Departing Kristol

Townhall.com ^ | January 29, 2009 | Emmett Tyrrell

[Kaslin]

WASHINGTON -- Let us put an end to the dark murmurings over why The New York Times did not renew its contract with its lone conservative columnist, Bill Kristol. Some say it was a matter of politics. Kristol is a Republican. The Times is Obamist. For a certitude, the political disagreement was there, but politics were not the ultimate cause of Kristol's departure.

I can report on copper-bottom authority that The New York Times let Kristol go owing to public health concerns. As the Times' financial condition has grown fragile, the publisher of the Times, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., has become apprehensive that Kristol's conservative views could endanger the health of some of the newspaper's neurotic liberal readers. During the past year, readers unexpectedly encountering Kristol in the otherwise lenitive company of Paul Krugman and Bob Herbert have complained on the correspondence page of various discomforts. None appeared life-threatening, but what if an aged environmentalist or an infirm McGovernite lost in reveries of 1972 actually suffered a coronary? The trial lawyers would move upon the Times in an instant. Sulzberger might not survive.

Of course, the Times might not survive anyway. It labors under $1.1 billion of debt. So precarious are its finances that it recently had to accept a $250 million loan from a Mexican with the unlikely name of Carlos Slim. Whether he really is a Mexican is not clear, and the Times' team of investigative reporters is now so tiny that Executive Editor Bill Keller has not been able to spare even one reporter to inquire. As far as I have been able to ascertain, no reporter even has Googled to verify Slim's nationality. He might be Portuguese. He could be dangerously overweight. Actually, I am told that investigative reporters at the Times now, in an effort to economize, rarely leave their offices and conduct many of their investigations on the telephone. Sulzberger likes them to call collect.

Yet, to return to Kristol's departure, frankly I shall miss him. During this past year, he rarely filed a boring column, which doubtlessly offended many of his colleagues on the op-ed page. "Boredom is a virtue" is their motto, and the only other Times columnist who regularly breaks with the general tedium is that perpetual high-school rowdy, Maureen Dowd, who often mistakes a cackle for a syllogism. Moreover, Kristol's conservatism is usually sound, solidly reasoned and often amusing. This has led to charges from unnamed journalists in a Washington Post column by Howard Kurtz that Kristol was "predictable." This is a charge liberals often file against conservatives, giving us still more evidence of their double standard. The adherence to principle that renders a conservative "predictable" in the eyes of liberals is exalted as "highly principled" and even "heroic" when exhibited by a liberal.

Another charge against Kristol from unnamed journalists is that he has been cavalier about facts. Kurtz writes that Kristol "had to correct three factual errors," presumably during the past year. What the errors were Kurtz does not say, but the Times' "Corrections" section overflows daily, rarely with Kristol's name. Once, a Times reporter had to interview me in an attempt to correct errors in a news story that I had broken in The New York Sun. When the "correction" appeared, is was still inaccurate.

Kurtz also reports that Kristol -- at least when he has written in The Washington Post -- has been "controversial." Well, at least he was not predictable, or was he? Kurtz reports that in the summer of 2007, Kristol wrote that the presidency of George W. Bush "will probably be a successful one." On that judgment, I would side with the herd of unnamed journalists, though by using selective criteria, Kristol can make a case. Elsewhere, Kurtz -- apparently in consultation with the herd -- adjudges "controversial" Kristol's 2007 observation that "military progress on the ground in Iraq in the past few months has been greater than even surge proponents like me expected." I cannot find anything controversial about that.

This is not the first time Kristol has departed the mainstream media. In the late 1990s, he was a regular with George Stephanopoulos, Cokie Roberts and Sam Donaldson in a round-table discussion on ABC's "This Week." He left amid rumors that ABC thought him too involved in politics. After a period of reorganizing, ABC put Stephanopoulos in charge of the whole show. Stephanopoulos had been a Democratic political apparatchik all his adult life, before joining ABC as a "political analyst." What prepared him for journalism at ABC? In his 1999 autobiography, he admitted that while serving as a senior adviser to Bill Clinton, he would "spin" the press, beginning with the Gennifer Flowers tape. Looking back on his years of spinning, Stephanopoulos lamented, "I have been willing to suspend my disbelief about some of (Clinton's) more suspect denials." Suspension of disbelief -- there is the mark of a great American journalist!

Kristol simply does not measure up.

[ClearCase_guy]

Compare also the recent information about Rahm Emmanuel’s daily phone calls to the press in which he pretty much directs how they will report the news.

[Kaslin]

This should be no surprise to anyone as the lame stream media was and is in the tank for the 0

[Anti-Bubba182]

I don’t care for Bill Kristol, but compared to Pinch Sulzberger he is a colossus.

[abb]

Compare also the recent information about Rahm Emmanuel’s daily phone calls to the press in which he pretty much directs how they will report the news.

LOL! Emmanuel doesn't have to 'direct' them - they do it willingly.

[Rome2000]

Love that Tyrell.

[HowlinglyMind-BendingAbsurdity]

"As the Times' financial condition has grown fragile, the publisher of the Times, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., has become apprehensive that Kristol's conservative views could endanger the health of some of the newspaper's neurotic liberal readers. "

Like Jimmy Carter maybe? He kept sending The Times xeroxed copies of Kristol's articles corrected and marked up in red ink with twenty pages of footnotes,of overly-detailed counter-proposals. In the end it was too much for the editorial staff and fact checkers running over to the library at Columbia to double-check in the National Geographics.

