Reading Bill Kristol's Mind

Call me YHWH.

You longtime New York Times readers thought you owned this paper, didn't you? All those years of reading Tony Lewis and Tom Wicker and Anna Quindlen and Frank Rich fooled you into thinking that this op-ed page was some kind of Ivy League newsletter for you and your pals.

When Abe Rosenthal -- whose son hired me -- hired Nixon White House speechwriter Bill Safire, at first it freaked you out. How could the paper that fought Nixon all the way to the Supreme Court to print the Pentagon Papers offer the most prestigious opinion real estate on the planet to the pit bull responsible for the worst of the Nixon/Agnew anti-intellectual demagoguery?

But Safire seduced you. You forgave his ferocious Clinton-bashing, because he always said (even long after Likkud drove you crazy) that Israel could do no wrong. You tolerated his campaign to prove the Saddam-9/11 connection with the Atta-Prague connection, because his language-maven drag reminded you of sweet Miss Fussbudget from 10th grade. You could live with Safire's saying Bin Laden wanted Kerry to win, because Safire also freaked out about Bush's wiretapping. You didn't spit your morning coffee when he called Hillary a "congenital liar," or when he speculated recklessly about Vince Foster's "apparent suicide," because he always had a fun pun to tickle you, plus the occasional libertarian nugget to flatter your open-mindedness for reading him.

Well, let me tell you something. You're not getting squat from me -- no witty spoonsful of sugar to make the neocon medicine go down, no weak-kneed contrarianism to compromise my rightist righteousness.

Don't look to me to be some David Brooks doppelganger, either. He may technically have inherited Safire's parking spot on this page, but let me tell you something: David Brooks is a pussy. When the political wind shifted, he ran out on Bush just like that scumbag Paul O'Neill, or that scumbag Richard Clarke, or that scumbag Matthew Dowd, or that scumbag David Kuo, or that scumbag John Di Iulio, or that scumbag Eric Shinseki, or that scumbag Larry Wilkerson, or that scumbag Tyler Drumheller. Need I go on?

No, you're not going to get any that Obamba fawning coming from Brooks out of me. I don't turn my back on my tribe. Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, the Kagan family, Podhoretz pere, mere et fils, the whole PNAC clan: don't look to me for some panty-waisted agonizing reappraisal whenever the polls turn against us. You can also forget about that hobby of his -- that psychobabbling Brooks with his self-hating pop sociology. Brooks may get a kick out of mocking his own elitist class, but if you're looking for some kind of mitigating ironic self-awareness in my twenty inches of type, you're barking up the wrong fifth column.

I still can't believe that Arthur Sulzberger Jr. is letting me keep on working for Rupert Murdoch while taking a paycheck from the Times. (I wonder what part of being-shitcanned-by-Time he doesn't understand.) I also can't believe that Andrew Rosenthal thinks what he's getting in me is just some "opposing views" voice to bookend Paul Krugman. Krugman and I don't just "disagree." He's wrong. Wrong, people, as in evil. I will destroy him. I didn't get to be "a serious, respected conservative intellectual," as Andy called me, by toadying to Times readers. I did it by gaining the respect of seriousness-arbiters like Hew Hewitt, Fred Barnes, Laura Ingraham, Michelle Malkin, Jonah Goldberg and Michael Savage. Our movement's goal isn't to enliven the marketplace of ideas with our views. Our crusade is to purify public discourse, to brand as a traitor and drive from that square anyone who dares disagree with us. Bill Kristol as the Adlai Stevenson of the right... HA! That's rich.

You pathetic pluralists think that facts and reason will always win out. Well, go ahead and keep thinking that. Lenin said, "The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them." If Lenin were around today, he'd say, "The liberals will pay us for the words with which we will poison them."

Have a nice day, suckers. See ya every Monday.

Comments

[andyboy]

Say what you will about Kristol but he was the only one to point out that we must have done a heckuva job scaring Iran into stopping their pursuit of nukes by invading Iraq in 2003.

The dates kind of coincide you see.

The neo-con dream is over. It won't be long before Kristol ends up as Geraldo's replacement on Fox. The guy who was never right.

[oldgringo]

BEAUTIFUL!

[hollywood]

I doubt Kristol will last 6 months. He'll either be ignored, act as a straw man, or be pilloried and give up and resign.

[SamEllison]

I just didn't read Kristol in the NYTimes for the first time today. And I'm feeling pretty good about it too.

[thebigfast]

isn't this just a business ploy to generate attention?

