Pimp My Rag

In which the NYT explains why detailing the Gray Lady with lies, cowardice and innocent blood is really an outstanding idea.

from the Editor and Publisher:

Kristol Clear: It's Official --'NYT' Explains Hiring New 'Op-Ed' Wag

By E&P Staff

Published: December 29, 2007 6:20 PM ET

NEW YORK A day after the Huffington Post first reported it, The New York Times has announced that it has indeed hired conservative pundit, and Fox News analyst, Bill Kristol, as a new regular op-ed columnist.

Liberal bloggers had been up in arms over the move. Kristol said, in an interview with Politico.com, it gave him some pleasure to see their "heads explode." Kristol was perhaps the most influential pundit of all in promoting the U.S. invasion of Iraq and has strongly defended the move ever since.

Times' editorial page editor Andy Rosenthal defended the move. Rosenthal told Politico.com shortly after the official announcement Saturday that he fails to understand “this weird fear of opposing views....We have views on our op-ed page that are as hawkish or more so than Bill....

“The idea that The New York Times is giving voice to a guy who is a serious, respected conservative intellectual — and somehow that’s a bad thing,” Rosenthal added. “How intolerant is that?”

Unlike The Times’ other regulars, Kristol will write only once a week, with his first column set for Jan. 7, and he has just a one-year contract. The paper noted in its own announcement: "In a 2003 column on the turmoil within The Times that led to the downfall of the top two editors, he wrote that it was not 'a first-rate newspaper of record,' adding, 'The Times is irredeemable.'”

Kristol, on Fox News in 2006, suggested that the paper should face charges after its big banking records scoop: "I think it is an open question whether the Times itself should be prosecuted for this totally gratuitous revealing of an ongoing secret classified program that is part of the war on terror.”

In 2003, on NPR's "Fresh Air" show, he said, "There's been a certain amount of pop sociology in America ... that the Shia can't get along with the Sunni....Iraq's always been very secular."

In the July 14, 2006 issue of The Weekly Standard, which he edits, Kristol called for a "military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. Why wait? Does anyone think a nuclear Iran can be contained? That the current regime will negotiate in good faith? It would be easier to act sooner rather than later. Yes, there would be repercussions--and they would be healthy ones, showing a strong America that has rejected further appeasement."
…

I suppose one could reasonably posit that buried somewhere deeeeep beneath the Right’s slag heap of Neocons and crypto-fascists, Dominionists and wannabe Klansmen, corporatists and gun freaks, there might be something someone could call Conservatism that could eventually blossom into a worthwhile political ideology; worthy at least of being treated with some respect and dealt with as a loyal opposition.

(Of course, should all of that filth ever actually be purged from the movement there wouldn’t be enough warm bodies left to put together a decent game of whist, but that is a different discussion for a different day.)

But on "This Week" last Sunday, when asked who the “Republican Establishment” even is these days, David Brooks and George Will absolutely gave the game away, replying “Well these days it's four guys in a room” and “The Republican Establishment died in 1964” respectively.

Bingo.

Anything even remotely resembling a genuine conservative movement is completely AWOL to begin with, which begs the question of where in the fuck Rosenthal gets the nuggets to assert that Kristol is one of this nonexistent movement’s members-in-good-standing?

I mean, from what Front Office is the entitlement sent that bestows this bestial, slaughter-drunk imbecile with the moniker “respected” in the first place?

And the answer is...from institutions like the New York Times itself of course.

As the NYT manufactured the illusion of David Brook’s gravitas and Tom Friedman’s sagacity out of a bolt of the same whole cloth Judith Miller used to stitch together her Emperor’s New Flight Suit, so are they now using exactly the same technique to squeegee the blood off of Kristol’s hands and give him a chair at the top of the mountain.

But of course Kristol isn’t a voice of Conservatism; Kristol is a voice for everything that is wrong with Conservatism. Because until the Right has been thoroughly lanced and drained of pus like Kristol, they are not a movement at all; they are nothing but a confederacy of depraved interest groups, each only slightly more interested in destroying America as a pluralistic, free, hopeful and tolerant society than they are in devouring each other.

They are a spectrum of diseases that are killing this country, and Kristol is no more than the giggly, sociopath front-man for one of their more fascistic mutations.

So, sure, there are circles where Kristol is respected.

So what?

There are also circles where the Klan is revered, and where Timothy McVeigh and Eric Rudolph are considered martyrs and holy warriors.

The only difference between Kristol and the rest is that none of these other butchers believed in waging their wingnut jihads by proxy. They got their hands bloody carrying out their own atrocities, and didn’t dispatch others to do their slaying for them from a PNAC conference room or a Fox News desk.

Kristol and his Neocon cult, on the other hand, antiseptically outsourced their atrocities from one side of the camera, and then cheered them on from the other.

Which is apparently the New York Times Manual of Style’s new working definition of “respectable”.