Katha Pollitt is wrong-headed on the composition of the columnist lineup at the New York Times:
So who would I like to see in the Kristol slot? Actually, Kristol. I was livid when they gave him the job, but he was perfect: a dull, complacent apparatchik who set forth the Bush line in all its fact-free glory. His columns were like press releases–you could hardly remember them two minutes after reading them. But his presence on the page reminded readers that David Brooks is not really what Republicanism is all about. Frankly, though, I don’t see why there must be two conservatives on the page. Does the Wall Street Journal, the Times‘s national competition, have two liberals? That the Times, the closest thing we have to a liberal paper, cedes so much turf to the opposition, as progressive bloggers applaud, shows the truth of Robert Frost’s quip that a liberal is someone so open-minded he won’t take his own side in an argument.
I agree with Pollitt that Ross Douthat has some eccentric positions, some of them based on faith at the expense of logic. But he’s about 100 times more interesting than Bill Kristol, and being interesting is what column writing is all about. And one virtue of liberalism – one that modern conservatism seems to have lost, to its detriment – is that it does hear and weigh what the other side is saying, and engage it, and sometimes borrow or co-opt it. You don’t win the argument by showcasing the other side’s stupidity (though it sometimes helps, obviously!). If the Times editorial page were to become like the Wall Street Journal’s (and, let’s face it, the masthead editorials themselves are already just as predictable) it wouldn’t help the cause of liberalism a whit. It would only confirm the lame-brained “fair and balanced” rationale behind Fox News and the Conservopedia, the notion that the only way to make sense of the world is to ideologically bifurcate it. Via The American Scene.
