William Kristol Gets a Promotion? You've Gotta Be Kidding!

So let me get this straight: Newsweek magazine has handed Karl Rove a column to rewrite the history of the Bush administration as he pleases, and The New York Times has just hired William Kristol as a commentator to spread his unique brand of intellectually dishonest warmongering? Talk about hangover from the Bush binge! Wow! Just when you think the corporate media cannot sink any lower they dive deeper into the morass and surprise you!

Today, the final day of 2007, the Times waxed eloquently in its masthead editorial about how the neo-cons and Christian nationalists comprising the Bush administration have ruined the country by undermining everything America supposedly stood for in the world. "And, by the way, we're hiring William Kristol to offer our readers his important insights about how the world works." Un-fucking-believable! Happy New Year Bill!

This is a person who has lied over and over again in virtually all of his public utterances about the U.S. role in the world and particularly the U.S. role in the Middle East, which is supposed to be his forte. Kristol has been a cheerleader for every failed violent murderous policy that the plutocrats and cronies inside the Bush-Cheney Beltway clique have conjured up. He has been wrong constantly -- murderously wrong. Kristol has consistently extolled the "benefits" to our nation's standing in the world of a belligerent imperial foreign policy that tells the rest of the world to go to hell and threatens violence against any nation that refuses to fall in line.

If Kristol were a fashion or film commentator then his ideological rantings would not mean a whole hell of a lot. But he has played a role in fomenting real world policies that have led to the deaths of thousands of innocent people. I'm sure his kids will never serve in the U.S. military, just as he ducked service while calling for greater levels of violence in Southeast Asia when he was of fighting age. But ideas matter. And Kristol has been an architect of many of the policies that the Times chose to decry in today's editorial.

"Freedom of Speech" does not excuse propaganda and lies that lead us to war.

I would like to remind people that in 1993 William Kristol circulated an influential memo arguing that any and all health care proposals coming out of the Clinton Administration should be opposed "sight unseen." He couldn't be bothered by honestly assessing the merits of the Clinton health care plan, he wanted the Republicans to just crush it to stop the Democrats from attaining any victory.

Kristol was also a constant source of phony accusations during the entire Monica Lewinsky episode and had close ties to Kenneth Starr's office even while pretending to be an independent commentator. Clinton "cannot survive" he concluded early on in one of his many television appearances. Kristol said on ABC's This Week: "It is a fact that [Clinton aide] Sidney Blumenthal has called members of the press to try to get them to look into congressmen's private lives." That statement was proven to be completely false.

I would also like to remind people that in 1996 Kristol was a mover and shaker along with Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and other extremists in calling for a new world order under American military dominance and he relished the possibility of a "new Pearl Harbor" to allow these radicals to make their imperial fantasies our new dismal reality.

In an editorial in The Washington Post during the 2000 presidential campaign entitled, "Gore's Family Values," Kristol wrote: "Al Gore is not a totalitarian. But his willingness to use his family members for political purposes reveals a self-regard and self-absorption, a ruthlessness and lack of restraint, that have taken him into new territory, well beyond George W. Bush, beyond even his master, Bill Clinton."

During the 2000 Florida recount, Kristol called the executive producer of ABC News This Week, Dorrance Smith, who was then in charge of public relations for Bush in Florida, and suggested to him that the overseas absentee ballots could be ginned up into a question of Gore denying members of the armed forces their votes.

In the 1990s, Kristol argued that the fact that Saddam Hussein remained in power after the 1991 Gulf War resulted in "a lack of awe" for the United States. Well, after seven years of a retrograde president following Kristol's ideological imperatives I supposed he now believes the United States has gained back the "awe" of the world.

Kristol never saw a war he didn't love. With 9/11 he saw his opportunity to translate his ideas into action. All he needed was a viable pretext. "No one disputes the nature of the threat," he wrote, "nor is there any doubt that, after September 11, Saddam's weapons of mass destruction pose a kind of danger that we hadn't grasped before."

During the lead up to the Iraq invasion, Kristol told the Senate Foreign Relations committee: "Reconstructing Iraq may prove to be a less difficult task than the challenge of building a viable state in Afghanistan."

