The New York Times Op-Ed page is on life support.

On January 5, David Brooks wrote a column, “The neocon cabal and other fantasies,” which drew a lot of attention because Brooks strongly implied that liberal opponents of neoconservative philosophies are anti-Semitic, an imputation he later described as a joke, and part of his “learning curve” as a Times columnist.

Of more serious import, to my mind, is what Brooks had to say about the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), which received no attention at all from Times public editor Daniel Okrent.

The full-mooners fixated on a think tank called the Project for the New American Century, which has a staff of five and issues memos on foreign policy. To hear these people describe it, PNAC is sort of a Yiddish Trilateral Commission, the nexus of the sprawling neocon tentacles.

We’d sit around the [Weekly Standard] magazine guffawing at the ludicrous stories that kept sprouting, but belief in shadowy neocon influence has now hardened into common knowledge. Wesley Clark, among others, cannot go a week without bringing it up.

In truth, the people labeled neocons (con is short for “conservative” and neo is short for “Jewish”) travel in widely different circles and don’t actually have much contact with one another. The ones outside government have almost no contact with President George W. Bush. There have been hundreds of references, for example, to Richard Perle’s insidious power over administration policy, but I’ve been told by senior administration officials that he has had no significant meetings with Bush or Cheney since they assumed office. If he’s shaping their decisions, he must be microwaving his ideas into their fillings.

Along with the repetitive imputations of anti-Semitism, Brooks flat out lied about PNAC’s influence within the Bush administration. Brooks is a former contributing editor at The Weekly Standard, the managing editor of which, William Kristol, is a PNAC co-founder. Brooks has to know that, and he has also to be aware of the signatories to PNAC’s statement of principles.

Those signatories iinclude Elliott Abrams, a sitting member of the National Security Council; Jeb Bush, the brother of the sitting US president; Dick Cheney, the sitting vice-president of the US; Zalmay Khalilzad, the presidential envoy and soon to be US ambassador to Afghanistan; Lewis Libby, currently vice-president Cheney’s advisor on security matters; sitting secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld; Paula Dobriansky, the sitting Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs; and, Paul Wolfowitz, the sitting deputy secretary of defense, along with a host of other luminaries.

Perhaps Brooks honestly believes that an organization boasting seven senior administration officials and the president’s brother as supporters has no influence on the administration. If so, his learning curve is considerably steeper than would seem appropriate for a high school newspaper editorialist, let alone a New York Times columnist. The truth is he’s simply a liar, and a progressively more bold one at that.

Plenty of newspapers seem at ease with demanding some semblance of accuracy from even their most partisan columnists, but, depressingly, the Times seems uninterested in or incapable of bringing Brooks to heel. Between his penchant for distortion and Dowd’s for trivializing the vital, the Times is well on its way to boasting the worst editorial page of any major newspaper; at this point they’re neck and neck with the Washington Post.