Among my various regular household duties, sorting bottles, paper, metal, and other forms of refuse, as mandated by local recycling law, is irksome, especially because I suspect that all these form of garbage end up in the same dump. But of such daily chores, none is more bothersome than reading the editorials of the New York Times. It’s not so much that I disagree with them — which I almost always do — but the fact that they are almost always dead on the page. Apodictic, sententious, grim are three words that consistently come to mind; these editorial masterpieces are to reading as sawdust is to eating.

Now that the paper is locked in a competition with Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, either the Times will have to get rid of the sawdust or they will continue to lose this portion of the game to an editorial-page operation that is nothing but lively and full of high good humor. Already, the Times’s op-ed page — as opposed to the editorial page — seems to have gotten the message. How else are we to read the decision to give prime real estate — a weekly column — to Bill Kristol, a dreaded neoconservative, and the editor of the Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard?

That decision has provoked howls of outrage from free-thinking liberals who appear exceedingly anxious to avoid hearing the views of anyone with whom they might disagree. One of the more notable contributions to this choir of conformity is Clark Hoyt, the Times’s “public editor” or ombudsman. This past Sunday he wrote a column calling the decision to appoint Kristol a mistake. The headline was He May Be Unwelcome, but We’ll Survive. Hoyt’s is the kind of thinking that might ensure that the Times will not survive. Keep up the good work Hoyt!

I take a closer look at Hoyt’s argument today in Bill Kristol: Enemy of the People, over at realclearpolitics.