Hooray! The Times found their new token conservative! Taking over for Bill Kristol: Mr. Ross Douthat.

Douthat is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he blogs. He is one of those "reasonable" "centrist" conservatives, like David Brooks except not so much of an asshole. Yes, he thinks fertilized eggs are human beings, but he'll argue it politely and he'll readily acknowledge reality and even use it as a jumping-off point for his arguments!

Also he'll hopefully devote more than ten fucking minutes to each column he writes, unlike Mr. Kristol.

The Times poached Douthat from The Atlantic, where is one of their pretty good stable of bloggers. Of course they picked the conservative one, because the Times needs to replace a conservative with a conservative, because conservative David Brooks is not enough pretend "balance" on their op-ed page, and they picked a good conservative but it's still appalling affirmative action hiring, where ideology trumped whether they person is interesting and relevant and maybe even new and exciting.

Douthat will be forced to blog for a while before his columns start showing up on Monday's, to balance out raving leftist loon Paul Krugman.