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Locke may not be the best of writers and the headline is too dramatic, but he does score a direct hit so far as Gigot and the Journal's status are concerned. The paper's heyday was the 80's and they did much good work for good causes then. But they've gotten stale and trapped since then, and Gigot won't help them, since he's part of the problem -- the Journal's atmosphere.

The deeper problem may be the inevitable dominance in a business paper of economic ways of looking at the world over political or cultural ones, and the prevalence of the "bottom line" over other concerns. Or it may be the enthusiastic desire to exceed all boundaries, limits and ties, including citizenship in any particular country. These tendencies weren't so apparent during the Cold War years -- or more accurately, they were apparent, but we ignored them, because the Journal was always more right than wrong in those days.