Glenn Reynolds at "InstaPundit" noticed how bad Dowd was also.
.......what is up with Maureen Dowd? This column starts out being about George Bush's dieting, veers through politics and war, and winds up with lesbian-chic. What was it about? Beats me. Stephen Green takes his best shot at figuring it out, but although the final line of his analysis almost justifies Dowd's column, he's confused, too.
Dowd doesn't have an academic day job, like Krugman, but that may actually make things worse. Her universe seems rather narrow, and she doesn't even have a steady stream of students to expose her to new ideas. And if you read the Times oped page regularly, as fewer and fewer people seem to do these days, you'll notice a distinct staleness about many of the columnists. The Times oped page needs turnover -- either permanent, or temporary, with columnists sent off to do actual reporting, or something, for six months or a year while they regain their edge. But who would fill the gaps?
What I'd really like is for the Times to broaden its ideological range and hire writers like Megan McArdle, Mark Steyn, Tim Blair, or James Lileks. But I know better than to expect the Times to hire any of these four. They're smart, funny, and their columns all come to a discernible point, but they're not really ideologically acceptable for the Times crowd.
Oxford blogger Josh Chafetz has been studying Dowd's work for quite some time, and even The Washingtonian has noticed. So maybe we should pay attention now that his fellow Oxford blogger David Adesnik has a Dowd-related suggestion for the NYT:
REPLACE DOWD WITH A GAY MAN: The NYT seems to have one columnist slot reserved for a sassy, good-looking writer with great fashion sense and a wicked sense of humor. So why not Dan Savage?
He's not just funny, he's a serious political writer willing to do investigative reporting.
Plus, Savage wouldn't throw off the political balance on the op-ed page because he's actually quite liberal. (Although he is willing to take the NYT to task for journalistic bias.)
Heck, Savage is already writing for the Times as a guest columnist. Maybe Adesnik is onto something ... are the Times editors trying him out?
Probably not. But it wouldn't be a bad idea.
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