Some how over the holiday’s I missed the fact that known moron and neoconservative Bill Kristol had been hired by the NY Times to write a weekly column. Here’s Yglesias:
When I heard that Bill Kristol was leaving Time I got seriously worried about the state of the world. After all, everyone knows that conservative pundits don’t get held accountable for saying tons and tons of wrong stuff — that’s not how it works. Instead, you march through the institutions of conservatism by being loyal to the Cause, and then eventually mainstream organizations decide they need to contain representatives of the Cause and there you are on your perch. So it is in the newsweeklies, so it is on the op-ed pages, and so it is on the Sunday shows. So how could Kristol be fired?
Thus I think we have to consider it good news that he’s apparently been hired by The New York Times.
Yes exactly. There really is nothing a conservative can do or say that will get them removed from positions of influence in the media. Anyway I mention this because today was Kristol’s time’s debut. It is, as expected, not very good. Forget the fact that he makes an attribution error (he quotes Michelle Malkin when he really means Michael Medved. Sometimes hard to keep right-wing nut jobs apart), he’s just not an interesting writer. I read two definitive take downs of Kristol’s first effort today and here are snippets from them. First, James Fellows:
Wow.
Suppose you had just received one of the most important opportunities in opinion journalism: a regular op-ed column in the New York Times. Suppose it was all the more important because it gave you a base in what would normally be considered enemy territory, right there alongside Paul Krugman and Frank Rich and the NYT’s own editorials. Suppose your debut column came at a moment of peak political excitement, with the surprise of the Iowa caucuses just behind us and the New Hampshire primaries one day away.
In those circumstances, would this be the best you could come up with for the very first paragraphs of your very first column?
…snip…
I’m saying nothing about the content here. Indeed the subject — how the GOP should run against Barack Obama — is one on which readers would want to hear a well-connected Republican’s views.
I am talking instead about the breathtaking banality of expression.
A single cliched phrase, like the last sentence of the first paragraph, can be effective. A whole string of cliches, like the second paragraph, is effective only in raising questions about the author’s skill and quality of thought. The passage might serve as a test for prospective copy-editors. For instance: “What is avoidably awkward about the sentence beginning, ‘After all, for all his ability..’?” Or, “How could the author express his thought without cliches?”
Next up, M.J. Rosenberg:
It’s not a column. It a series of GOP talking points.
…snip…
Perhaps the Times thought it was getting George Will, an elegant writer who is a conservative not a GOP party hack. I’m a liberal and sometimes Will drives me crazy but Will’s columns are never identical to a press release from the chairman of the RNC. That is all Kristol’s are. Pure party pap. James Carville without the cleverness or humor.
But the Times would never hire Carville or any Democratic sloganeer because it was thought that political slogans didn’t belong on the op-ed page, not by a regular columnist anyway.
But that is what they have in Kristol. A neocon masquerading as a conservative, using his column to advance whatever candidate or goal is likely to restore the neocons’ New American Century and its Middle East empire.
As Chris Orr says:
If Kristol took this job as a backdoor way to discredit the Times, he’s off to an excellent start.