For years, the New York Times’s Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich have played the same journalistic card trick:  Take the hot button issue of the week, cross it with the latest pop culture reference and – voila! – Times readers are treated to columns that give the appearance of having some kind of deep-seated cultural insight.

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The problem, however, is that their “insights” won’t stand up to any kind of serious analysis, and quickly reveal themselves to be shallow, glib, sophomoric, and perhaps worst of all, predictable.

(Several weeks ago, for example, Rich struggled to make the claim that the George Clooney film Up in the Air is the Grapes of Wrath for our times – which sounds pretty good, until one thinks about it for a moment:  The film is about a guy who travels the country racking up frequent flier miles as he fires people; Steinbeck’s masterpiece is about the struggles of the Joads as they’ve lost their farm and their livelihoods, and set out for California, penniless.  But such is what passes for insight at the Times – where the upper westsider who’s been forced to fire a maid is seen as the tragic victim in need of sympathy, rather than the out-of-work maid.)

The former “Butcher of Broadway”

In any case, this week’s award for the vapid pop cultural reference masquerading as insight goes to Ms. Dowd, for her New Years’ eve interview with Janet Napolitano, wherein she posed the following Big Question, which manages to be both frightfully naïve, yet ever so trendy at the same time:

Why is it so hard for those charged with keeping us safe to be as imaginative and innovative as filmmakers like James Cameron?

Aw, shucks.  When did The New York Times start sounding like Tiger Beat magazine?