Just this morning we were caught off guard, yet again, by our fickle friend History. We’d come down to our study at 4 a.m. There was History, rifling through our desk looking for, as it turned out, chocolates. “You know,” we said, “we’ve studied you all our life and never cease to be amazed at your impish streak — your ability to turn the tables on editorial writers, your confounded trickery.”

History cocked an eyebrow.

“What?” we demanded.

History dropped his chin and peered at us over his spectacles.

“What!?” we repeated.

Suddenly History scooted into the darkness of the stacks and was gone. So we tapped on our electrically-operated newspaper reader to discover what he’d been reading. It was opened to the New York Times’ latest editorial — a geshrai about how worrying it is that President Trump has forsaken the advice of his national security adviser, John Bolton.

“Trump’s Decision to Withdraw From Syria Is Alarming,” the headline said. “Just Ask His Advisers.” The editorial began with Mr. Bolton’s declaration three months ago of an expanded objective for American troops in Syria — not just defeating ISIS but making sure Iranian forces are out. It called Mr. Trump’s decision to “overrule Mr. Bolton” and the rest of his national security team “abrupt and dangerous.”

We couldn’t believe it. In 2005, the Times had greeted President George W. Bush’s decision to name Mr. Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations with a cataract of condescension. “If there’s a positive side to President Bush’s appointment of John Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations … ” it had said, “it’s that as long as Mr. Bolton is in New York, he will not be wreaking diplomatic havoc anywhere else.”

Now Mr. Bolton, never having changed his gloriously hawkish plummage, is national security adviser to the president, and the Times is treating him as the soul of sound foreign policy. Not only is Mr. Trump’s decision to overrule Mr. Bolton abrupt and dangerous, the Times reckons, but it’s “detached from any broader strategic context or any public rationale.”

The move, the Times says, has “sowed new uncertainty about America’s commitment to the Middle East, its willingness to be a global leader and Mr. Trump’s role as commander in chief.” So, suddenly, the Times is on the side not only of Mr. Bolton but of Senators Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham and our own famed leg at the United Nations, Benny Avni.

Given how unrelentingly wrong the Times has been over the past generation, this puts the rest of us in a devil of a fix. Then again, too, it’s all too typical of the tricks that History likes to play. To help us power through our thought process, there in the pre-dawn gloom of our study, we reached for the red cinnabar box in which we keep an emergency supply of Hershey’s Kisses — only to discover nothing but empty foils. History, it seems, had gotten there first, the golem.

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Image: Reproduction from Prague of the Golem, via Wikipedia.