Addendum to the column on Bret Stephens

Having written the column earlier this evening, Tracy and I were talking about it when she asked me, why does the Times hire these fools like Stephens, Douthat, and Brooks. 

It’s because they’re actually the best “conservative” thinkers they can find.  The list of those who are even stupider, more intellectually dishonest, sold-out, and just plain really bad writers is a long one.  Stephens and the rest of them are the good conservatives…or the least bad, anyway. 

I was reminded of another columnist the Times hired back in 2008, if I recall correctly.  For about a year, they had Bill Kristol on the op ed page writing “conservative” columns.  I ran into a friend from the New Yorker at a blogging conference during that time, and he asked me why in hell the NY Times had hired Kristol, because his columns were terrible:  really badly written, shoddily argued, intellectually dishonest, and if you can believe it, filled with mistakes the Times had to issue corrections to week after week.

I answered, because he was just about the best of the conservatives writing at that time, and then it came to me.  The Times wanted “balance” on the op ed page…or so they said.  But it was just possible that someone in the Times hierarchy wanted Times readers to be exposed regularly to how bloody bad Kristol…and others…were.  It cost the Times a couple hundred grand a year, but look at the return on investment!  Kristol made a fool of himself, and of conservative political “arguments” week after week, and he even fucked them up with his stream of factual errors.  So the Times just sat back and corrected them and let him run, and it was a glorious display of buffoonery for all to see.

I think something of the same thing may be going on with Stephens and Douthat and Brooks.  Douthat’s obsequious bowing down to the varying madness of the Catholic Church is an education in the shortcomings of faith as an intellectual guide to life.  Brooks’ crazed forays into the weeds of “sociology” and its academic star of the week has become a running joke.  And I’ve already had my say about Stephens.  I don’t think he had a clue what he was doing when he set up that strawman paragraph that could be taken as a list of Trump and Republican insanity before ascribing the entire mess to Biden.  In other words, he wasn’t thinking.  He is so taken with being in the Times and with thinking of himself as a brilliant writer and thinker that he may as well be writing his columns in Braille, he’s so blinded by the light of his own genius.

Well, it’s worth a thought anyway.  The Times may be doing us all a favor by giving us a window into how thin the right’s “intellectual” ranks really are.  Looked at that way, it’s kind of fun, isn’t it, watching these right-wing “intellectuals” haul out their you-know-whats every week and stomp all over them.