November 2, 2006

Unanswered Questions, Disturbing Thoughts

By Ronald Wieck
Bob Herbert was, in a bygone age, tough—minded yet passionate, a doggedly objective reporter who seemed to embody the best traits of those incorruptible newshounds of the silver screen. Once capable of making sharp distinctions, of offering his readers the occasional penetrating insight, he has undergone a dreadful mutation into the single most tiresome and predictable hack in the New York Times stable of tiresomely dreary and predictable hacks. Possibly the strain of operating within the confines of the paper's stultifying orthodoxy sapped his creativity and blighted his capacity for nuance, but the result is a sad one. The same column gets endlessly recycled, its theme relentlessly unvarying. Bush is always wrong and ordinary human error is inadequate to account for the blunders, the miscalculations, the outright failures. No, this singularly disastrous administration is animated by malevolence, innate and irremediable, unprecedented in American politics. Liberals gobble up...(Read Full Article)