In which The Gay Recluse scores selected opinion pieces in The Times.

Paul Krugman/Betting the Bank

The Short Version: Economically, we’re fucked.

In his words: “I’m more concerned that despite the extraordinary scale of Mr. Bernanke’s action — to my knowledge, no advanced-country’s central bank has ever exposed itself to this much market risk — the Fed still won’t manage to get a grip on the economy.”

Score: D+ (Depressing)
This column is basically a repeat of Krugman’s last column — just with $200 billion more being offered up by the Fed — so even though the prospect of “one of history’s great financial crises” is indeed scary, we feel kind of dumb reading it. Krugman has already described the problem; it’s time to move on to the anticipated effects.

David Brooks/The Rank-Link Imbalance

The Short Version: _____ is just one of many.

In his words: “If they were used to limits in public life, maybe it would be easier to accept the everydayness of middle-aged passion. But, of course, they are not.”

The Score: B (Benign)
When we first saw the title of this article, we thought it might be about the injustice of Technorati, which at least in our case didn’t count the Gawker linkage (among others) in improving our rank. But actually it’s about _____, and we must give credit to Brooks for writing an entire column about him without mentioning his name. This is another column in which we read Brooks and basically admire his insight and prose enough to consider it a minor tragedy that he’s aligned himself with many of the biggest assholes on the right; e.g., ______, who we have to believe is hardly better than _____ in all of the respects Brooks describes.