After his beloved war became a fait accompli, Kristol wrote: "The mission begins in Baghdad, but it does not end there," and "We stand at the cusp of a new historical era. . . . This is a decisive moment. . . . It is so clearly about more than Iraq. It is about more even than the future of the Middle East and the war on terror. It is about what sort of role the United States intends to play in the world in the twenty-first century."

So now we get to read about Kristol's lovely views of humankind and planet earth in the pages of The New York Times -- Gee, I wonder what profound insights he's going to have about the next war, and the war after that, and the war after that, and on and on and on.

What will it take for the facade on the part of the media, which pretend to desire to give the American people varying viewpoints on the world, going to fall apart and reveal itself as the corporate propaganda machine it truly is? I mean why on earth does a man who has been wrong, wrong, wrong on virtually everything -- history, politics, international relations -- just because he's a right-wing neo-conservative gasbag -- get to disseminate his views so widely in the political discourse? Is this the best the Times can do?

People in power must really like what Mr. Kristol has to say to catapult him to the nation's "paper of record" so he can spew his vitriol and contempt for democracy, habeas corpus, and the rule of law if they happen to interfere with U.S. imperial objectives.

Hooray for the Times! Hooray for the corporate propagandists who must feel the tide turning against their agenda and now wish to redouble their efforts to skew the political debate their way. Their world rests on what Thomas Friedman so eloquently described as the nexus of McDonalds hamburgers and McDonnell Douglas's cruise missiles. If we as a nation are going to learn anything from the disaster of the last seven years it is that we must have limits and repudiate warmongers and philistines like William Kristol and not allow those in power to ram these sons of bitches down our throats any longer!

Enough is enough!

Comments

[Joseph A. Palermo - Huffpost Blogger]

Excellent comments, thank you. I wanted to add much more about Kristol's perfidy but didn't have time. I think of Edward R. Murrow and Joseph McCarthy -- McCarthy was censured and ended his life is disrepute -- but Rove and Kristol and Miller and Michael Gordon just keep on influencing the political discourse -- along with Fox News, we are really put at a terrible disadvantage -- commentators moving effortlessly from the White House to Fox to the NYTimes, it's disgraceful and if a Democrat gets in power in 2009 they can turn up the heat enough to probably bring down the administration, which is what they're gearing up to do. This country is not going to survive if these people are allowed to frame all of our public debates -- either the Democrats have to step up and start acting like an opposition party and show a little class and discipline, or we're going to continue down the road toward fascism. Turning over US policy toward the Middle East to people like Kristol and Elliot Abrams was a big mistake -- and we will pay the price for it -- we need to dump Rahm Emanuel and Steny Hoyer and the "moderates" in the DP and move in a unapologetically progressive direction and stand up and fight these bastards -- Kristol and his ilk are fascists.

[sgk]

Comment to the NY Times at [e-mail], or to Andrew Rosenthal's email: [e-mail].
Keep up the public outrage!

[realpolitic]

Why the Senate Foreign Relations Commitee would ask Kristol for his opinion is beyond me.

[brooklyncitizen]

Your indignation is understandable but certainly there can be no "surprise" given the NY Times track record. It is a misperception that it's a liberal paper. It has historically been the mouthpiece of Presidential Administrations; especially Bush's.

[Counterglow]

And Eric Margolis, a columnist who has been right on just about everything to do with this mess, is hardly even known in his native United States.

[bronceye]

Again, the white house and fix noise will be able to quote the NYT. Deja vu y'all.

[Mack20]

Hate to break it to you Joe, but the Times needs Bill more than he needs them. In all your academic studies it seems you forgot to learn business and economics. You know supply and demand, market forces and all that. Apparently most of the MSM outlets are losing money hand over fist. As a matter of survival, they probably feel a more balanced offering may sell more papers.

