Packer urges Times to send Kristol packing

[BurtWorm]

George Packer of The New Yorker, that is:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/georgepacker/2008/11/if-kristol-is-a.html

November 17, 2008
After Kristol

Kristol was hired on a one-year contract for what amounts to a mutual tryout…If Kristol is another Safire, he has the chance to prove it. If not, he and the newspaper will move on, and the search will resume.”—Clark Hoyt, the Times public editor, telling Kristol’s detractors to take a deep breath and give him a chance (January 13, 2008).

It’s time for the newspaper to move on. 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.

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.

In one sense, this mental shallowness and literary poverty come as a surprise from the son of Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb, the student of Harvey C. Mansfield, the devotee of Leo Strauss, and the colleague of Robert Kagan, David Brooks, et al. Kristol was never an intellectual—he’s always been a Republican strategist with various public platforms, including government office—but under his editorship the Weekly Standard managed to be lively and interesting on a regular basis. By his own account, Kristol is the sort of person who browses through a used bookstore at the Milwaukee airport while waiting for a plane and picks up an old edition of Orwell’s essays.

He’s also the sort of person who then writes a wrongheaded column about it, analogizing Republicans to the clear-eyed empire builders of Orwell’s essay on Kipling and Democrats to Kipling’s feckless left-wing critics: “If I may vulgarize the implications of Orwell’s argument a bit: substitute Republicans for Kipling and Democrats for the opposition, and you have a good synopsis of the current state of American politics.” That’s just the problem with Kristol: he is always ready to vulgarize, but he can’t see that he, more than his antagonists, has become a member of what Orwell called a “permanent and pensioned” class of critics, and that “the quality of thought deteriorates accordingly.”

The degeneration of the conservative movement from William F. Buckley and Milton Friedman to Sean Hannity and Sarah Palin is a subject that will require more than one book (Mark Lilla got a start in this fine Wall Street Journal column). Kristol’s performance on the Op-Ed page during the most interesting election in a generation is a historical symptom, not merely a personal failure. He wrote badly because his world view had become problematic at best, untenable at worst, and he had spent too many years turning out Party propaganda to summon the intellectual resources that a difficult situation required. Now the Times owes it to its readers to find someone better.

...

[tsuki]

1. Beware the sons of privilege. They rely on an old boy network rather

than intellectual curiosity or ability. Such is Bloody Bill.

[stevedeshazer]

2. Bill Kristol hasn't been right on ANYTHING.

Recommended.

[BREMPRO]

3. Kristol is the biggest baffoon of the Ne0-cons. A neer-do-well faux intellect.

I've watched him spout for years and he thinks this is all a GAME> he's disconnected from the human consequences of the Ne0-Con agenda. I've never heard him say anything that was not purely ideological and disconnected from reality. I have ZERO respect for him.

[zbdent]

4. hasn't he been costing the Times due to retractions of his points or

corrections?

[Peace Patriot]

5. How about Dick Cheney--from his private prison cell in Texas? That would be fun

for readers of this shit-rag that lied about WMDs and withheld NSA spying info to get Bush-Cheney re-(s)elected, and routinely prints finely combed crapolo about South America.

I don't care who the freakish dragons of the NYT print to brainwash the world about the Corpo/Fascists who are running things. The rawer, the uglier, the meaner, the more ill-phrased, the stupider and the more Bushwhacky the columns, the op-eds and the 'news' articles, the more perfectly they reflect the views of who management and owners are kissing the butts of, among the powerful.

Fuckers. They can keep Kristol. He IS who they are.