Kristol gets an unearned promotion

December 29, 2007

Recently cast off from Time magazine, presumably for writing shallow, predictable tripe, the Weekly Standard’s William Kristol is getting a promotion of sorts.

The Huffington Post has learned that, in a move bound to create controversy, the New York Times is set to announce that Bill Kristol will become a weekly columnist in 2008. Kristol, a prominent neo-conservative who recently departed Time magazine in what was reported as a “mutual” decision, has close ties to the White House and is a well-known proponent of the war in Iraq. Kristol also is a regular contributor to Fox News’ Special Report with Brit Hume.

If the report is accurate, and Kristol is joining the Times’ roster, this is an embarrassment from which the paper of record will not soon recover. If Kristol were merely wrong about matters of national significance, this decision would merely be a mistake. But in recent years Kristol has become far more — gone are the “soothing tones” that made him a mainstay on the DC cocktail circuit, replaced with a bitter, sycophantic belligerence.

Over the summer, when Kristol started blaming American liberals for Khmer Rouge’s crimes, and arguing that the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam also created the conditions for the Islamist revolution in Iran in 1979, I started wondering if Kristol actually believes his own nonsense. Except, as Jonathan Chait explained, it may not matter: “Kristol’s good standing in the Washington establishment depends on the wink-and-nod awareness that he’s too smart to believe his own agitprop. Perhaps so. But, in the end, a fake thug is not much better than the real thing.”

True, except now, one of the world’s most prestigious news outlets has apparently given this thug space on the most valuable media real estate in existence.

Kevin Drum captured Kristol’s absurd persona perfectly back in June:

The Bill Kristol phenomenon is a stellar example of what a nice suit and a sober tone of voice can do for you. When Curtis LeMay suggested bombing North Vietnam into the Stone Age and getting over our fear of using nuclear weapons, everyone saw him for what he was: a bellicose nutcase. Kristol is barely any less bloodthirsty, but he’s smart enough to talk in more soothing tones. As a result, he gets columns in Time magazine, edits his own widely-read magazine, and shows up constantly on television.

Underneath it, though, he’s every bit the bellicose nutcase that LeMay was. His answer to every foreign policy problem is exactly the same: a proposal to use the maximum amount of force that he thinks elite opinion can tolerate. But Kristol is well dressed, soft spoken, and a lively dinner companion. So everyone just sort of shrugs their shoulders at the fact that he basically wants to go to war with the whole world. It’s a nice gig.

Standards and consequences be damned, it’s a gig that seems to keep getting better.

For more on just how breathtakingly wrong Kristol has been about practically every policy matter of substance, consider Anonymous Liberal’s greatest-hits package published earlier this year, and ThinkProgress’ run-down of Kristol’s more recent “lies, distortions, and hawkish proposals.”

I can appreciate the notion of the NYT striving for some kind of amorphous ideological balance on its op-ed page, but there are far better choices than Kristol the Clown.

Oh, God!

What is it with those jerks at the NYT?

It won’t be long before they fire Frank Rich.

  • William Kristol will likely fit right in, taking up the torch thrown from the failing hands of Judith Miller. It’s always nice to have a tame journalist to whom you can feed disinformation and later quote it as fact. However happy Billy may be to put his thumb in the eye of the antiwar crowd, who obviously hoped to see him come to grief (I know I did), his ability to do harm will be attenuated by his disastrous right/wrong record on the Iraq war. People on both sides of the fence will be less likely to put any stock in his shrill yips when he says Iran has the bomb, and he and Donny Rumsfeld know exactly where it is.

    I bet there was a big congratulatory fruit basket from AIPAC on his new desk, though.

  • Yes, Mark, you’re right. It’s all the fault of the evil Joooooooooooooooooooooz.

    And how the New York Times could even contemplate changing its liberal-to-conservative ratio from 7:1 to 6:2 is beyond me.

    Heaven knows, we don’t want the other 50% of the country represented in the Gray Lady.

  • re: “liberal-to-conservative ratio”

    In this country “liberal” is really conservative (the New Deal was generations ago), and “conservative” is really … what? reactionary? racist? fascist? laughable?

    America doesn’t have any liberals, not in government or the media anyway.

  • The placement of “Willie Kris” on the op-ed pages of the Times?

    Y’know, it could work—if they found a good cartoonist to illustrate his rambling drivel. I propose a mangy chimpanzee, wearing a nice suit and sitting behind a desk with an autographed photo of KG43 in one corner, and a copy of “My Pet Goat” on the credenza.

    C’mon, people—can we find someone who can characterize Willie Kris as a mangy chimp?

  • First there was David Brooks and now Bill Kristol. Has the Weekly Standard become a farm team for the NYTimes? Another question: who is the Times dumping to make room for Billy?

