

The Daily News's running identity crisis is one of the best stories in town, and while we're not exactly sure what to make of this post on Dawn Eden's blog, we suspect it'll advance that story:

"Looks like the big news that I promised a while back is finally coming to pass. It has to do with something that'll be in this coming Sunday's New York Daily News."

Eden, as you'll recall, was a copy-editor fired by the New York Post (!) for surreptitiously putting some pro-life spin into a story. Our George Gurley fell in love with her, and the subsequent profile, according to Eden, got her a job on the copy-desk at the Daily News. Now, apparently, she's moving on up at the biggest-circulation paper in New York City.

This is such a perfect snapshot of the way in which the News constantly gets tangled over its own feet in trying to be, and yet not be, the Post. Hiring a woman banished from Murdoch-land for conservatism somehow crystallizes that.

But it's also a classic News misstep. Eden's not a New York conservative like Ryan Sager or Robert George, the younger, libertarian generation on the Post's editorial page who represent, in some way, the way in which the movement has a future in New York. Her conservatism is more U.S. House of Representatives: Here she is cheerleading the Christian attack on Sponge-Bob, and here's her observation that "at the root of homosexuality is a desire to avoid true human intimacy."

And so the Daily News barrels into the future.