If Obama Had Done What Trump Just Did on Iran, He’d Be Crucified

But the pivotal moment, or actually moments, in her career came before that. The first was her hiring, in April 2017, by The New York Times. The second was her famous departure from that same paper, which she cynically and shamelessly used to get a bevy of wealthy, angry, rich men to stake her to the Free Press. You know that saying about how sometimes liberals are so open-minded that their brains start falling out their ears? Weiss’s ascent provides a lesson in how liberal institutions can sometimes place such value on proving that they’re open-minded that other liberal values, like standing for actual liberal things in the world, get tossed aside.

On April 12, 2017, as the nation’s most important newspaper was settling into the first Trump era, the honchos of the Times made an announcement. They were hiring Bret Stephens away from The Wall Street Journal. Stephens was, of course, conservative in outlook. He made for the third conservative at the generally liberal op-ed page, after longtimer David Brooks and the comparatively youthful Ross Douthat.

Well … OK, then. Brooks had been at the paper since the 1990s; Douthat since 2009. One could maybe, possibly justify adding a third after Trump’s election, to “understand” the conservative mind and the sentiment apparently flowing across this great land (even though that sentiment won 2.8 million fewer votes than liberal sentiment, but never mind that). Mind you, though, that it sure isn’t as if The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Times and the New York Post started making an effort to understand the liberal mind after Barack Obama won. The Journal has one nonconservative columnist, William Galston of the Brookings Institution, who is a friend of mine and can fairly be described as liberal-centrist. The Washington Times and the New York Post, from what I can see, have zero.