THIS WEEK IN PANEL BALANCE. Classic Sunday chat show roundtable on ABC's "This Week" yesterday: George Will, Reuel Marc Gerecht, Fareed Zakaria, and Robin Wright. For those keeping score, that's a conservative, a neoconservative, a moderate conservative, and a straight news reporter. The subject was the fiasco of American strategy in the Middle East, however, and an elite consensus of outrage and despair on that subject is clearly beginning to emerge such that the ideological slant of the team didn't prevent the discussion from being, on the whole, fairly cogent and sober-minded. (Another way of putting this is that, particularly regarding Iraq, several of the panelists made the major analytical points that liberals have been expressing for a few years now, which can be taken as a real sign of progress given that it's apparently simply too much to expect that liberals themselves will ever regularly appear on such panels.) Bush has turned out to be a uniter after all.
--Sam Rosenfeld