You probably heard that The New York Times has decided to diversify the voices on its editorial page by adding Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol as a columnist.

This has caused no end of consternation inside the liberal bubble because Kristol's hiring raises the number of conservative voices on that page to 1 1/2 -- the half being David Brooks. The balance of the op-ed page has now swung precipitously rightward because, apparently, Roger Cohen, Gail Collins, Maureen Dowd, Thomas Friedman, Bob Herbert, Nicholas Kristof, Paul Krugman and Frank Rich cannot hope to out-influence Kristol and Brooks.

The most hilarious complaint that I've read is this column over at Radar Online by Charles Kaiser.

Many Times readers consider Kristol a third-rate neocon apparatchik, a stark symbol of the steep decline of the Washington culture—and arguably the most consistently mean-spirited and wrong-headed pundit of our time (examples below).

Kaiser must not read Paul Krugman. Seriously, by now Krugman has predicted 30 of the last seven recessions and he has famously stated that historians will consider the Enron collapse a much bigger story than the terrorist attacks of 9/11 that killed nearly 3,000 people.

There's a place in newspapers, magazines and the Internet for so-called niche media. However, if the Times wants to continue to be more than a larger version of the World Socialist Party newspaper, then it has a duty to readers to present some conservative views on its editorial pages. The cries of despair coming from all the leftists betrays a tendency towards authoritarianism and intolerance that they would march against if the politics were reversed.

For the record: I think The Wall Street Journal's failure to replace liberal columnist Al Hunt with some other liberal columnist is a black mark against that paper too.