Ramesh – I agree with you on Safire. Too often he brags that he’s taking a contrarian position because it is contrarian. This is not only profoundly juvenile it is staggeringly egocentric — “the whole world says X, so I will say not X solely because I am Bill Safire not because I have a good reason.” He calls himself a “libertarian conservative,” it seems, whenever he wants to cloak the fact he’s just a moderate Republican with some vestige of principle. When faced with the choice of making a hard hitting observation or a useless pun, he will more times than not opt for the pun.

As for the Times not having a conservative, I always thought Andrew Sullivan would have been the obvious choice for the Times. He’s conservative, but he’s also gay which seems to be more important to the Times. He’s Catholic, and hence a threefer, but he disagrees with the Church on homosexuality and he defends his pro-life position with being anti-death penalty.

Of course the only problem is that they hate each other.