on the right of the op-ed page...

As long as David Brooks stays away from popular culture his column is always worth a quick look.

There was the time last November when Brooks wrote a whole column about how indie rock is destroying America, based not on his own observations, but basically from an article in the New Yorker (!) by their in-house pompous pop music dork Sasha Frere-Jones. (Who exhausts his intellectual talents on such weighty subjects as calling Stephen Merrit of the Magnetic Fields a racist because he doesn't list music by black artists among his favorites.)

In anycase, Brooks has a great column today about the scope of the infrastructure package and the need for new thinking on the whole project. This is the kind of practical, macro thinking that lends credence to Obama's whole centrist "just do what works" philosophy.

Meanwhile Bill Kristol is setting new standards of intellectual laziness and smarmy triangulation by writing a whole column about how, gee, government isn't all bad. You conservatives who just harp on government all the time are such sticks-in-the-mud! Actually, I'm sorry I put that link there. This guy doesn't need any more attention.