I know Tom Meeks. Tom Meeks has balls of steel. He is not afraid to take chances. In order to hold a championship on traditional courses like Shinnecock, Bethpage et al., you have to take chances. One chance is to make holes ridiculously long and move the bunkers out to the inhuman lengths that the pros hit it to. The other is to bake the course until the fairways and greens are near-dead. Those are the only real options, if you want the championship to wind up with only a handful of players under par, which is clearly what the Competition Committee wants.
If you take non-traditional courses out of the mix, you certainly could have a U.S. Open on a newly built golf course that would be designed at already torturous lengths, but that would not require dramatic re-bunkering and asphalt-like conditions in the fairways and greens. We already have courses like that. Valhalla, Whistling Straits and a handful of TPC courses, just to name a few.
The people on this site LOVE traditional courses. I just hope that we all recognize that, in order to continue hosting this championship at courses built before WWII, the USGA is going to have to take chances on watering issues. Yesterday it backfired, but they came within one day of getting it just right. I've been through a U.S. Open as a grounds chairman (Olympia Fields last year) and I have to tell you that it is a lot easier being a Monday Morning critic of Tom Meeks than it is to be Tom Meeks.