Kristol, lite
I have to admit disappointment in the decision to “award” William Kristol column space in the Times. The Times is my one morning paper out here in Oakland, and its op-ed page is already filled with a shocking amount of rehashers and pop-psychologizers – Dowd, Herbert, Collins, Rich. Cohen is usually a weak read, too. You get real polemics and/or analysis only from Krugman and Brooks. Based on his other writing, I’d predict that Kristol will resemble nobody at the Times so much as Thomas Friedman. Both see their function as agenda-pushers, policy-salesmen. There is a distinct shoutiness to their prose styles. Both give me a headache.
This is also how Kristol has gotten himself called a “thug.” It’s a bit self-pitying to complain that Bill Kristol has gotten thuggish on you or your magazine. It’s only writing, after all. But the complaint, made most notably by Jonathan Chait, has a kernel of validity. That is, as an agenda-pusher, Kristol has an irritating tendency to aim his attacks not on the faulty ideas of his opponents, but on the weakness of their character. He aims higher than the textbook ad hominem, though. It’s not your hidden interests he wants to expose. It’s your chicken-heartedness. Like an old-school football coach, he wants to separate the team players from the shirkers, the winners-at-heart from the simpering losers. You secretly want to lose in Iraq, as he has it in the Standard ’s current leader. Or, to change the animal metaphor, you, if you won’t buck up and bomb Iran, are a weak horse.
This is, for starters, a tiresome way for such a brilliant guy to write. But there’s also something self-undermining in its unseriousness. When the New Republic experiences one of its periodic disasters of fabulosity and Kristol jumps in to peddle the kitsch that “They don’t support the troops!,” you can’t help smelling opportunism in the bathos. Bill Kristol cannot possibly think in such moldy slogans. So why does he write in them?
The result, for me anyway, is that I treat Kristol much like I treat his fellow soap-boxer, Friedman. I assume from the get-go that he’s trying to sell something, and, when he starts with the shouting, as he inevitably does, I roll my eyes.
There’s cause enough already to roll your eyes when you read the Times op-ed page.
A little snippet of 2Pac’s Thug 4 Life, as channeled by Bill Kristol in his moment of triumph:
Tell em’
Thug for life
Right till’ I die
When em’ stupid ass liberals ask why?
Game? Thicker than most of these tricks
I got my mind on makin’ policy,
But you stuck on these fake Brookings wonks
And jealous muthafuckas can’t see
That it’s the fame that caught these stupid liberals, pass the morning talk shows free
So tell me why u sweatin’ a muthafucka like me?
A middle-aged neocon tryin’ to a hustle up some G’s
You playa hatin’ unserious blue-state latte-swilling elitist liberals speakin’ down on GOPs
Jumpin’ around at the shows
And your the first muthafucka to jump
To the trunk when it’s time for fun
Little trick ass punk (especially at The New Republic, and really especially that punk-ass Jonathan Chait)
Thug muthafuckas don’t die we get paid and we get hired by the NY Times
Muthafuckaa!!
Give a holla to my peeps in the AEI
I’m livin’ in Northern Virginia still clutchin’ on my copy of some kine Himmelfarb
Tell em’
Thug for life
High till’ I die
When em’ stupid ass liberals ask why?
THUG FOR LIFE BIATCH!!
— Mark in Houston · Jan 1, 01:21 AM · #
A better choice would have been thought-crime peddler Mark Steyn, who says unsayable things that violate PC-religion. Or Andrew McCarthy who on the front lines of the failed effort to use the law to stop terror knows whereof he speaks. Or Mark Bowden who’s expertise in all aspects of the war on terror aka the War Against Jihad span Mogadishu to Kabul.
Kristol was on Stewart’s show and could not frame a response as to why Red State America was concerned about 9/11 when Stewart’s audience in NYC was not.
The answer of course was that the people who died there were not of course Upper East Siders but New Jersey, Queens, Brooklyn, and Long Islander working class people. Who resembled in character if not accent the working people of Texas, Iowa, and Kansas.
Kristol being part of the elite couldn’t point out the obvious.
— Jim Rockford · Jan 1, 07:33 AM · #
I have to say, I think Bill Kristol will be a great columnist. He has firm convictions, he is persuasive, and he has a keen political sense. The Times is lucky to have him, and I think that will become clear soon enough.
— Reihan · Jan 1, 09:57 AM · #