John Tierney inherited William Safire's column in the New York Times. Safire is a wingnut and so is Tierney, of course. It's an old and important tradition of liberal tolerance to give all the best column space in the Times to right-wingers who can't write. In fact, it looks like this tradition is slowly turning into giving almost all the column space to wingnuts. That way the liberals look truly unbiased and fair. What could possibly be fairer than rolling over, baring your stomach and directing the attacker's teeth to the largest vein?
Or this is how I first saw the hiring of John Tierney. He's a clone of the babbling David Brooks. Neither can write. Both think that their task in the world is to push the arrogant faces of the coastal liberal elites into the backsides of what they call the real America or the red states. You know, where the people who matter live. Both Brooks and Tierney act like tour guides on some safari, full of poorly disguised contempt towards the tourists who have hired them, making up stuff as the tour progresses and leading the group to all sorts of dead-ends.
But then it occurred to me that maybe this is really a cunning plot! Maybe the Times is carefully hand-picking clumsy wingnut writers with nothing interesting to say to keep its readers angry and liberal! Nah.