Over at Politico, Roger Simon has written a fairly trollish bit of “analysis,” which leads off with what he calls a joke about how America would be better off if John Boehner and Ted Cruz drowned. It goes on with the usual clichéd drek about the shutdown being racist and so on. No doubt many liberals think it’s right on target. But that’s not what interests me. Simon’s column reminds me of a point I’ve been making for years. Most mainstream journalists roll their eyes at the idea the MSM is biased. It’s a tired argument, I know. But it’s simply remarkable that when supposedly objective reporters move on to the opinion column racket they reveal themselves as utterly conventional liberal Democrats. When any longtime New York Times reporter rewarded with a column at the Times or elsewhere — Nick Kristoff, Bill Keller, Maureen Dowd, Anthony Lewis, EJ Dionne et al. — rips off the mask it turns out that they were exactly as liberal as conservatives suspected. It’s like that Saturday Night Live skit where Obama takes off his Obama mask to reveal that he’s Barack Obama.

Just going by the law of averages, some of these reporters should turn out to be conservative or libertarian or at least ideologically heterodox. But it almost never happens. Indeed, when the Times needs to find a conservative columnist (Bill Safire, David Brooks, Ross Douthat) it always has to hire outside its own shop.