    I find it disturbing that they would do this in the lead up to what will surely be a Democratic sweep of congress and the White House. They are giving prime real estate to a person who will use to, for example, complain the the Dems are purging justice when they rid it of the sleeper cells of Regant grads in the DOJ.

  • toowearyforoutrage (#8),

    I don’t want to quibble, but I think Kennedy and Kucinich represent merely the best of New Deal thinking. They have the public interest in mind, and where possible they want to improve the lot of the downtrodden without fundamentally altering the institutional structures we inherited from long ago. What’s particularly liberal about that?

    Think of the horse-and-buggy structures we routinely tolerate without serious challenge, even from so-called liberals — electoral college, byzantine senate procedural rules, rural domination of state legislatures, 95% retention rates in congress, voting on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, 50 million without health care, the death penalty and incredibly long sentences, voting “procedures” which would be regarded as unfair in the third world, tax-free status for those in the religion-business, exorbitant tuition at public colleges, routine racial discrimination in courts of law and in prisons, a labor “movement” which is laughable.

    We have the most rapidly advancing technology of any generation ever and our options come down to fluffballs like Maureen Dowd versus throwbacks like Bill Kristol?

  • Mark, Judith Miller was a reporter, not a columnist. She wasn’t a particularly good reporter, predisposed as she was to exploitation and manipulation by the Bush Administration’s second-rate hacks, but she was a reporter.

    Conversely, Kristol is being brought aboard as a columnist. He’s expected to have pronounced opinions and to present them forcefully. He will be under no obligation to adhere to facts or to present an unbiased picture. He’s there for entertainment value, to generate controversy, and to draw the unflagging attention and ire of those who think he’s nothing but a vacuous ideologue.

    If you want the NY Times to dump him, pay no heed to what he writes. He’s there to draw an audience of readers, and it doesn’t matter to the TImes whether that audience comprises followers or detractors. If he draws a crowd, he’ll be deemed a success.

  • One would almost think the NYT has a death wish, one I’m beginning to support.Paul Krugman and Frank Rich are the only two really worth reading. Maureen Dowd has decided she likes being a kinder, gentler Coulter; and Friedman, for all his good instincts about our energy situation, is still a pro-Israel hawk. Herbert writes predictably liberal cant, and whoever is left doesn’t matter much at all.

    One has to wonder what their feckless and clueless publisher, Pinch Sulzberger, has in mind. Keeping a leg in all camps? Being all things to all people like Robot Romney? The elder Sulzberger, Punch, responding to pressure from the Nixon thugs long ago, hired Larry Sapphire, a former Nixon speech writer, who for decades lied, prevaricated, dissembled, and just plain made things up to suit his ideology and life-long quest to reconstruct Nixon as as a American hero. Fortunately, he’s gone, but in his place came drivel- mouthed David Brooks whose writing isn’t worth dignifying even by agknowledging that he puts words on paper. Suffice it to say he’s an arrogant, airhead elitist, who also wears nice suits and speaks pleasantly.

    Kristol is so slimy I have to either change the channel when his creepy moon face appears spouting his delusional nonsense, or take a shower immediately when he’s through.

    With the addition of Kristol to the Times roster, the great right-wing neocon propaganda machine will have legitimized itself yet again instead of being relegated to the outer darkness where it so rightfully belongs.

    The Times ought to be ashamed of itself, but belonging to the establishment is obviously more important to it than having a clear point of view.

  • A Kristol Meth column writes itself:

    Blah blah Iraq is going well blah blah anti semetic blah blah Bush is the greetest (sic) leeder (sic) of all time blah blah casualties are low blah blah I am not responsible blah blah Dems and Libs are wrong blah blah Iran must be stopped for the security of Israe, er, US blah blah. Copy, rearrange, paste and repeat 52 times a week.

  • What? The Post wasn’t hiring? (NY, not DC — although…)

    But how fitting in a way, that the single publication most responsible for starting the Iraq war should be giving a column to one of the handful of men in America who love that war most. I’ve often thought since then that Judith Miller at the Times was a lot like AIDS: a virus that disabled what should have been a vital component of our immune system. Maybe they miss her. Anyway, back on double-secret probation they go. Assholes.

  • Alright, which NYT editor’s 17-year-old daughter did Kristol knock up and before he threatened to release her love-letters to him to that famed cocktail circuit, or to the junior-cocktail-circuit private high school?

    Let’s get it all out in the open, so we can kick this guy out of town . . .

  • Ok, some people here are saying the NYT editorial board doesn’t have “ideological balance.” Anyone who believes that must not read the columns, because from a left point of view, they have about 2 columnists who are good, and the rest are worthless.