[wilywolf]

Who cares? Kristol is not a cat: he doesn't get nine shots. He is one bean in a big bean bag chair full of neoWRONGS. Sit on it, fart a couple times, and relax--read someone else. When you were as wrong as the neos, you don't get a second chance. Your opinion is FOREVER invalidated. You are no longer relavent. Period. Want to take putting lessons from a guy who jacks a 1" putt? People around the world look at us with pity and bewilderment. It's a secret to the neos and the conservatives but no one else. They are a sad crew who are irrelevant, and who have succeeded in making our country much less than it once was.

[sammy333]

Short of a court trial for propaganda of hatred and war, a leading neocon deserves to be forgotten for good.

It would be great to start liscening to honest, constructive and decent people and simply ignore the hissing spin of CNN, NYT, Fox and the like.

[vontrapp]

Bill Kristol's sole response to this entire thing will be to spin it as "liberal heads exploding" over a supposed conservative getting to speak his mind.

Which is false, of course.

Bill Kristol lacks the fundamental intellectual honesty to even dare approach the real criticism being directed at him. Andy Rosenthal as well, lacks the intellectual honesty, to address the actual legitimate criticisms. Sad behaviour for an editor of the NYT, but there it is nonetheless.

At the very minimum, the success of Bill Kristol in the mediasphere is an example of the power of cronyism and nepotism. Merit has no place in the conservative movement.

[wldnswmmr]

Kristol's first column is up on the NYTimes site and it's predictably irritating but completely devoid of anything you would call an "idea." Simply a rather boring rehash of the kinds of things the panelists on Fox reassure each other with. Not deep, not interesting, not entertaining, not really very well written. To hold the views he does, of course, and to have been wrong as often as he's been wrong about Iraq, he could not actually be very intelligent. Just the pampered, baby-faced and baby-fat covered little son of Irving, an heir to all of his ideas along with his money.

[Kontessa]

Fifty-one dollars and twenty-one cents is what Bill Kristol is saving me each month when my subscription runs out in a few weeks.
The NYTimes has just validated the immoral war by signing up its biggest warmonger, always already in our faces if we bother to watch TV anymore, the Times is spitting on the graves of almost 4.000 dead Americans by signing on this neo-con stormtrooper.

HOW can just one person have so much power and influence over this nation's foreign affairs, I ask? How and why has Kristol been given so many venues to spew his fascist agitprop? He's always on C-span, has his Weekly Standard, plugged incessantly on C-span, he is a regular on Fox's "always fair and balanced" evening laugh-in and is on the panels of C-span productions constantly and I wonder why?

The NYTimes has never been against the war really, they equivicate and pick around the edges but for Bob Herbert, Paul Krugman and Frank Rich, the NYTimes would be nothing more that another right-wing mouthiece with a few good cultural sections that can now be replaced via the internet.

Thank God for the internet, I can only imagine how badly Rupert wants to get his hands on it, and twist it to his liking.

[PrinceHal]

Speaking of progressives presiding at their own funerals . . .

Our favorite website, HuffPo, is doing us liberals no favor by playing the anti-Hillary card in its biggest headlines, and apparently doing so every time it gets half a chance.

[TomR]

Some Explosive News: Gagged Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds Says Corrupt US Officials Sold Nuke Secrets to Middle Eastern Countries

No wonder the Neocons wanted to stop Valerie Plame in her tracks.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/larisa-alexandrovna/sibel-edmonds-speaks_b_80077.html
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5518
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article3137695.ece

Larisa Alexandrovna names names of those involved:
http://www.atlargely.com/2008/01/sibel-speaks-pa.html

- Tom

[AlphaSam]

You Sir, are right,right, right. But, what a sad time for the grey old lady. There are those of us, who, in times of confusion, turned to her. We put her away with respect for what she once was. She has ceased to be a newspaper, and has become just another corporate player. Times change. The only truth to be found now,is here, on the web. Money rules in the newspaper world. We are sad to see her passing on, but we're glad to save the trees. Her time has passed, along with her integrity.

[wmbear]

I'M PRETTY MUCH IN AGREEMENT.­..

The Times may think it's being "pluralistic" and "open to many perspectives" but neocons like Kristol sure as hell don't think that way. They mean to "take no prisoners.­" Unfortunately, we liberals are constitutionally (so speak) INCAPABLE of playing that way precisely because liberalism is ABOUT pluralism. So there you go. The neocons fight dirty and they fight to win. We try to play fair like the bunch of Nice Nellies we all are at heart. In this kind of one-sided contest, who do you think is going to win?

[UncleJohn]

You can fret all you want, but if you'd like to feel a little comfort, just look on "you Tube" for Kristol being skewered by Steven Colbert.