Steve Benen ends an otherwise unexceptionable post about Bill Kristol getting canned with an observation that is faulty, to say the least.
That's absurd. There is no reason whatsoever to believe that Kristol's replacement won't turn out to be yet another bottomlessly awful hack. In fact, it's a near certainty.
The fundamental problem, after all, is that the people who run the New York Times op-ed page are cretins. Apparently he was fired because he was and is a for-shit writer. But it's not like that shittiness emerged out of nowhere in 2008. Kristol has always been a shitty writer, and there's no reason the NYT should not have known that:
A senior writer at Time magazine recounted to me a similar experience with Kristol following his stint in 2006-07. "His conservative ideas were cutting edge and influential," I was told."But his sloppy writing and failure to fact check what he wrote made us queasy."
Why couldn't Time have figured this out beforehand? A mystery! How could someone whose "ideas" about foreign policy were by 2006-7 proved fucking wrong in the most gristly way possible be deemed a "cutting edge" thinker? A mystery!
Well. These would be a mysteries if you were so foolish as to believe that the people who run places like Time or the NYT care all that much about hiring writers who can write well and who get things right. But they don't. Those are not relevant considerations for their hiring decisions.
The source makes clear that the decision not to renew Kristol's contract is not related to his neoconservative ideology—Kristol's proximity to key Washington players ranging from Bush and Cheney to John McCain (whom he supported in 2000) was considered a distinct plus. His leading advocacy of the Iraq War also added to his appeal. Kristol was viewed as a mover and shaker whose ideas had ready impact on the political firmament in Washington.
He's an Insider, and that's all that matters. Otherwise could only be seen as stark raving idiot lunacy to believe that Kristol getting Iraq monstrously wrong was somehow a feather in his fucking cap.
The person replacing him will be selected for similarly ridiculous reasons, at least from the perspective of anyone with the antique concept that the NYT op-ed pages should feature good writing by people who know what they're talking about.
But nobody really believes that anymore. The brute fact of the matter is that by and large the NYT op-ed page sucks. Friedman, Dowd, and Brooks are pretty embarrassing, and Krugman is there pretty much by accident.
People who at one point thought it was cool, hip, and daring to give Bill Kristol a gig in the first place are capable of any atrocity. The replacement will suck pretty hard.
