As we reported earlier, New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus has been tapped to helm the paper's Week in Review section—it's the equivalent of a right-turn signal at a paper that pretty consistently cruises in the left lane.

Tanenhaus's work as a biographer of conservative icons Whittaker Chambers and William F. Buckley (that book is forthcoming) has made him enough of an eminence gris in right-wing circles to merit an invitation to speak last month at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI)—the current employer of White House cast-offs Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, and David Frum.

There's no doubt where Tanenhaus' politics lay. At the AEI speech, he repeatedly referred to conservatives as "we," expressed puzzlement that "much of conservative ideology is not widely popular," heaped praise on Gen. Irving Kristol, and ended with a prescription for "a conservatism that can last another generation."

Tanenhaus' ability to keep his partisan beliefs out of the Book Review, which he has run since 2004, has been frequently called into question, most recently by Jim Sleeper in the Nation. Since taking over, Sleeper wrote, "Tanenhaus published a steady stream of put-downs of dissenters" and declined to even assign space for a review of Al Gore's The Assault on Reason. "As Iraq fell apart," Sleeper continued, "the Book Review became a neoconservative damage-control gazette."

As for why the Times would appoint someone with such a firm, public, and—at least insofar as the war in Iraq is concerned—wrong political point of view to edit a section that's nominally devoted to news analysis, neither Tanenhaus nor a Times spokesperson responded to requests for comment.

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