Either that or they just figured out what a "Straussian" is over at The Times. Threw them for a loop. When the white-bearded professor at Columbia finished explaining what that was they got coffee all over their notepads. Now they're busy brooding over the Cliffsnotes and Monarch Notes of Plato's Republic looking for the hidden clues, nervously reading back issues of The Weekly Standard.

[Halfmanhalfamazing]

I don’t see the big deal.

Because of guys like Kristol and David Brooks we ended up with McCain.

There were many reasons, but the elitists on the conservative side were part of the problem, and these guys are just that.

I’m glad he’s gone.

Frankly, I think hiring psuedo conservatives has been a plan on part of the NYT to do damage to the conservative movement.

[TADSLOS]

Ditto, except that he’s still around spewing blue blood beltway republicanism.

[Piers-the-Ploughman]

I know he’s not a jeff Sessions clone, but Bill Krisol did support Palin did he not, very early? I thought I heard him say that he thoought she would be a good VP pick months before the pick was made? Others like Charles K did not offer much early support at all

[Liz]

Winner of the 2008 Best Election Night Performance Award in the category of:
"I Know Nothing About this Republican Disaster."

Billy Kristol (McC campaign mastermind)

"Thank you very much. But I could not have done it without the help of all the
punkeos--David Frum,Michael Gerson, David Brooks, Richard Perle.......and my
Dearest Daddy."

"Sniffle---my Dearest Daddy (who was Giuliani's foreign policy advisor) said,
"The historical task and political purpose of neoconservatism would seem
to be.....to convert the Republican Party and American conservatism in general,
against their respective wills, into a new kind of conservative politics suitable
to governing a modern democracy."

"Sob."

"I especially want to thank punkneo Douglas Feith for faking documents on his
home computer so we punkneos could dupe the president."

"Without Doug we would not have been able to transfer trillions of US dollars
into the Mideast, into the pockets of war profiteers, which enabled Richard Perle
to startup an oil business in Iraq with his cut."

Kristol smirked: "Making Iraq safe for Perle's oil business with US tax dollars was truly a noble punkneo effort."

==============================================

COMMENTS The political entrail readings showed the crucial conservative base stayed home.........too bad the pukes "forget" to tell McC that would be one outcome of the punkneo-RINO bi-partisanship. Be aware that many senior neocons are rank opportunists who squatted in the Repub Party for their stealth purposes-----they are actually former Trotskyites that flew the coop when Stalin executed their hero.

AS FREEPER TADSLOS COGENTLY POSTED: "People forget that candy-ass Kristol, and his crony, metro-sexual Brooks are the original makeover artists for McCain post-2000. They are McC's original groomers and media switch operators. Kristol then urged McCain to fire his staff, to start all over at the 11th hour, as McC's numbers tanked. Shows how how ill conceived, advised, equipped and poorly managed McC's campaign was. But then, what else to expect from a Republican candidate made up of neopunks' Kristol and Brooks."

[hellbender]

I agree. The networks like to have a token conservative (out of a panel of 3 or 4 libs), so they can claim they are not biased. However, they pick people like Kristol and Will, who are “nuanced” and wimpy, and will throw criticism of conservatives into their dialogue. You will never see anyone in the MSM who is uncompromising and aggressive, like Tyrell or Limbaugh.

[TADSLOS]

Kristol was and still is a front man for McCain. He championed McCain on the front pages early in the election cycle to push his boy to the nomination. His support for Palin had nothing to do with her conservatism and everything to do with gauging the political winds to get his maverick liberal senator elected president. Kristol is the media poster boy for why D.C. plutocrats are completely out of touch with the rest of the country.

Watching him nervously squirm in his FNC seat on election night as his "straight talk" weasel and bullshitter lost his bid for the presidency was a my consolation prize to this abortion of an election cycle.

[6SJ7]

The NYTimes purifying its ranks. It’s what a cult does before it goes belly up.

[MinuteGal]

Maybe Kristol is fading from the scene? Can Barnes and other "conservative" weak sisters be far behind? I hope so.

Too many TV show seats allocated grudgingly by the mediawhores to conservatives are filled with the likes of inside-the-beltway, linguini-spined RINOS posing as conservatives.

I don't even know if they're still on, but George Will and the other bow-tied younger noodle fit my above assessment.

Leni

[andy58-in-nh]

Perhaps in leaving behind the hollowed-out shell that is the New York Times, Kristol will rediscover the brand of religious, post-war Conservatism that once motivated his own father and which eludes so many of today's right-wing pundits comfortably ensconced as they are in the elitist redoubts of the East Coast media.

[MinuteGal]

Excellent observation, Andy.

Leni

[org.whodat]

Who gives a rats-ass what kristol has to say anyway. I'm sure he has started his McCain for 2012 pac already.

[org.whodat]

Maybe Kristol is fading from the scene? Can Barnes and other "conservative" weak sisters be far behind? I hope so. Too many TV show seats allocated grudgingly by the mediawhores to conservatives are filled with the likes of inside-the-beltway, linguini-spined RINOS posing as conservatives. I don't even know if they're still on, but George Will and the other bow-tied younger noodle fit my above assessment. Leni

Bingo!!!

[Seaplaner]

Compare also the recent information about Rahm Emmanuel’s daily phone calls to the press in which he pretty much directs how they will report the news.

Oui.

What used to be the "libarally biased media" are now the "Government-Controlled Media."

Big difference and vewwy skewwy.

.