It's Sunday Morning - Time for the NY Times Editorial Page

[This post's title links to today's edition]

Decades ago, when I was a college freshman, the daily issue of the New York Times was required reading. A requirement I tended to overlook, preferring to spend my time pouring over the sports page of the Boston Globe for the latest articles about the Red Sox and the Celtics. When I married a devoted reader of the Times, I would grab the crossword puzzle and leave the rest to him. I relied upon televised news broadcasts for information on current events. Post 9/11 I became addicted to NPR during long solitary road trips to visit my first grandchild and CNN when television was available.

My addiction to NPR endured. But the television 24-hour news cycle devolved into obsessive coverage of notoriety and endless analysis of politicians' sound bytes. Then the day arrived when I got DSL on my home computer and discovered Google. And lo and behold, decades after leaving the growing pile of New York Times unread on my bedroom chair, I began to read the op ed pages of the "grey lady".

Last Sunday my disappointment at Maureen Dowd's absence from the page was mitigated by a wonderful piece by Thomas Friedman. Today Dowd is back, her acerbic, incisive style turned toward the all-too-slow dismantling of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," and John McCain's mystifying opposition to ending this abomination.

Next I turned to a Frank Rich piece about Obama's suffering from "Stockholm Syndrome." Rich brought a creative approach in his superbly-written lament about the disappearance of the dynamic progressive candidate into a president of empty words and lackluster leadership.

Finally I turned to Thomas Friedman's analysis of Wikileaks' release of classified U. S. documents and how they illustrate the decline of U. S. leverage on the global stage. Any newspaper that offers such a magnificent variety of contributors is worth a little time. It may not make me feel better about the world, but it makes me exercise my brain cells and increases my understanding of the challenges we face.

Can folks rely on the New York Times as their only news source? Certainly not. But it is a damn good place to visit on Sunday morning.