JVL, August 15:  “It’s going to be awesome when the media decides that the way to spin the uneasiness of the Team Perry and Team W camps is by painting George W. Bush as the thoughtful, sensible guy who just wasn’t comfortable with the brash, extremist Perry. You’ve never seen Strange New Respect like this!”

Maureen Dowd, August 17: “By the end of the day, it was a barroom brawl, with Karl Rove telling Fox News that it was not “presidential” to call the Fed chief, appointed by the second President Bush, a traitor. (When Team W. calls you a yahoo, you’re in trouble.)”

The New York Times publishes a lot of embarrassing stuff in its opinion sections these days. By which I do not mean “stuff I do not politically agree with”–I mean writing so lazy and/or foolish that both the authors and editors should be embarrassed by it.

But this giant piece by Drew Westin sets a new standard:

As a practicing psychologist with more than 25 years of experience, I will resist the temptation to diagnose at a distance, but as a scientist and strategic consultant I will venture some hypotheses.

He’s not just a practicing psychologist. He’s not just a strategic consultant. Drew Westin is a scientist!

That’s just a fact. Science.

Hmmmm. How do you open an NYT piece about X-Men and civil rights in a way that doesn’t make it sound like a paint-by-numbers exercise? That’s hard. I know–open with a reference to the box-office gross!

Last weekend, like seemingly half the country, I took my son to see “X-Men: First Class,” the latest, and best, big-screen incarnation of the popular comic book franchise.

The “seemingly” is the big giveaway as to how off-the-shelf this lede is–the idea being to assert that we’re reading this piece because X-Men: First Class became a runaway hit and not because, well, someone has a pre-conceived hobbyhorse that they want to ride. The problem is, X-Men: First Class didn’t get seen by anything like half the country. In fact, its box-office take was kind of disappointing. If you’re going to lede with a reference to X-Men’s BO take, then you should really be talking about how few people plunked down their $9 to see it. (That is, if you care at all about coherent writing that doesn’t look like pre-fab construction.)

So X-Men opened to $55M. That makes it the smallest opening for the entire X-Men franchise. How does it compare to other openings this season? Not well at all:

Hangover Part II: $103M

Pirates IV: $90M

Thor: $65M

Fast Five: $86M

That makes X-Men: First Class the least-seen of the summer tent-pole movies (on opening weekend) this year. But, you know, we wouldn’t want Ta-Nehisi to pull a muscle trying to figure out a lede for his X-Men piece. No, he has Big Ideas about race and the X-Men that no one else has ever thought of before. Just drop the “seemingly” into the opening graph and let him move on to the important stuff.

Hey, it’s not like he’s going to just quote his family members for half the piece.

Lane goes with the crotch chop and everything.

I know Friedman’s a joke to everyone except Davos attendees, but this is avert-your-eyes embarrassing.

In researching the fertility industry, I came across this old piece by Melanie Thernstrom in the New York Times Magazine. In it,Thernstrom details her long struggle with infertility–the medical regimes, the IVF routines, her attempts at adoption. Finally Thernstrom and her husband decide to employ an egg donor, secure two eggs, have them fertilized through IVF, and then implanted in two separate gestational carriers. It’s quite an ordeal, spanning years and costing at what the author hints at are astronomical sums. (You get the sense the the final tab is somewhere in the scores of thousands of dollars.)

Thernstrom’s journey results in two happy, healthy babies. Which is wonderful, of course.

Throughout her essay, Thernstrom expresses her unhappiness with people who do not both (1) fully approve of her expedition and (2) use all of the terminology that she, herself, prefers. For instance, “surrogate mothers” are “gestational carriers”; the children are “twiblings.” She seems particularly displeased with people who use the term “biological mother” in discussing her children. She insists that her babies have no “biological mother.” Parents can be finicky.

The kicker comes about three quarters of the way through the piece, when she details some unhappiness she with the improper reaction of her nanny.

Nothing wrong with that, of course. Lots of wonderful parents use wonderful nannies and surely there’s nothing wrong with farming out portions of child care.

But it does put the rest of the piece in a slightly different color.

Galley Friend K.K. sends the following note about story placement at NYT.com:

The Times has the winner of the Rose Bowl, just below the lede on ‘new clubs for gay teens in Utah.”

This isn’t meant as a complaint, mind you, just an observation at how well the New York Times understands its audience.

Every op-ed page publishes embarrassing stuff from time to time–it’s hard to fill that many inches, 365 days a year, without some mistakes.

Even so.

Don’t miss this dandy from the NYT’s Yoko Ono essay. Yoko manages to be self-important, sub-literate, and preposterous all at the same time. For instance:

“The most important gift we received from him was not words, but deeds.”

But those words were real doozies. Because “He believed in Truth, and had dared to speak up.”

So his words were really important. Or maybe, in the mouth of John Lennon, words actually were deeds.

And because of his word-deeds, “We all knew that he upset certain powerful people . . .”

Perhaps it was these powerful people who had John not murdered but–in Yoko’s word-deed–“assassinated.”

Also, John and Yoko made tea together once. With their cats.

Writing a regular op-ed column is hard. It’s there every week, waiting for you, unremitting. You can’t hide your bad stuff and even your best stuff disappears after 48 hours. More than any other kind of writing you have to cling to the dictum that they can’t all be home runs. (Though during his golden era, George Will had a slugging percentage of something like .863. He was ungodly.)

The only thing you can control completely is your effort. You shouldn’t mail it in. And if you are being lazy, you should at least make an effort to hide it.

Maureen Dowd has just written her second column in two months in which she basically gives the space over to one of her siblings.