Clown returns to center ring

The New York Times has called in reinforcements for "a redesigned Op-Ed package that will be expanded to two pages in the Week in Review section, following the editorials."

Increasing the number of admitted opinion pages that I won't be reading in the Sunday Times by 50 percent is a bold stroke of...further self-aggrandizement? (I just this moment recalled, from at least 30 years ago, the father of an old girlfriend hoisting the entire Sunday Times onto his lap and referring to it, affectionately, as "this big pig".) But promoting that expansion by announcing the return of Frank Rich to that venue is to announce that the clown act that the Times opinion pages have become will be richer by one clown.

I'm sure that Rich has no need of my appreciation, or anyone else's, given the sublime appreciation he has for himself. But Executive Editor Bill Keller and Editorial Page Editor Gail Collins, no doubt on the instructions of Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., said this in a "note to the staff":

"At Arts & Leisure he developed his own brand of social criticism, in a column that combined intensive reporting, immersion in the popular culture and a unique gift for seeing connections between culture and public life."

Gee, is that what Frank has been doing? I thought that he had been muttering about conservatives while doing his best to reassure Times readers that their liberal conceits will always be carefully nurtured by the Times because, after all, who depends upon the nurturing of those conceits more than the Times itself. Good luck, Frank, but watch out for Maureen. She's a real criminal (first song). "It's a sad, sad world where a girl will break a boy just because she can."

(Thanks to the NRO Corner for the tip)