I just keep missing those memos. First there was the one about the secular liberal candidates I should have supported, and now it turns out that I missed the one telling me that, as a liberal blogger, I was supposed to respond to anything John Tierney writs with derision. Tierney has his last column in The New York Times today, and I have never seen so much reaction to anything he has written as today.
The gist of his column is that voters supported gridlock and “gave Congress a Seinfeld mandate to do nothing.” He is overly harsh on the Democrats for saying they “offered no bold new ideas, and they were rewarded with victory. Voters would like them to mop up the messes made by Republicans, but that’s it. Find a way out of Iraq, and then avoid any more excellent adventures dreamed up by neoconservatives.” While not entirely true considering the support for Democratic ideas in polls, the fact does remain that Democrats did concentrate their campaign on being the non-Republicans as opposed to their own agenda. A split government does have its advantages in providing checks and balances and forcing government to limit actions to those which have a bipartisan consensus.
I could certainly find specifics to argue with here and in Tierney’s other columns. The American Prospect gives one such example. The Carpetbagger Report notes how tediously predictable it is when every problem comes down to blaming the government. Despite disagreeing with Tierney on some points, my feeling is closer to that of Cafe Hayek which finds Tierney leaving to be a gray day as opposed to considering it a bright day as at The News Blog. In the past I have found reason to quote Tierney when he criticized the war, Republican hypocrisy, the moral majority, and the drug war. While I understand where The Agitator is coming from, I am proud to say he is at least wrong with regards to this blog when looking at how the left viewed Tierney:
One of the more disappointing aspects of Tierney’s tenure is the left’s knee-jerk, red-blue reaction to his appointment, basically from day one. Judging solely by the way the lefty blogs reacted to the guy, you’d never know that he regularly criticized the Bush administration, that he attacked Rush Limbaugh’s hypocrisy on prescription painkiller abuse, and that there were in fact a number of issues where the left ought to have been interested in what he was reporting. Instead, he was immediately dismissed as “Saffire’s replacement,” a token conservative to be loathed and scorned with Brooks. Because that’s how it works. Everybody’s either on your side, or they’re the enemy.
The point of an op-ed page in a liberal newspaper is to have a variety of opinions presented. I join with The Agitator and others in hoping to see a diversity of viewpoints and would welcome another libertarian writer to replace Tierney.
The problem isn’t his politics, but the level of idiocy with which he presents them with.
His big ten year jihad was against New York’s rent control laws. No story on abuse, no story on how badly landlords treated tenents would change his mind.
All I care about is finding writers who make sense. Tierney never came close.
I only read him intermittently so I can’t comment much on his “level of idiocy.” Looking back at what i’ve quoted from him here there were columns which I did feel made sense, but I also note that I’ve quoted him far less than others such as Krugman and Dowd. Not living in New York the rent control laws aren’t a big issue to me and I haven’t read any columns on that. I could certainly see a libertarian taking a philosphical objection to rent control and frustratilng others by not considering anything else.
As long as you accept the idea of a variety of viewpoints, whether or not you like Tierney specifically isn’t of much consequence. I just hope liberal bloggers don’t see an all liberal op-ed page as desirable. Even though I disagree with much of what he writes, and find his knee jerk attacks on Democrats to be tedious, I even find things of interest from David Brooks.