The long-troubled New York Sun, the neocon newspaper founded in 2002, is going down forevermore tomorrow, Gawker reports.

The Sun was an attempt to re-establish a neocon perch in New York City’s broadsheet press. But the project was superfluous — who needs a “right-wing” social-democratic paper like the Sun, when the New York Times is ready to present David Brooks and Bill Kristol as the voices of acceptable conservatism?

Here’s a bit of what Michael Tomasky wrote about the Sun at the time of its launch:

“The right wing of the Democratic Party,” [Sun editor Seth] Lipsky told me recently, “is a depressed stock.” Interesting that it took a journalist to produce the apposite business metaphor. And though the reference to party label shouldn’t be taken too literally, Lipsky is describing both the certain ideological niche of the Sun and a likely trajectory of the Hertog-Steinhardt New Republic with some precision. It’s exactly on the right-most edge of the Democratic cliff — where the DLC begins to morph into, say, the American Enterprise Institute; where neoliberalism and neoconservatism, each of which is a vestigial presence now in the twenty-first century, collapse into some new entity that doesn’t yet have a fully formed identity, or a name …

… It may be premature to say that what these “velvet conservatives” are doing with The New Republic and the Sun will become something bigger; on the other hand, it’s already something bigger than it was this time last year. Hertog, Steinhardt , Peretz, and Lipsky have the money, the acumen, and the forums to do whatever they wish. “I’m not sure this represents anything more than these two guys getting together to do something,” said Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, a friend of Hertog’s for a decade. “But yeah, the tectonic plates are due for a shift, and there’s a reform Republicanism that can marry up fairly comfortably with the sort of center-right Democrat.”

The tectonic plates are shifting, all right — to swallow up the Sun.