Soccer Dad

Kristol clear

Clark Hoyt gives his support to the hiring of William Kristol as on op-ed columnist at the NY Times, He may be unwelcome but we'll survive.

Kristol would not have been my choice to join David Brooks as a second conservative voice in the mix of Times columnists, but the reaction is beyond reason. Hiring Kristol the worst idea ever? I can think of many worse. Hanging someone from a lamppost to be beaten by a mob because of his ideas? And that is from a liberal, defined by Webster as “one who is open-minded.” What have we come to?

How's that for full support? I believe that Mr. Hoyt was a lot more enthusiastic about giving space to someone who did believe that hanging people from lampposts was a good idea.

Needless to say, Bill Kristol didn't get off unscathed in the Times, as the paper published Father and Sons a review of Jacob Heilbrunn's recent book about "neo-conservatives."

While the Nazis herded Jews into the gas chambers, Kristol, then a 24-year-old Trotskyist, held fast to his conviction that the Allies were no different from the Axis in their imperialism. Kristol took this view because he was “indulging in an abstract crusade for a better world.”

Sound familiar? In March 2003, Kristol’s son, William, the editor of The Weekly Standard (and now a New York Times Op-Ed columnist), cheered on the United States invasion of Iraq while bin Laden remained at large. Hussein, Kristol wrote with Lawrence F. Kaplan, was “a threat to civilization” and defeating him would kick off a glorious campaign to spread freedom and democracy across the globe. Although William’s argument was precisely opposite to Irving’s 59 years earlier, it sprang from the same crusading myopia.

Well when something's "precisely opposite" it's hard to say that it sounds familiar. What Timoth Noah's brief history lesson shows is that neo-conservatives are capable of assimilating new information and adjusting their views accordingly.

And Noah's dismissal of the war against Iraq, might be overstating the case a bit. Roger L. Simon responds:

Needless to say, Noah ignores such inconvenient truths - and others including the fact that Iraq is a functioning (albeit limping) democracy with people in the streets and growing businesses, that it is one of our least violent wars (less than five percent the US fatalities of Vietnam) and at the very least we will be left with bases inside Mesopotamia to help control the expansionist fascisms in Iran and Syria. It could be better than that. Who knows? The Iraqis could turn into real allies for freedom, just like those dreaded neocons hoped.

Of course the recent gains in Iraq have been a result of President Bush's dismissal of Secretary Rumsfeld and the start of the surge, which, I believe was consistent with William Kristol's recommendations over a number of years.

But it was nice that that Times balanced their views of Bill Kristol. Had they only had Clark Hoyt's faint praise, I'd have been worried that the world was threatened to be overcome by chaos through some disturbance in the space-time continuum. The Noah review restored order.
(via memeorandum)

bill kristol.

Posted by SoccerDad at January 14, 2008 6:15 AM