NYT hires Bill Kristol

Letter to the public editor, NYT

It has never been clear to me what qualifications one needs to be hired as a columnist by the NYT. People come, people go, and it is not always clear what qualifications matter.

Is there a requirement to know something? To have some original thoughts? To have policy or government experience? Is facility with language sufficient…witness Maureen Dowd?

No doubt there is a requirement for “balance” on the op-ed pages, so the NYT always has the problem of finding a conservative columnist who is not constantly at war with the facts – a stock in trade for most of them.

Is there a requirement to be pro-Israel? That seems to be a core principle of the NYT.

I am trying to figure out on what bases the NYT hired Bill Kristol.

I recall a former government colleague telling me when Paul Wolfowitz was appointed as Deputy SecDef that “he is always wrong on the big things.” A prescient comment in light of later events.

One could say the same about Kristol. Is there any topic on which he has bloviated for Fox News that turned out as he predicted? Maybe the flowers are still to come in Iraq. Maybe the Iranians are really going to attack us. Maybe the sky will fall. But above all, of course, Israel is always right.

What qualifications does Kristol have other than the fact that Rupert Murdoch was willing to subsidize his losses year after year at the Weekly Standard?

These are the same standards that make the Washington Times a “newspaper”: Sun Myung Moon has been willing to put up with more than a billion dollars in losses to run a right-wing propaganda sheet.

But really…Bill Kristol?

Tom Maertens
Mankato, MN___________

NOTE: Jonah Goldberg at NRO likes the appointment, which prompted the following at Firedoglake:

Sure we lose money with every sale, but we make it up in volume
By: TBogg Sunday December 30, 2007 11:50 am

Poor dumb stupid moronic Jonah Goldberg:

Either way, what is really remarkable — and a large source of liberal rage — is that for all the leftwing talk about the discrediting of "neoconservatism" and the hawks of The Weekly Standard stripe, they're still so influential that when the Times looks for a second conservative columnist it looks to the editor of The Weekly Standard and Brooks' old boss and colleague. This no doubt says a lot about the narrow prism through which The New York Times views conservatism. But it also says a lot for the enduring success of Kristol and his magazine and the inability of liberals to pelt conservatives from the public stage the way they used to — and the way they desperately still want to.

Reality:

Aside from Fox, Murdoch's News Corp owns TV Guide, HarperCollins, 20th Century Fox, the London Times, and the New York Post. Murdoch also bankrolls William Kristol's neocon mouthpiece the Weekly Standard, which has been losing money ever since it started up in the mid-1990s.

It must be interesting to go through life knowing that the Wingnut Fairy will put money under your pillow every night no matter how many times the invisible hand of the free market gives you the finger. If it weren't for wingnut welfare Lucianne, Irving, Gertrude, Norman, and Midge would have left their idiot children on a hill somewhere for the wolves to eat.