[ProfessorDuh]

Walter C. Uhler's letter to the NYT.
-----
I canceled my subscription to the New York Times -- with prejudice -- a few minutes ago. I've terminated my decades-long subscription because somebody at the Times made the immoral decision to hire William Kristol -- as close to a war criminal as a so-called "journalist" can become. You see, I can have nothing further to do with such a morally tainted newspaper. It's a matter of principle.
You might use this moment to reflect on how the reporting by Judith Miller (AKA stenography for Perle and Chalabi) and your editorial decision to delay reporting on Bush's illegal wiretaps contributed to America's poor moral standing around the world. Now, with the hiring of effete coward and warmonger Kristol, who (possessing any morals at all) can consider the Times to be anything but a whore?
I will use my website to inform my thousands of readers about your immoral decision and I will exhort them to cancel their subscriptions as well.
Sincerely,
Walter C. Uhler
-----

[jbgnyc]

Thank goodness for HuffPost. I've lived in NYC since 1972, read the NYTs daily (wrote for it even). In that time, I've seen it devolve from the courage of printing the Pentagon Papers to kissing big moneys'backside while retaining a cult-like support of Isreal that defies logic or the truth. (Sounds a lot like the WSJ and the National Standard, doesn't it? So why the surprise about hiring Billy Liar.)

Providing Kristol with its forum is beyond self-hating. It's a totally cynical attempt by the NYTs to BE the Wall Street Journal. But now we have three right wing papers in NYC: The Times, The WSJ, The Post. Watch readers flee in droves.

The liberal print press is dead. Long live the Internet,which now frees us to ignore the old gray rag.

[realpolitic]

If anyone on the left was so consistently wrong they would be parking cars and not writing for the Times.

Kristol and his minions are always talking about freedom, but as Mr. Palermo states, they have nothing but contempt for democracy. There is no civil liberty Kristol would not be willing to sacrifice on the altar of security; habeas corpus is the punchline of a joke for him; and the rule of law is just a signing statement away from being anachronistic. Kristol in many ways uses our freedoms the way a terrorist would- as something to exploit to perpetrate their ideology on us, convert the masses by any means necessary, and to victimize us when possible. Kristol is an intellectual terrorist with nothing but contempt for the real meaning of freedom.

[ljsfolly]

Kristol is going to have way too many people available to him for him to bend and tweek their minds. Like the Newsweek with Rove is just one one publication that is selling it's soul to impress the world by numbers who will read it. I will read neither and have less trust for those who also are published by them.

[wagadog]

I said it before, and I'll say it again:

Well, we don't know why the NYT hired Kristol. (I still can't bring myself to call it "The Times" -- which is published in London.)

We also don't know why the NYT offered Ray Bonner the editorship of the home section way back then after being a highly effective foreign correspondent for many years -- oh, maybe it had something to do with his insistent reporting on things like the massacre at El Mozote.

Any of us with a pulse during those years could not have missed their consistent identification Somocista thugs-armed-by-the-US as "The Nicaraguan Freedom Fighters Known As The Contras" -- even when the phrase didn't make any sense in the sentence, or would make it unbelievably awkward. Even in those years, some right-wing editor appears to have had his hand on the "global search and replace" button. We don't know why he would have used it. It may have had something to do with "access" and those lunch dates Sultzberger (or was it Ochs?) was keeping with Ronald Reagan -- but, in fact, we don't know why.

We also do not know why there has been zero -- ZERO -- reporting from the NYT on the gang DRUG rape of Jamie Leigh Jones by KBR Halliburton employees, and the subsequent cover-up. Not to mention a congressional hearing. Why should the NYT report on something so important that it warrants a congressional hearing?

And why the NYT kept Judith Miller on for so long after she was revealed as a neocon shill (or is that shrill?), we'll never know.

Why why why why WHY?

Personally I think it's because the NYT is basically a right-wing rag that keeps a few tame liberals on staff to create thin veneer of balance and integrity on occasion -- and set up something for Murdoch rags to attack.

It's sad, really.

Didn't Uncle Rupert want him?

[dexxjones]

fuck the times. every time i think they might save themselves, they make another stupid move. fuck the tims and fuck old media. they can hire cheney himself for all i care. give me raw story, huff post, and talking points memo and keep your times/post/murdoch/newsweek.

the only people who really read most of thar arent ready for reality anyway. if they were they would already be on the net and forgetting all about the times and other msm dinosaurs.

[Orlando]

Great article.

We should be holding trials for these traitors not handing out coveted journalist positions.

Kristol should be ashamed and embarrassed to walk down an American city street much less continue to be a public voice.

"We, the People" need to take this country back.

[sptatt]

It's about money Joe, Billy boy's gonna bring in readers, and more importantly advertisers. The Times doesn't give a rat's patoot about truth or fairness or making many viewpoints available, it's all about the dough rae me.