About a year ago, the New York Times hired John Tierney for its op-ed page, one of the most coveted jobs in opinion journalism. Tierney, a proud libertarian, was going to have the freedom to skewer everyone. “He thinks outside the box, has a very distinct worldview, and I think he’ll be a lot of fun,” editorial page editor Gail Collins told the WaPo after Tierney came on board.
Today, however, Tierney announced that he is giving up his post.
This is my last column on the Op-Ed page. I’ve enjoyed the past couple of years in Washington, but one election cycle is enough. […]
I hate to abandon my libertarian comrades here fighting in the belly of the beast, but this is the right moment to leave. After six years of libertarians reluctantly electing Republicans as the lesser of two evils, we’ve finally had enough. We’ve voted out big-government conservatism, and the result is the happy state of gridlock. For now, our work is done.
In other words, Tierney effectively blamed government for his resignation. How fitting — he’s devoted pretty much every column for a year to blaming government for one problem or another, so it stands to reason that he’ll go out on the same note.
My beef with Tierney has never really been entirely ideological — he’s a libertarian, which makes him half-right in my book — it’s been his obviousness. He was so proud of his ideology that he spent practically every column, twice a week for a year, reminding us how great libertarianism is.
After a while, it became easy to just skip his column, knowing that it was pretty much the same as the last one, and the same points would be repeated in the next one.
Way back in March, TNR’s Noam Scheiber described how Tierney had become “utterly predictable.”
Already, he has tallied seven columns lamenting the war on drugs, five bashing big government energy plans, and four more promoting vouchers. Other columns have savaged Amtrak and federalized airport security. No government initiative, however marginal, is safe from Tierney’s withering gaze. (Here I submit to you all four Tierney columns about privatizing space exploration.) And so, while it can take years for the punishing, twice-weekly schedule to render most Times columnists unreadable, Tierney has managed the feat in a matter of months.
One of Tierney’s most tedious stretches came just after Hurricane Katrina. Tierney’s first Katrina column blamed government flood insurance for undermining people’s incentives to protect themselves, never mind that the prospect of drowning in a toxic goulash should have been incentive enough. A second column bemoaned the feds’ dubious “one-size-fits-all strategy” for dealing with hurricanes, as though fema had been forced to manufacture evacuation plans the way the Soviets manufactured Volgas. Subsequent columns rightly praised the performance of corporations like Wal-Mart during the crisis, but then proposed outsourcing fema’s functions to said corporations. Finally, in his sixth Katrina column in seven opportunities, titled “losing that new deal religion,” Tierney got right down to it: He had lost faith in government.
That was in March, but the problem persisted. Recent columns have been devoted to explaining why government shouldn’t worry about fish populations, shouldn’t take drastic measures to curtail global warming, shouldn’t have a congressional page program, and shouldn’t regulate nutrition. Notice a pattern here?
Of course, given that it’s the New York Times and its legendary op-ed page, the opening will set off a fresh round of speculation about Tierney’s replacement. Gail Collins, if you’re reading, my door is always open to you….