There is no concatenation of caveats, provisos, conditions, stipulations, reservations, qualifications, and conditional phrases you can deploy to, ahem, bulwark your editorial decision to give Butcher Bill Kristol a platform from which to mouth off about war in the middle east. On that subject, his mouth should have long ago been (metaphorically) filled with salt and sewn shut forever.
And it all began back in 2014 when the then-barely-post-pubescent executive producer of "This Week" , Jonathan Greenberger, took it upon himself to pluck Kristol from the rubble of his many, many catastrophically bad public opinions and rehabilitate his professional reputation.
[Fun fact: In 2024, Greenberger left ABC News to become... wait for it...
Jonathan Greenberger To Depart As ABC News D.C. Bureau Chief For Role At Politico
Jonathan Greenberger is departing ABC News, where he has been Washington, D.C. bureau chief, for a new job as executive vice president of Politico. Greenberger will start in his new position on April 22 [2024]
...because of course.]
Join me now in this brief jog down memory lane.
Given Kristol's very long and very public record of being pretty much wrong about everything (from the WaPo) --
Bill Kristol knows his predictions have been bad but he’s going to keep making them
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“With Kristol what I love are not so much the big, grand predictions that are always wrong, but the smaller ones that really demonstrate how poor his actual grasp of politics is,” says Alex Pareene, the editor of Gawker, one of Kristol’s regular tormentors. “He is sort of ideologically motivated to make certain ridiculous claims — Iraq will be a huge success, Romney will win — and even his ‘peak Trump’ predictions are based on the fact that he can’t abide the ongoing rejection of his entire ethos by Republican voters. But it’s when he makes claims that are just wrong but not motivated by the advancement of his worldview . . . that we see just how bad he is at his ostensible job.”-- at no point in the past 20 years have any of the many corporate media drones who have chosen to hire him (and his idiot son-in-law, Matthew Continetti) ever been vindicated in that decision (from Politico in 2014)
Bill Kristol joins ABC News
Bill Kristol, the editor and publisher of The Weekly Standard, has joined ABC News as a contributor, "This Week" host George Stephanopoulos announced on Sunday.
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The agreement, one source said, includes regular appearances on the Sunday show, as well as special events and other political-relaed events. But there's also a window that allows him to do other shows on cable television.
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Jonathan Greenberger, executive producer of "This Week," said in a statement Kristol is "an original thinker" that will make their team stronger:
“Bill makes our outstanding team of contributors and analysts even stronger. He’s an original thinker with a unique perspective on the political and cultural landscape, and we look forward to hearing his voice on the 'This Week' roundtable on a regular basis."Furthermore, at no point in the last two decades has Kristol been exonerated of the years he spent strutting across the American media stage, blood-drunk and smirking, confidently insisting that not only could unleashing hell on Earth in Iraq “have terrifically good effects throughout the Middle East” and that it would be a “two-month war, not an eight-year war” but that inflicting Kristol-brand democracy on Middle Eastern countries at the point of an American sword was something we should be doing a lot more.
So how, you may fairly ask, is Butcher's Bill Kristol still abroad in the land?...
What the hell kinda cancel culture are we running here where the people who were this very loudly dead fucking wrong about everything got to keep their place in elite media circles and get to go right on being courted for their opinions on subjects about which they should shut their holes forever?
What the hell kinda cancel culture are we running here where the people who were actually right about everything continue to be treated as pariahs, and told to sit down and shut up because it's rude and unproductive to, y'know, remember stuff?
Funny old world.
4 comments:
Unfortunately, those who were right all along have been effectively buried. The "trusted" voices (and faces) of media punditry and "newsfotainment" have kept their squats by the largess of their nameless/faceless media overlords. They simply had to adapt their style to fit the new landscape to continue punching down, blaming Dems for what they, themselves, had championed.
That's not particularly funny. Hasn't solved anything. Has continued the bad ideas, churning them into the "way things have always been done" in this holy land. We're closing in on 50 years of conservative ideology driving U.S. policy. 50 years we will never get back. 50 years off-course, taking us further for our once shared ideals.
Meanwhie, Olbermann is relegated to his own podcast and a sports gambling site.
It clearly is not about being right or wrong, correct or clueless. It's about The Club, of course, but how do you get in The Club? My guess is it's the all-important Job Interview, over lunch at some classy restaurant or oak-paneled bar. They pitch themselves as wise, connected, the second-smartest guy in the room (behind the guy across the table who's paying for lunch/drinks). Do your homework and know which names to drop, which to avoid. Must be a great pitch.
Trusting in, and championing The Bulwark, with its line up of GOP hatchet-men, pollsters who excell at demonizong, issue trivializers and political ratfuckers was never gonna work out for Dems and progressives.
Kristol got his cushy pundit post with horrific Weekly Standard (another one of those pet propaghanda enterprise funded by only the best Billionaires) taken away by MAGA, so he parked his "Is their such a thing as a bad war?" credentials at Bulwark.
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