Late last year I offered a gripe about the magazine The Week. It read in part:

I generally like the magazine. But it has a very annoying bullpen of columnists. This is not to say all the columnists are annoying, merely the line-up. Bob Shrum is the worst of the bunch — by far. He is relentlessly hackish. Nearly every column is a tendentious spin job (See today’s, for example), that is better suited as a posting at the DNC if not the Democratic Underground. Democrats are always right, facts be damned. Republicans are always stupid and/or evil, facts be damned.
They often seem to pair Shrum with David Frum. The problem is that, whatever your disagreements with David may be, he is no right-wing version of Bob Shrum. Not even close. David is an unpredictable pundit. Of late, he has made it his project to go after the GOP and the conservative base of the party. Often — quite often — his arguments score more legitimate points against the Right than Shrum’s ever could.
What bothers me is that this strikes me as a classic example of the elite liberal media’s idea of “balance.” PBS’s Newshour is another such example: One unapologetic lefty — say, Mark Shields — versus something of an apologetic righty, say David Gergen or David Brooks. The thinking seems to be: Highly partisan liberals are insightful and so are conservatives who think the highly partisan liberals have a point.

This popped into my head when I read thew news that Kathleen Parker will be joining Elliot Spitzer as the host of a new CNN show. When I heard the news that Spitzer was getting a job at CNN at all, I sighed and assumed it was because he and Jeff Toobin hang out at the same clubs.

Now, I like Kathleen. She’s smart, she’s very nice. I have very strong and quite negative opinions about how she has shot to prominence in recent years by bee-bopping and scatting all over conservatives. (Oh, those dreadful emails from Palin supporters!) But I don’t really hold that against her. She’s a lovely writer and I’m sure she’s sincere. It just annoys me that liberal editors and producers are eternally overimpressed with such stuff.

Which brings us back to her new show with Spitzer. I have no doubt that Spitzer will start by trying to fix his image as client number 9 and his well-earned reputation for being a jerk of galactic proportions. But I predict that as we get closer to the midterm elections (how can anybody predict any CNN show will last until 2012?), Spitzer will return to type and become a whip-smart, wildly partisan, lawyerly jerk. No doubt Parker will be the more attractive and likable. But she will also play the role of a more charming David Gergen (more charming than Gergen?!? I know it sounds impossible) who, with a smile and a heavy heart ends up apologizing for conservatives more than defending them.