Kristol End Days

So Weekly Standard founder and conservative chipmunk-faced pundit Bill Kristol was brought on the New York Times op-ed board for one-year to balance things out in this election year. Seems the mental lightweight has been called out by George Packer:

"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 prose was so limp (“Who, inquiring minds want to know, is going to spare us a first Obama term?”) that you had the sense Kristol wrote his column during the commercial breaks of his gig on Fox News Sunday and gave it about the same amount of thought.

In one sense, this mental shallowness and literary poverty come as a surprise from the son of Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb, the student of Harvey C. Mansfield, the devotee of Leo Strauss, and the colleague of Robert Kagan, David Brooks, et al. Kristol was never an intellectual—he’s always been a Republican strategist with various public platforms, including government office—but under his editorship the Weekly Standard managed to be lively and interesting on a regular basis. By his own account, Kristol is the sort of person who browses through a used bookstore at the Milwaukee airport while waiting for a plane and picks up an old edition of Orwell’s essays."

The Conservative movement is in need of some real ideas, not just actors. Liberals need a quality debate partner, it's no fun beating up on the little guy. Maybe it's time the NYT manned up and found someone worthy.

"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 (Mark Lilla got a start in this fine Wall Street Journal column). 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. Now the Times owes it to its readers to find someone better."

Source: New Yorker