Greg Mitchell: First Anniversary of Bill Kristol at the New York Times: Will He Get Axed Next Week?

[laststeamtrain]

Greg Mitchell:

First Anniversary of Bill Kristol at the New York Times: Will He Get Axed Next Week?


Exactly one year ago this weekend, the the Huffington Post's Danny Shea broke the news that, as Jim Morrison might have put it, the Kristol Ship was about to sail at The New York Times. Much uproar ensued across the blogosphere. I recalled Kristol's call for the paper to be prosecuted, on Fox News in 2006, after its big banking records scoop: "I think it is an open question whether the Times itself should be prosecuted for this totally gratuitous revealing of an ongoing secret classified program that is part of the war on terror."

A day after the Huffington Post reported it, the Times announced that it had indeed hired the conservative pundit as a new weekly op-ed columnist, on a one-year contract.

Liberal bloggers really reacted now and Kristol said, in an interview with Politico.com, it gave him some pleasure to see their "heads explode." Kristol, of course, was perhaps the most influential pundit of all in promoting the U.S. invasion of Iraq and has strongly defended the move ever since.

Times editorial page editor Andy Rosenthal defended the move. Rosenthal told Politico.com shortly after the official announcement Saturday that he failed to understand "this weird fear of opposing views....We have views on our op-ed page that are as hawkish or more so than Bill... The idea that the New York Times is giving voice to a guy who is a serious, respected conservative intellectual -- and somehow that's a bad thing," Rosenthal added. "How intolerant is that?"

The paper, however, noted in its own announcement: "In a 2003 column on the turmoil within the Times that led to the downfall of the top two editors, he wrote that it was not 'a first-rate newspaper of record,' adding, 'the Times is irredeemable.'"

Fun soon followed when, on January 7, eight paragraphs into his new stint as op-ed columnist, Kristol already made an embarrassing error...http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-mitchell/1st-anniversary-of-bill-k_b_153582.html

[wryter2000]

1. Why on Earth?

Why on Earth does any organization give a microphone or platform to someone who is so consistently, blindingly, obviously wrong about everything? Doesn't one disaster of a prediction after another disqualify Kristol as a "pundit"? Isn't a columnist supposed to have something of value to say? The only thing you can say about Kristol is you can't go broke predicting the exact opposite of what he insists is true.

[tsuki]

2. Because everyone knew Mummy and Daddy, and they felt sorry

they produced such a pedestrian putz.

Such is the life of a Son of the Privileged.