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

[oldpotsmuggler]

This is another aspect of the affect of talk radio on society. It can be in the middle of the day and you could have a wingnut "host" say "Bill Clinton says that it's day time so that's how we know it's really night" and within ten minutes their whole side would be talking about a liberal conspiracy to make us believe that the sun does not rise at night. I know that if I owned a newspaper I wouldn't want to be left out of the fun.

Google "global cooling" and then listen to the freaks go on and on about how global wrming is just another liberal hoax and you'll see what I mean.

[TheDoomed]

I just figured this would be a paragraph consisting of Invade *fill in the blank*. I'm pretty sure that's all he thinks.

[godlessclif]

Bill Kristal's mind. EEWWWWW!!

[suntzu]

To read Kristol's mind, do you need a Kristol ball?

Joking aside, I sent a very complaining letter to the editor of The Times re hiring of Kristol. Of course they did not print my letter.

[provoice]

As a firm believer in free speech, I would defend Bill Kristol's right to spew his fascist ideology to the world.

I do however wish that the manure these publications and broadcasts by the Kristols, Limbaughs and Coulers of the world were required to carry a warning label like tobacco products or other poisonous things.

"This material may be hazardous to your freedom, security and financial well-being!"

[Shake-A-Spear]

Marty: Yes, Safire was our right-wing sonofabitch, but he was OURS and he was lovable, made so by combining his old-maid grammarian/punster shtick with his rather mild right-wing shtick. And come to think of it, it was easier to be right-wing in the Nixon years than today where you're obliged to join a pack of downright nutty ideologues starting with Bush,Jr. himself. Would Boy George ever have met with Rad China? And wasn't the Environmental Protection Agecny founded during the Nixon years? Indeed it was! (Take THAT, Kyoto Bush.) OK NY Times, bring him on! Bill Kristol, armchair expert who makes his living by being consistently wrong. We're ready to hear it from you as we hear it from McCain, Bush, Romney, Huckleberry,Limburger, et al and ad nauseam: THE SURGE IS WORKING,but how long must we keep surging, and what'll happen when we stop? And when was the last time you admitted you were wrong. And did you ever get a bayonet up your arse, and if not why are you so willing to commit troops to the Iraq fiasco? Welcome, Bill, but protect your cojones.

[MinerSam]

Nazi Germany proved that a radical right wing dictatorship can indeed be born out of a Democracy.

And there is an old saying: "he who controls the printing press controls the agenda."

And everyone knows that to their utter delight Hitler and his "architect" Goebbles discovered that all you need is TO REPEAT LIES to get perfectly normal people to believe erroneous crap.

I was first shocked by who Kristol is when he was a part of a panel at a panel at the American Enterprise Institute, on the subject of, if you can believe it, Fairy tales.

This crowd had their children there.. all very well behaved looking scared, sad almost dower.

The old German fairy tales that were read were viscous and frankly what any normal person could perceive as pure evil.

It reminded me of the negative projections that prevailed against children in pre-natzi Germany!

Mr. Kristol seemed deeply disturbed to me then and I now intend to find out more about Stauss and "the Strausians" that seems to be a part of Mr. Kristol's (and his Dad's) belief system.

This is an outrage. Equally outrageous to a column on Newsweek (the supposed more liberal one compared to Time) to Karl Rove.

Karl Rove, who helped turn the Government agencies Americans PAY to protect their interests into Central Headquarters for the Republican Party.

Karl Rove, who in early 2001 rolled out the Republican strategy for taking over "For the next 100 years" by fighting the war on "terra" against nation states. This just days before Mr. Bush's "Axis of Evil" speech shocked any truly informed person.

It is the "valuing of Diversity" of the more progressives, coupled w/belief by some that there are no facts, just opinions: That has the capacity to provide the red carpet for the unreasonably selfish and viscous who will do anything for the opportunity to loot our treasury and empower themselves by keeping the majority down.

[Jane]

Great piece.

[Bongborg]

You must have felt very dirty after channeling that, Marty.

[mommadona]

Well, this little slice of the NYT subscribers has just dropped it like a hot potato.

*click!

They want free market?
They got it.
You don't supply my need, I don't supply your $$
Gee, that felt good.

[RustyCannon]

I guess The NY Times has accepted the idea that news and opinion must be entertaining and that to be entertaining, you have to have a smirking ideological hack on staff to ruin the reader's morning. Because what could be more entertaining that causing a massive plague of high blood pressure and indegestion? Why else would you give money and space to anyone who has been proven wrong so many times in the most recent 7 years? At least he's consistant. He's ALWAYS wrong!

[RussAbbott]

And look how wrong Lenin was the first time.

The real story is that the Times is attempting to learn how to survive in the new online world. It has one of the best web site — including a stable of columnists people want to read.

I wish them well.