TW: The NYT contrary to popular understanding does have conservative representation in its editorial pages. William Safire held the primary position for twenty years, when he retired a couple of years ago a void was created (David Brooks remained as the other conservative voice). During 2008 Bill Kristol had a trial run, but he was a disaster, filing polemical tripe that merely spoke to the choir without any attempt at persuasion or analysis.
NYT has now hired a full-time replacement, Ross Douthat of the Atlantic. I have mentioned him before and posted a couple of his pieces. I like him, not his views per se as he is a firm social conservative while I am unabashedly the polar opposite firm social liberal. But he articulates his positions without waving the bloody shirt of murder relative to abortion and similar vitriol on other issues.
He unlike Kristol will be the type conservative that challenges one's positions with substance not political sloganeering.
From George Packer from New Yorker on Douthat:
"...he’s more than capable of hearing out an opposing argument, absorbing it into his own thinking, and then answering with a fair but thoroughgoing counterargument. He also has deeply felt views, especially about religion and social issues. He doesn’t work off talking points, and he’s unblemished by cable news. His book “Grand New Party,” co-written with Reihan Salam, was the best single guide for a Republican renewal published amid a huge crop of such books last year. In a party that’s increasingly dividing up between purists and reformists, he’s decidedly in the latter category, which is more interesting and will be more important..."
Packer on the other NYT columnists:
"...These days, it’s striking that the Times’s columnists seem unable to contend with the earthquake rolling under our feet. With the whole world undergoing a once-in-a-lifetime upheaval, the stars of the Op-Ed page have almost without exception fallen back on the comfort of well-worn stances and personality tics, which are the habitual danger of publishing one’s thoughts every week for years. Friedman, who knows a lot about economics but has too much faith in elites, calls for a summit of “the country’s 20 leading bankers, 20 leading industrialists, 20 top market economists and the Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and Senate,” as if these very individuals are not the main agents of the catastrophe. Dowd publishes a column of inadvertent self-parody whose subject is Michelle Obama’s arms, and whose sum total of reporting is a conversation in a Washington taxi with her fellow columnist David Brooks. Kristof continues to call necessary attention to chronic, less-noticed disasters, but he does it more and more by making himself the hero of a moral drama and, in a recent series of columns from Darfur, insulting his readers with the suggestion that they’re too shallow to read on unless he bribes them with celebrity gossip. Rich never challenges his own side, and the result is a weekly display of rhetorical bravura and cheap shots. Bob Herbert has one tone of voice, and as often as outrage is called for, it’s also tiresome. Only Brooks and Krugman seem to be registering the earthquake in a meaningful way, asking themselves difficult questions on a regular basis and struggling out in the open with the answers, which is why the page is at its best on Friday."
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/georgepacker/2009/03/ross-douthat-th.html
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