Street Value of Today's OpEd Page: $2.81
Both of today's Times columnists, added together, do not equal one Maureen Dowd ($3.42). Someone's gotta do something about this, it's getting embarrassing.
David Brooks sees Tierney on the emailed list, finds there's suddenly very little keeping him from plummeting to an embarrassing last place in the rankings. So he makes a desperate, flailing attempt at humor; warms 'em up with a few topical jokes (did you hear the one about rich Republicans?), barely disguising his rage that his last book — Bobos2: Exurbs United — tanked while equally lazy thinker Friedman scored a minor hit with his anti-Heliocentric ode to globalization.
Then comes the but seriously, folks, I want to talk about poverty for a minute and we're back on safely humorless ground. Until this heckler whose rounded the three-drink minimum and is heading for home shouts "Booooorring," and Dave makes with the flop sweat: I, uh... I — saw U2 the other day he starts, but he's totally lost them now, and he gets belligerent. I'm on a panel, dammit! You liberals stop making fun of the Christians this instant and by the time he gets to "I see Chuck Colson deeply involved in Sudan," everyone's on the floor in hysterics. But not for the right reasons. Not the right reasons at all.
Thesis: Liberals should pretend that evangelicals don't hate the gays, join forces with them to pay bipartisan lip service to poor people.
Secret affection and a little advice for Bob Herbert, after the jump.
You know what? I like Bob Herbert. There. Does that make me uncool or something? Nothing too flashy about him, no gimmicks, no put-on personality, he's just like giving it to us straight. He's unassuming, even — where Krugman might come in with guns blazing, throwing out statistics and flashing his economics badge, Herbert starts denunciations with phrases like "Either I'm missing something, or..."
The only problem is that it reads like an "expert" post on the Huffington blog. Don't you get it, Bob? Your readers are clearly so desperate for anything easy to process and unimportant that Matt Miller is topping the Most Emailed list! There's a vacuum in our lives — a big, Dowd-shaped vacuum that Times-readers are attempting to fill any way they can. There's only so many female orgasm stories you can print, after all. And we're not asking much, Bob — just a casual aside about last night's Lost, a cheap joke about Dick Cheney, and a little desperate glibness.
Thesis (with suggested parenthetical Dowdisms): Look, we're torturing people ("worse than Bo Bice's off-key rendition of 'Sweet Home Alabama'"). It's hypocritical ("Paging Mr. Lucas — Dick Cheney, the real-life Sith lord, doesn't think in complete absolutes"). We should stop ("Or we'll all end up "Lost").
