Columbia Journalism Review's Megan Garber recently talked to Times' liberal columnist and former editorial page editor Gail Collins [1], whoconfirmed conservative suspicions about the hiring of Weekly Standard editor David Brooks as a columnist: He was a "conservative" acceptable to the left, one you could invite to dinner parties. 
And David Brooks - David and [Nicholas Kristof] I hired when I was editor; that was my major contribution to the editorial page, I think - David just has so many interests. He is just so smart, and he's also, for our purposes, the closest thing you can have to a Republican who liberal Democrats really love - or at least feel that if they had dinner with him, he would understand their point of view.
A month before the election Brooks called Gov. Sarah Palin a "fatal [2] cancer [2]" on the Republican party, as Tim Graham recounted at NewsBusters.Brooks also lauded Barack Obama recounting a conversation he had with Obama about the intellectual Reinhold Niebuhr: "I was dazzled, I felt the tingle up my knee as Chris Matthews would say."