Some journalists I like...

...are Jonathan Alter, David Brooks, Ron Brownstein, Christopher Buckley, Margaret Carlson, Tucker Carlson, Steve Chapman, Richard Cohen, Gail Collins, E. J. Dionne, Maureen Dowd, Charlie Gasparino, Georgie Anne Geyer, John Heilemann, Christopher Hitchens, Joe Klein, Lawrence Kudlow, Lawrence O'Donnell, Frank Rich, Roger Simon, John Stossel, and Andrew Sullivan.

I'm not crazy about Fred Barnes, Victor Davis Hanson, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Arianna Huffington, Charles Krauthammer, Jon Meacham, William McGurn, Peggy Noonan, or the entire editorial board of the Wall Street Journal.

I have little patience for opinion-makers that see the world through ideological blinders. The Wall Street Journal is particularly guilty of this. If reality doesn't fit their free-market economic or neoconservative foreign policy view of the world, then it's made to fit. I find this to be intellectually lazy and ultimately dishonest.

It's a common human impulse to try to make sense of an otherwise mysterious universe. We will all die knowing only a tiny part of it. The vast majority is unknowable. Most of us will not even understand ourselves, much less anyone or anything else. As a result, most people intuitively construct an ideological framework from which they try to impose order on things. It's comforting to feel like we have some control over our environment, if only intellectually. That's why its tempting to want to see the universe in terms of black and white, but it seems more and more to me that reality is in shades of gray.

I'm still on the fence on Tom Friedman, Bob Herbert, Morton Kondracke, Bill Kristol, Paul Krugman, and George Will.

One of my favorite Web sites is RealClearPolitics.com. And while I'm on the subject, check out thedailybeast.com, Tina Brown's new site. Everything she touches turns to gold.