In his "Happy Warrior" backpage column in the dead tree edition of National Review this past week (subscription required to read online), Mark Steyn wrote:

Remember when Frank Rich was drama critic of the New York Times? Feared as “the Butcher of Broadway,” he could close a show on opening night. He did it to a musical called Dance a Little Closer, set on the eve of World War III and written by Charles Strouse, composer of Annie, and Alan Jay Lerner, lyricist of My Fair Lady. But what did they know? At the first-night party, fax copies of Rich’s review were passed around, and the producers threw in the towel while the first canapés were still going round. Alan told me he spent the next 72 hours throwing up.

I had lunch with Mary Martin back then and she told me she’d just been sent a new play by a mutual friend. “What do you think of it?” I asked.

“It doesn’t really matter what I think of it, does it?” she said. “I should just send it straight to Frank Rich and see whether he thinks I should do it.” Some buddy of hers had just been panned in the Times that morning and Mary was devastated. “Oh, plop!” she said, which was her preferred choice of swear word and always sounded to me far more vivid and obscene than any of the ones the gangsta rappers use.

Well, the Times arts pages aren’t what they were, but the Frank Rich approach seems to have been transferred to the national-security and foreign-policy departments. We may be in a real world war, but the president and the attorney general are in the same situation Charles Strouse and Alan Jay Lerner were when writing about their fictional world war. They can labor away for months, fine-tune this, ditch that, re-tweak the other. But what do they know? In the end, before you go to all that trouble, you might as well mail the script to Bill Keller and ask him what he thinks. Because if he doesn’t like it, he’ll give you a pan and close down the show.

Update: It seemed like such a polite young newspaper at first. Yet all the signs of delinquency were already on the horizon, if one looked carefully enough.