He Disappeared and No One Noticed

Paul mentioning Tom Friedman today reminded me that there’s a whole raft of Times columnists running out the clock and no one has noticed anything they’ve written in the last decade. Friedman is definitely one of them. No one even mentions him anymore. Maybe powerful old people still read him, but he seems so much less relevant these days than he did when cheerleading the Iraq War, which started 23 years ago now, the difference between the end of World War II and the Tet Offensive.

Speaking of which, I had totally forgotten to mention that David Brooks left the Times. And really, who cares! What a clown. But it’s worth noting how much of the early blogosphere was people responding to his inane bullshit, his immeasurable self-regard, his constant shilling for bad policies, the complete lack of consequences for being totally wrong about everything. Now he’s gone and no one even noticed. He can go back to teaching his courses on humility and lecturing the world on morals when he leaves his wife for his assistant, like a good moral conservative with strong family values.

Maybe the same thing can happen to Maureen Dowd someday.