by Damozel | Oh, yes, please, New York Times! What would the left blogosphere if we don't have Kristol to kick around anymore? Will our lives not be less amusing without regular photographs of Kristol getting hit with a pie? What neocon do you know who is cheerier or more risible or an easier target or who yields more loud, bitter, cathartic laughter when righteously mocked? Cf. Princess Sparkle Pony in re: this piece.
Finally, the King of the Neocons offers his most laughable prevarication yet:
I don’t pretend to know just what has to be done.
Oh but you do, Bill, you do!
It's not like everyone doesn't know the verdict by now on the effects of listening to Bill Kristol.
In one year of writing regular columns, he's done more to discredit neoconservatism and expose the paucity of its paper-thin premises than any other pundit, up to and including Limbaugh. What makes everyone think that this was the New York Times' cunning plan all along? The great left-wing conspiracy lives!
Please keep him around so we can point and laugh without having to watch him on Fox or give The Weekly Standard our custom.
Not everyone sees it this way. At The New Yorker, George Packer has lined up all the reasons why he should stop taking up valuable space that could be put to better use.
For Pinch Sulzberger and Andy Rosenthal to renew Kristol’s one-year contract, in 2009, would be for the Times to reward failure—and look where that got Wall Street and General Motors. It’s not just that Kristol isn’t another Safire (although an absence of verbal playfulness and wit is a consistent hallmark of the Kristol prose style). It’s not just that his views are utterly predictable (if that were firing grounds, close to half the Times columnists would lose their jobs).
It’s not just that he was fundamentally wrong at least every other week throughout the year (misattributing a quote in his first column, counting Clinton out after Iowa, placing Obama at a Jeremiah Wright sermon that Obama didn’t attend, predicting the imminent return of a McCain adviser named Mike Murphy who ended up staying off the campaign, all but predicting a McCain victory, sort of predicting that McCain would oppose the bailout, praising McCain’s “suspension” of his campaign as a smart move, preferring fake populism to professional excellence and Joe the Plumber to Horace the Poet, urging Ayers-Wright attack tactics as the way for McCain to win, basically telling McCain to ignore all the advice Kristol had given him throughout the year, but above all, vouching again and again and again, privately and publicly, for Palin as an excellent Vice-Presidential choice). What the hell—it was an unpredictable year. (NYT; paragraph break inserted just because).
As if that weren't cold enough, Packer goes after him on style as well.
The real grounds for firing Kristol are that he didn’t take his column seriously. In his year on the Op-Ed page, not one memorable sentence, not one provocative thought, not one valuable piece of information appeared under his name. The prose was so limp (“Who, inquiring minds want to know, is going to spare us a first Obama term?”) that you had the sense Kristol wrote his column during the commercial breaks of his gig on Fox News Sunday and gave it about the same amount of thought.(NYT)
James Fallows, when Kristol first started writing for The New Yorker. "I am talking...about the breathtaking banality of expression," he school-marmed.
A single cliched phrase, like the last sentence of the first paragraph, can be effective. A whole string of cliches....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?"
Wonkette is even crueller:
For the past year, the liberal New York Times has published a comical fraud letter every Monday from its “lightning rod conservative” columnist, the Republican party operative Bill Kristol. This has provided your Wonkette with many posts! We were planning on ignoring him late last year, until the Times‘ opinion editor challenged us by calling Kristol a “serious, respected conservative intellectual” and us “intolerant.” Not only is the first half of that wrong, but Kristol doesn’t even care about his column!....
The Conde Nast Portfolio news publication caught up with Kristol at some thing and asked about his future at the Times. Clearly it weighs heavily on his mind, this decision about whether to keep his 750-words in the most-read opinion market on the planet:
“I don’t think I’ve had that conversation yet,” he told me.
Okay — but would he like to have it renewed? “I’m ambivalent. It’s been fun. It’s a lot of work. I have a lot of things going on. But I haven’t really focused on it.”
Kristol said he planned to talk to Andy Rosenthal, the Times’s editorial-page editor, “soon.”
Ha ha, he doesn’t give a hoot.
To be fair, he's been very busy. Here's a snippet from an interview with The New York Observer.
Was his contract with The Times going to be renewed? "I dunno. You gotta talk to them about that. It's been a lot of work and I'm kinda stretched a little thin. I'll see." (A call to The New York Times' Editorial Page editor Andrew Rosenthal has not yet been returned.) "You guys are all—well, I don't know you—but everyone's obsessed with this internal New York Times..." Mr. Kristol stopped himself short.
"I've had zero problems, issues... It's been low drama. Despite all the dramatics in the blogosphere it's been a very undramatic experience for me."
Oh, well then. Now that the election is over, he'll have more time! He'll do better and find more intelligent ways to be offensive!
Benen seems to agree with me, up to a point.
I wish I could give up on Kristol's misguided missives as easily, but like a car crash, I find it difficult to look away. Besides, most of the time, they make for entertaining targets for blog posts.
But then he says:
But that's not a good reason to give Kristol one of the premier pieces of real estate in American media. He's embarrassed the paper with his predictable sophistry, and one can hope the Times will put an end to the farce fairly soon.
Oh, I so disagree. On this point, Nora Ephron speaks for me.
I read [Kristol's column] religiously every Monday....The man could not write his way out of a paper bag. His column was simply awful. Reading it was like watching someone dance on the head of a pin: his need to prove to his base that he hadn't gone over to the other side was so strong, his need to please his constituency was so moving, that I began to wish he would quit his job as editor of the Weekly Standard and become a Times columnist full-time. It was certainly not going to inconvenience him: the column couldn't have been taking him more than about twenty minutes to write. And it was great having him there, visible, so people like me could see what people like him were like. He was wrong about everything. It was such a comfort.....
People like me sometimes wonder what it would be like to be involved in mistakes that end up killing people; we wonder about sleepless nights and remorse and guilt. Bill Kristol exists to remind us that these are pathetic liberal fantasies, and that some people are never sorry.
There are rumors that the New York Times is not going to renew his contract. I just pray they're not true.
But I sadly fear it is curtains for Bill K at The New York Times. Bye, Bill. ::sniff::
I for one will miss your scary rictus grin. You might appear on Fox News and in other conservative media, but there are places I won't go, even for a laugh.
Memeorandum has other bloggers' reactions here.
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I am confused, is the NY Times a nightclub or a premier newspaper? A place that ropes off prime space every Monday with a sign on it saying "Dr. Kristol" regardless of what went on there the week before doesn't sound like a newspaper. It doesn't even sound like a legitimate nightclub. It sounds like a speakeasy.
Posted by: M Wagner | January 04, 2009 at 08:02 PM