In his Times column in Sunday Opinion, Michael Kinsley paid a nice compliment to the NYT op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd:

[She] proceeded to reinvent the political column as a comedy of manners and a running commentary on the psychopathologies of power. It is the first real innovation in this tired literary form since Walter Lippmann....Dowd is different, and better.

Emphasis mine. In the Washington Post version of the same column, Kinsley paid Dowd (who has a love-her or loathe-her relationship with readers) a far nicer—some might say supreme—compliment:

It is the first real innovation in this tired literary form since Walter Lippmann....But Dowd is different, and she is the most influential columnist of our time.

Since I presume that Kinsley feels pretty much the same about Dowd regardless of which coast he's addressing, until hearing otherwise I'll figure someone at the LAT edited for space. Stuff like this gets noticed these days.