The American Spectator

Media Matters

The Unboring Pundit

By Jeremy Lott on 11.15.06 @ 12:07AM

(Page 2 of 2)

* He proposed "no-sluts-allowed" Halloween parties to correct the "market failure" of "Slutoween."

* He weighed into the Borat controversy by reminding readers that the comedian's supposedly racist, sexist, misogynist Middle American marks had behaved decently toward a weird foreigner.

Not everybody liked Tierney's column. A few installments led to bags of hate mail from the op-ed page's core group of left-of-center readers, and some Republicans groused that he wasn't a partisan.

Earlier this year, the New Republic published an essay by Noam Scheiber arguing that Tierney was "boring," because he didn't write about the sort of things the author wanted him to write about -- health care and Iraq -- and because he was skeptical of most projects that government undertakes.

The criticism was not entirely accurate. Tierney wrote a number of columns about Iraq and he actually reported from the country before he came to the op-ed page. He brought to light the high incidence of cousin marriage in Iraq and the fact that intense loyalties to kith and clan would make forming a government difficult.

But leave Iraq aside for a moment. Scheiber's complaint was that Tierney didn't write on the subjects that the New Republic would like to talk about and he has a different set of ideas than most of the folks in the press. After consulting several dictionaries about this, I'm still having a hard time understanding how that makes Tierney the boring one.

Jeremy Lott is the Warren T. Brookes Journalism Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and author of In Defense of Hypocrisy.

Letter to the Editor

topics:
Health Care, Television, Earmarks, Social Security, Books, Law, Iraq, Libertarianism