Kristol Meh

If this week brought the news of a sad literary demise, it also brought a welcome one - the termination of Bill Kristol's New York Times opinion column. Just over one year into his gig writing for the paper of note, Kristol's pink slip arrived shortly before the presidential inauguration. And good riddance.

My dislike for Kristol extends beyond his politics. As a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century, key strategist behind the conservative wholescale rejection of the Clinton health care plan, foreign policy advisor for the McCain campaign, editor of The Weekly Standard, constant commentator for Fox News, and one of the most ardent supporters of the ongoing Iraq war, it's clear we have vastly different ideologies. And his role in urging the McCain campaign to choose Sarah Palin as running mate was apparently larger than he and others will admit (and perhaps for this tactical blunder, I should be somewhat grateful for Kristol). But that's mere politics, a distinction I'm always willing to accept when considering the opinions of others. What stunk up his gig at the Times was his sloppy and ill-informed writing, his smug reliance on talking points and received wisdom, his cavalier attitude towards his readers, his catastrophic miscalculations and errors. Simply put, his column was an amateurish vanity project.

If the Times was hoping to deflect Fox News attacks against liberal bias by hiring a prominent conservative thinker to their editorial board (what, Thomas Friedman isn't reactionary or simplistic enough?), they could have tapped any number of thoughtful, intellectual conservative figures. Instead, they turned to a hack who is, as Glenn Greenwald of Salon memorably put it, "not only chronically wrong about everything, but far worse, completely incapable of acknowledging mistakes". No doubt some will point to his hasty termination as more proof of media bias against conservative thought - the announcement was made with little fanfare, merely a "This is William Kristol's last column" tagline at the bottom of his piece - but there's probably more to the story than simple ideology. The fit between Kristol and the Times was always an odd one, which Kristol did little to address. Appearing on The Daily Show to defend, among other things, the picking of Sarah Palin during the presidential campaign, he derided John Stewart's liberal bias by announcing, "You're reading the New York Times too much," to which Stewart, logically, retorted, "Bill, you work for the New York Times".

Scott Horton wrote recently on sources within the paper making clear that it was Kristol's "sloppy writing and failure to fact check what he wrote" that ended the relationship. While I'm not the most ardent fan of any of the New York Times' columnists, either to the left or the right - we've come a long way from the days of editorial writers like H.L. Mencken - I do believe that with the dismissal of Kristol, the Times has made a positive purge in the name of journalistic integrity and good writing.