TW: Let me be 100% clear, I detest William Kristol. Not only do I believe his opinions flawed, I believe through his influence within the Republican party he has done immeasurable harm to the interests of the US. It is people like him who have been the pseudo-intellectual bastions for some of the deeply flawed policies which have led the US into its yet to be defined abyss.
The New York Times about a year ago was searching for a replacement for William Safire to provide another conservative voice on its editorial page. They chose to provide Kristol with a one year test-run..."Kristol was hired on a one-year contract for what amounts to a mutual tryout…If Kristol is another Safire, he has the chance to prove it. If not, he and the newspaper will move on, and the search will resume.”—Clark Hoyt, the Times public editor, telling Kristol’s detractors to take a deep breath and give him a chance (January 13, 2008).
George Packer from New Yorker does an excellent job of critiquing the test.
From Packer/New Yorker:
"It’s not just that Kristol isn’t another Safire...It’s not just that his views are utterly predictable...It’s not just that he was fundamentally wrong at least every other week throughout the year (misattributing a quote in his first column, counting Clinton out after Iowa, placing Obama at a Jeremiah Wright sermon that Obama didn’t attend, predicting the imminent return of a McCain adviser named Mike Murphy who ended up staying off the campaign, all but predicting a McCain victory, sort of predicting that McCain would oppose the bailout, praising McCain’s “suspension” of his campaign as a smart move, preferring fake populism to professional excellence and Joe the Plumber to Horace the Poet, urging Ayers-Wright attack tactics as the way for McCain to win, basically telling McCain to ignore all the advice Kristol had given him throughout the year, but above all, vouching again and again and again, privately and publicly, for Palin as an excellent Vice-Presidential choice).
The real grounds for firing Kristol are that he didn’t take his column seriously. In his year on the Op-Ed page, not one memorable sentence, not one provocative thought, not one valuable piece of information appeared under his name...
The degeneration of the conservative movement from William F. Buckley and Milton Friedman to Sean Hannity and Sarah Palin is a subject that will require more than one book...Kristol’s performance on the Op-Ed page during the most interesting election in a generation is a historical symptom, not merely a personal failure. He wrote badly because his world view had become problematic at best, untenable at worst, and he had spent too many years turning out Party propaganda to summon the intellectual resources that a difficult situation required."
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/georgepacker/2008/11/if-kristol-is-a.html
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