In The New Republic, Gabriel Sherman has an interesting piece on the in-house grousing at the NYT about Bill Kristol's appointment right-wing mediocrity issuing weekly boilerplate on a subpar op-ed page:

...behind much of the internal distaste for Kristol lies the paper's complicated relationship with the Iraq war. In an August 2002 column in The Weekly Standard, as the Bush administration began marshaling its case for war, Kristol labeled the Times a member of the "Axis of Appeasement," and a piece in his magazine commented that the paper's bias against the war "colors . . . practically every news story on the subject."

According to a former Times staffer, criticism from Kristol and other conservatives weighed heavily on the Times' pre-war coverage, which turned more hawkish under then-executive editor Howell Raines and Washington bureau chief Jill Abramson.

 

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I ranted to a "60 Minutes" producer that the campaign coverage was shallow, trivial, preoccupied with the evanescent ups and the electrifying downs, the insiders' moods, the rumors and gaffes, and incurious about the candidates' records, and the weight or weightlessness of their arguments, the truth and untruth of their claims, and seemingly indifferent to the stakes of the most consequential election on earth. "I know, I know," he said. "We talk constantly about how to do it better next time."

That was in 1980.

Seven presidentiads later, the horse race is still in play, the handicappers thrive however shoddy their records (talk about people who don't have to put their money where their mouths are!), and still more blowhards blow harder, and mainline adrenaline, and fall in and out of love like middle-schoolers, and extapolate to the moon from the most recent primaries, and trot out their new improved story lines, and pretend that they have the slightest idea what's going to happen next; and we become connoisseurs of our own bamboozlement.

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