A One-Way Ratchet
By 
Call your agent!
This is a good roundup of the greatest hits of the latest addition to the NYT op-ed page, but I think we have to start with this:
I am not sorry Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the operational mastermind of 9/11, was waterboarded 183 times… I am sorry KSM remains alive nearly 12 years after his capture. He has been let off far too lightly. As for his waterboarding, it never would have happened if he had been truthful with his captors. It stopped as soon as he became cooperative. As far as I’m concerned, he waterboarded himself.
“If they hadn’t done, what I told them not to do, they’d still be a alive.” Plenty more where this came from.
So why did the NYT feel this was the voice it needed to add? Well:
The charge that Stephens is a “climate denialist” is “terribly unfair,” Bennet said. “There’s more than one kind of denial,” he continued. “And to pretend like the views of a thinker like Bret, and the millions of people who agree with him on a range of issues, should simply be ignored, that they’re outside the bounds of reasonable debate, is a really dangerous form of delusion.”
There, is, indeed, more than one form of denial.
First of all, it’s not really clear what void Stephens is filling at the Times unless support for torture and climitae denialism are views the editors really think need a hearing. Their relatively small stable of columnists already includes two genteel white male conservatives who don’t support Trump. What contribution is Stephens making here, exactly?
But, of course, there’s a bigger problem here, and Calderone and Bauman point out:
But as far as embracing views far to the left or right, the Times’ full-time opinion writers have never represented a particularly wide range. The paper has never had a Pat Buchanan or Steve Bannon, a strident right-wing populist arguing against free trade, immigration and U.S. intervention abroad. Nor has it played host to a regular columnist from the anti-war left in the vein of Michael Moore, or an anti-capitalist like Naomi Klein.
Amazing how this commitment to hearing a broad array of viewpoints can always justify hiring another standard-issue Republican white guy but can never justify hiring anyone to Paul Krugman’s left.