Monday, June 01, 2015

The Inexplicable Mr. Kristol



Despite a virtually unbroken record of being horribly wrong about everything, Bill Kristol continues his equally unbroken record of being handed one, prime teevee gig after another.

The most interesting story in American political journalism would be the story of exactly how (names, dates, terms of service) it is possible for this particular ghoul to be so untouchable.


The fact that Mr. Kristol is uniquely unqualified to ever be given a seat at any table ever again seems to be an open secret among the Very Serious People, which is why the specific nature of the machinery behind Mr. Kristol's professional indestructibility must be so ugly and so fraught with high-level repercussions that no one in the ranks of professional political journalism dares to spill the beans.

Which, in turn, is why I beleve that if the unruly mob outside the gated Beltway Media ever learned the specific details of how Mr. Kristol effortlessly extorts his way onto our teevee machines, the dominoes which would start to fall would be, at the very least, extremely entertaining.

14 comments:

Neo Tuxedo said...

The most interesting story in American political journalism would be the story of exactly how (names, dates, terms of service) it is possible for this particular ghoul to be so untouchable.

My brainmeats showed their age just now by rephrasing that as "What unholy Headmaster Ritual allows this specific belligerent ghoul to run Manchester schools?"

bowtiejack said...

Drifty, Drifty:

Always with the facts and the logic!
That way lies madness.
Here, have a nice pull on the soma bottle.
Now lie down and Herr Doktor Kristol will read you another nice fairy tale.
Remember, this is the best of all possible worlds.
Journalists are courageous truth seekers and tellers.
See how easy that was?

D. said...

It's probably the traditional multiple interlocking blackmail scheme, complete with photos and/or video in a bank vault somewhere. Why his victims have not done an Orient Express on him is left as an exercise for the reader...

-- From Tales of the White House Basement, forthcoming from Random Penguin Onion Press.

Kaye said...

This is so funny cuz Bill Kristol is himself a, I'd not the, solipsistic Boomer who's less serious than his father was (in his crazy way).

dinthebeast said...

@Kaye:
Making this perhaps the only subject he has any authority to speak on ever, and he still fucks it up? I guess that's just what he does...

-Doug in Oakland

Anonymous said...

Obnoxious blowhard snaps at pompous buffoon.

janet said...

Its always projection.

Unknown said...

What an awesome tweet. Kristol is describing himself but doesn't seem to realize it.

Unknown said...

The fact that Bloody Bill WRONG Kristol is still given a high-profile soapbox to spew his always-wrong warmongering dumbassery is all the proof you need that the media has learned nothing from their Iraq faceplant and, worse, they never intended to learn a fucking thing either.

Unknown said...

Also, my reaction to the beginning of WRONG Kristol's tweet "Can we be honest?", was "there's always a first time."

BBWK makes the shortlist of people who, despite my typically extremely peaceful disposition, I'd probably punch in the face if I saw him on the sidewalk. Paul Ryan and several senior members of GWB's maladministration are the other members.

Chan Kobun said...

The sad part is that for once, he's not wrong (well, the tweet isn't, anyhow - if I watch the video my monitor will suddenly stop working due to fistular interference). Racist Rand is playing the same grift his father does, and he's getting away with it because our media never calls them on it.

Anonymous said...

He gets it from his dad:

"I remember back in the late 1990s, when Ira Katznelson, an eminent political scientist at Columbia, came to deliver a guest lecture. Prof. Katznelson described a lunch he had with Irving Kristol during the first Bush administration.

The talk turned to William Kristol, then Dan Quayle's chief of staff, and how he got his start in politics.

Irving recalled how he talked to his friend Harvey Mansfield at Harvard, who secured William a place there as both an undergrad and graduate student; how he talked to Pat Moynihan, then Nixon's domestic policy adviser, and got William an internship at the White House; how he talked to friends at the RNC [Republican National Committee] and secured a job for William after he got his Harvard Ph.D.; and how he arranged with still more friends for William to teach at Penn and the Kennedy School of Government.

"With that, Prof. Katznelson recalled, he then asked Irving what he thought of affirmative action. 'I oppose it,' Irving replied. 'It subverts meritocracy.' "

http://ahistoricality.blogspot.com/2009/09/quotation-it-subverts-meritocracy.html

Kent said...

As with being rabidly anti-communist in years past, as long as you are rabidly "pro-Israel" today you will be invited to the all-you-can-eat media buffet. Honesty and rational thinking on the subject are not required -- indeed, they are more of a detriment since sound bites and sound policies are not exactly synonyms.

Fritz Strand said...

Kristol stays on the air because, like most conservatives, the folk who schedule him don't get satire, but they do know how to piss off liberals.