Left, Right and Dead Wrong

The news that William Kristol may be joining the New York Times as an OpEd columnist to provide ideological balance--left, right and dead wrong--is a dreary reminder of the new Neo-Con heaven in the mainstream media. With Karl Rove at Newsweek, can Scooter Libby be far behind?

Kristol would bring to the Times not only a spectacular record for unfulfilled predictions about the future but a turgid style to inspire nostalgia for William Safire's bouncy wrong-headedness.

David Brooks' pedantic pop sociology must not be enough to cover the paper's conservative flank, so the Times is going all the way to the right edge of reason by hiring a writer who describes it as "irredeemable" and deserving of prosecution for treason.

But we may be missing the point. The move may have more to do with being democratic about talent than politics.

As Sen. Roman Hruska famously said in defending a Nixon Supreme Court appointee called mediocre, "Even if he is mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they, and a little chance?"

A War We Might Just Win--or Maybe Not

After all the gabble today over the Times’ OpEd piece about “winning” in Iraq, it turns out to be a misunderstanding--or more accurately, a mis-titling.

This evening, co-author Kenneth Pollack told Wolf Blitzer on CNN: “Mike and I did not choose the title. We had nothing to do with it...we came back optimistic--but very guardedly optimistic...

”It's not necessarily the title Mike and I would have chosen for it. But when you write for the Times, the Times gets to choose the title...

”As we say in the piece, I don't know what victory really means. You know, if victory means that we're going to create a country like Switzerland, you know, Iraq is at least 50 or 60 years away from that.”

So a more accurate title, if the writers of the piece were to choose it, would have been “A War We Might Just Win in 50 Years.”

Oops.

Great reporter that he is, Wolf failed to ask Pollack what the original title was. It would have been nice to know.