You would think that being selected as a New York Times columnist would spur you to churn out some of the highest-quality prose you could muster. It was surprising, then, when Bill Kristol, founder of the Weekly Standard and scion of the right-wing punditocracy, blessed the Gray Lady’s Op-Ed pages with possibly the worst writing it’d ever seen. Kristol, no stranger to the argumentative essay or the persuasive piece, regularly gave his name to columns that were shoddily structured, shabbily researched and just plain boring; it seemed at times as if the veteran polemicist were doing little more than filtering propaganda into the backside of the front section.

I feel that anguished sense of desolation that inevitably accompanies news that an aging relative is on her deathbed.

Old, infirm and hopelessly behind the times, the gray lady’s moment has arrived. The stale scent of death has already set in. And yet, I cannot help but resent the loss of so rich a life. Overcome with chagrin, I throw up my arms and plead frantically to the heavens. I dream of miracles.

In my case, the doctor’s prognosis is four months. four months! I should lie down and weep.

You should too.

I had a couple of other column ideas for this week, but I came across a column in Friday’s Yale Daily News by a Yale senior named Elizabeth Moore (entitled “You made a big mistake, America”), which, in the context of the mostly feel-good nature of American politics last week, was too astonishing to ignore.

It’s not that she doesn’t have the right to say and believe what she wants; she certainly does. It’s just that if what she says is completely ridiculous, we all (Democrats and Republicans) have the right to point and laugh at it.

I’m no political columnist, but below are excerpts of the column with some comments interjected.

“Thank you, America, for making the biggest mistake of your life.”

Journalists make mistakes sometimes. Especially college journalists. It’s for that reason that newspapers generally run corrections — and The Sun certainly ran its fair share when I was the managing editor.

But, sometimes a correction really just isn’t good enough. And it’s at those times that we, as consumers of the news, have to hope that the news organization in question learns its lesson and moves forward in a more responsible and intelligent manner.

For WVBR, Wednesday Oct. 8 was one of those times.

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If you go to the WVBR website, go to the “News/Sports” drop down menu, and click on “WVBR NewsLine” you’ll be presented with a couple of recent stories and a list of older stories at the bottom of the page.

I have been dreading, since deciding to quit grad school to pursue journalism, the ego-crushing task of finding a job — the unreturned calls and emails, submitted résumés lost to the abyss of corporate career sites and the self-doubt and desperation that come with rejection. Given the economy, perhaps now was not the best time to make this decision, but one of my personal traits is a penchant for deciding on a course of action with only minimal consideration of its feasibility. Perhaps this (naïve but motivating) faith in my ability to accomplish things is what made looking for jobs so discouraging the first time I did so.

Hear about Sun Senior Editor Molly OToole's ride with the CUPD and what else The Sun is doing with its new investigative report unit.