When he’s not engaged in the pop-sociological project of chronicling the tastes and habits of the bourgeois bohemian class to which he desperately wants to belong, the conservative David Brooks, for example, displays a keen interest in—if not a deep knowledge of—world affairs, and has recently been spotted on the Lehrer News Hour offering his lively opinions on the situation in Iraq. And though the liberal Katha Pollitt will sometimes weigh in on the situation of women in Afghanistan, it’s clear that her orientation is basically local: as a feminist—and thus as the spokesperson of a narrow special interest group—Pollitt’s interests and concerns are largely confined to those 140 million or so women who inhabit her own country. But by and large [reiterate first two paragraphs…]

One wonders whether the same piece- if it had been written by a conservative writer- would have been published despite its flaws, or whether Totten was given a free pass because he claims to be a liberal.