    Also, there is Fox News out there, and Fox News is waaaaaaaaay out of balance compared to the NYT. Fox News even gets loads of facts wrong all the time, and the errors they make all make conservative positions look better. If NYT was mostly liberal, it would balance news outlets like Fox News Channel. So there is no argument to be made that hiring Kristol somehow makes NYT fair. Besides, that’s assuming that Kristol is a meritorious columnist. If he lies and deceives and writes fluff, how can he be helping anything by being a newspaper writer? The truth should be strong enough on its own merits to convince educated people.

    If he’s really so right that all non-white people are the scourge of the Earth and should be eliminated, or whatever it is he truly believes, he should be able to just say it, and not lie that they are up to more dangers than they are, and people will recognize how right he is and be persuaded by him. He doesn’t make those arguments because they’re implausible. It’s not really going to help the world if we go around killing off all non-Christians and non-whites. There are a lot more helpful things we could be thinking about than obsessing over that. So Kristol isn’t really helping or contributing.

  • I read the Opinions page daily and I think Gail Collins is growing into quite a good columnist. Not as smarmy and aren’t-I-clever as Maureen Dowd, and, sometimes, even Frank Rich. I also like Bob Herbert for clear, concise presentation.

    That being said, I have no problem with Kristol. I probably won’t read him very often, but I think his views have a place to be presented. Why are we frightened of opposing views?

    What I DO with the Times had, which the WaPo does have, is a place to issue comments along with each opinion piece. Believe me, most NYT readers would tear Kristol a new asshole if we could comment directly on his pieces. For a great example, read the comments section on a David Broder piece in the WaPo.

  • The implied anti-semitism of commenters on this site is starting to get more than a little offensive.

    Just as not all of us American Jews are super-hawks, we’d appreciate not being lumped in with the delusional and bloodthirsty individuals who, in fact, never heard about a war they couldn’t support.

    On Kristol, while the unhinged bloodlust is his most notable (or notorious) characteristic today, let’s not forget that he’s the intellectual author of, IMO, the most singly immoral domestic policy “talking point” of the last half-century at least: the notion that the Republicans should oppose any health care reform because it would revive Americans’ faith in activist, competent government that could materially improve (and extend) their lives.

    In other words, it’s fine for untold millions to suffer and die needlessly because of a corrupt and inefficient healthcare system–so long as Our Side keeps winning elections.

    For this alone, he should rot in hell.

  • dajafi,

    I’m not blind to the fact that Kristol may represent only 10-15% of the views of American jews. However, it irks me that he views any (well earned) criticism of him and his policies as antisemitism and his tying of US policy with increasingly divergent Israeli ones.

  • So, let me get this straight: Bill “Dan Quayle’s Brain” Kristol, who’s owned, body and soul by Rupert Murdoch, whose magazine, The Weekly Standard was financed by and is run at a huge loss BY Rupert Murdoch, the New York Times‘ best friend in the world (especially now that Rupert’s bought the Wall Street Journal) is going to be given a slot IN the NYT?

    Rupert Murdoch, who also features the sleazy little schmuck on Faux Nooz™ all the time, since he owns the twisted little Kristol SOB anyway? (Bill’s father, Irving Kristol — the “B” in the “SOB” — is the founder of the neo-con movement).

    I guess they didn’t have enough of Murdoch’s point of view in their pages? Or, perhaps, no representatives of NAMBLA were available?

    Or perhaps they just would like the Chairman of the Project For A New American Century on their roster so that the next time Bush’s White House asks the NYT to spike a story that exposes egregious and impeachable offenses (like, say, the NSA wiretapping story, withheld by the Times prior to the 2004 election), they can use Kristol’s cel phone, to keep their phone logs clean?

    Then again, the NYT seems, lately, to be shockingly cavalier as to whom they crawl into bed with . ( “[Judy] Miller was pounding mattresses for news, and none of her editors thought fit to call her on it.” — Steve Gilliard, 2004)

    So, I suppose that another glorious chapter in the history of the latter-day NYT is opening. Wonder when the magic underwear arrives?

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  • Phoebes wrote:

    That being said, I have no problem with Kristol. I probably won’t read him very often, but I think his views have a place to be presented. Why are we frightened of opposing views?

    We don’t want views that are made out of extreme ignorance or distortion to be presented through a big megaphone, because if they catch on it’s like driving with a blindfold on. Look at how much trouble we’re having combatting this global warming thing. I’m surprised a liberal wrote what you wrote– it’s obvious that people like Kristol have repeatedly “crossed the line” over the past few years.

  • I think I’m pro-Jew and not antisemitic, therefore any criticism of my foreign policy opinions is antisemitic.

    Just kidding– but it’s a good parody of Kristol and all these assholes, don’t you think?

  • to phoebes: most mammals eat their own feces, yeah even your cute little girl/boy -if any?- until you teach them … I had a ‘granola’ mommy once tell me about her 1 y. old boy:”…he’ll stop when/if he does not like it” .. some permissiveness doncha THINK? It is well established that the Times is pure crap so why bother? … you say an opposing point of view, REALLY???!!

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  • As the WH changes in one yr this decision will become painful for the NYT’s credibility. The elite ruling class which snobs like Kristol feel are his family will hopefully be regulated out of existence in DC when integrity finds its way back to Washington. Kristol is part of a corrupt system which has gone further in destruction and mass murder than any before it. His only sanctuary soon will be cocktail parties where he can be read aloud for laughs. To be crude, he knows which way to go in foreign policy by which direction the hairs on Bush’s ass are parted. If he’d been born without the silver spoon he never would have been published. His notoriety for being dreadfully wrong on everything is matched only by his loyalty to the Bush regime.

    He is forced to live a deeply sheltered and protected life as he wouldn’t last a week among the “masses”…among real people. So he will continue to live far away from reality. Why the NYT thought this would be an asset is simply because of the resentment and animosity Kristol attracts will make him controversial. Giving him more exposure is sure to make us sicker. For sure he will be used to deliver the message of the week.

  • Swan and Rolandc, yes, I’m a proud liberal and I did write that I didn’t see the problem with Kristol’s column. I think he, and David Brooks, are assholes. But, I’d rather have their stupid views right out there where we can refute them.

    Believe me, every NYT reader KNOWS they’re both assholes. And, I would love to have a Comments Section right next to Kristol’s column, as they do with the WaPo columnists.
    We know how to give back to these conservatives.

    I just don’t think we – liberals and Democrats – should be scared of Kristol. Let him write.

  • I was away for most of the day, and couldn’t keep up; to Doug and Dajafi – I didn’t say Jews (or Joooooooooz), I said AIPAC. While AIPAC is comprised of Jewish lobbyists, AIPAC is as representative of the Jewish people as the Bush government is like Americans, or a marshmallow is like an ear-swab. I don’t see why nobody can insult AIPAC without being called anti-semitic: do the Jewish people identify so closely with AIPAC?

    If you want to see an item that promotes anti-semitism, check out Saul Singer’s “To Help Pakistan, Fight Iran” on WaPo’s Post Global. Not a lot of fudging there, it’s a blatant attempt to use America as a blunt instrument once again on Israel’s regional enemies. Again, all Jews are not like Saul Singer, or I hope not. But I bet AIPAC is sympathetic to his worldview. What’s AIPAC even about, if not to press America to Israel’s defense? To get Americans to buy more Israeli jeans?

    Doug; thanks for the correction. You’re right, and there is a difference between a reporter and a columnist, although not as far as “facts” go for the Bush administration. There are plenty of examples of their seizing upon items in an opinion column to support their agenda. That doesn’t make your point less correct.

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  • I think the problem with Kristol having a platform at the Times is simply that he is one of those intellectuals that isn’t very smart. How many times does he have to be wrong, how obviously flawed does his reasoning have to be, how corrupted do his assumptions about the world have to be proven to be, before he is automatically excluded from having this best of all columnists’ positions? The problem with Kristol is simply that he has not earned this promotion. Now, that being said, I think it would be difficult in today’s environment to find a “conservative” who is worthy of the op-ed role. The definition of conservative has changed so radicaly, it is now almost synonymous with “wrong.” People who used to be known as conservative are now identified as leftists, simply because they think Bush has taken this country down a ruinous path. I’m talking about people like Kevin Phillips, or even Glenn Greenwald, for pete’s sake, who certainly would be a much better choice as an analyst and as a writer than Kristol. Anyway, the Times was in a bind. If they wanted to feature another True Conservative, they pretty much had to pick an idiot like Kristol.

  • There’s gotta be some kind of backstory going on here, the man hasn’t been right about one damn thing in the last ten years, and they think he’ll bring them more readers? The proverbial monkey with a dartboard would be far more accurate.

    I’d like to hear the guy who made this decision explain why Times readers need to read more opinions from one of the prime backers of the worst policy decision the US has ever made. It looks like they think we need to make more bad decisions, like attacking Iran. (Something the AIPAC folks are still pushing for)

    I was thinking about subscribing to the NYT, to reward them for bringing Krugman out from behind their stupid wall, but now I’m going to have to think about that one.

  • I’ve got it! This is journalism’s equivalent to the Presidential Medal of Freedom (think Tenet, Franks, Bremer, Gonzales, etc)

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