Wow am I late. The New York Times announced last Saturday that Bill Kristol is becoming an Op-Ed columnist. Its story is remarkable for a few reasons. First, the article insists on calling Kristol "a conservative" and describing his father, Irving, as "one of the founding forces behind modern conservatism." Irving and Bill are neoconservatives. Evidently that’s the new n-word. (And so it follows the protocols of the other n-word: from now on, only neoconservatives can say it, but anyone else who uses the word is antisemitic.) Is a little sexism at work here, too? Bill K’s mother, Gertrude Himmelfarb, a big historian and also an n—-, doesn’t get mentioned.
More importantly, the article scrupulously quotes Kristol’s attacks on the Times thru the years but doesn’t detail his fatuous pronouncements about how we were going to save Iraq. Let alone his pro-Israel stuff. Thus Tom Friedman, David Brooks, and now Bill Kristol have been allowed by the Times to bury their idiotic judgment on this most important issue of our time. Has any of them been held to account? Only Judy Miller has paid a price for the lies that helped lead us into the war.
Back in Vietnam days, the Times published the Pentagon Papers, exposing the liars who had caused enormous suffering and pain here and in Indochina. Former Timesman David Halberstam published The Best and the Brightest, pillorying the bluebloods who got us into the war. This time around, the intellectuals are failing up.
it is remarkable how unaccountable our elite is today. The goyim dare not criticise them; they wont police themselves–in fact they will cover for themselves.
How will it all end? How will their dominance of American politics, foreign policy, culture, the academy end?
It would be merely interesting if it were only a computer game. Alas, their tragedy, their narcissism, their incompetence, their ethno centrism will drag down the U.S. too.
Oh well, they are saying:" we can move onto Delhi and Shanghai…."
Well of course they will document the shortcomings of bluebloods, but as they demonstrated with the Bolsvhivik revolution, Israel's founding and subsequent wars and the "neocon"'s latest – they not so willing to discuss their own.
Funny how these are the conservatives – giving the appearance of balance when in reality it's just a discussion within different parts of the spectrum of the Jewish community. They are peas in a pod on issues like immigration (the more the better) And this is "America"'s paper of 'record'?
Yawn. More of the same demonizing. Gets old.
Off Topic: Looks like Phil didn't make the list this year, although Richard Silverstein did:
2007's MOST SELF HATING JEWS FINALISTS
By calling Kristol a conservative, the NYTimes is trying to make Jewish fascist ideas respectable.
The NY Times has a long history of coverups, from Walter Duranty on the Soviet Union, to burying stories on mass murders of Jews during WW2, to lying about the Nakba (for 30 years).
Hiring Kristol is no big surprise.
The Sulzbergers, who are no longer Jewish, have to please some extremely racist and Zionist NY Jews to keep major advertising revenue coming in, and management has been looking for a replacement for Safire for a while.
BTW, Neocons are the current incarnation of American Jabotinskians. Thus they are Jewish Nazis and not Jewish fascists.
The Israeli Labor Party is more properly a fascist party(although it has been gradually moving toward Nazism for a long time), and it is a travesty for it to be a member of Socialist International and the Party of European Socialists.
One blogger has suggested that the NY Slimes picked up Kristol to prepare for battle with the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal, which harbors ambitions of replacing the Slimes as the nation's "newspaper of record."
Let us pray that it's not so. With the Slimes, the WSJ and the Post battling to out-neocon each other, the public would be subjected to a true "race to the bottom." No wonder newspapers are dying.
The Times also recently lionized Venezuela's opposition before and during their failed coup d'etat, along with so many other radical, undemocratic, or violent right-wing reactionary movements in Latin America throughout the years.
It may be advertising revenues that are the deciding factor in the NYT's biased and unreliable foreign coverage. Or perhaps the newspaper and its benefactors have their own investment in American imperialism and corporatism (the status quo).
MM you may be on to something – the New York Times supports what most people would call eminent domain abuse, largely because they are some of the chief beneficiaries of it.
They have constantly shielded their corrupt developer partner Bruce Ratner who basically makes money off tax payer subsidies.
"It may be advertising revenues that are the deciding factor in the NYT's"
Combination of that and idealogy – look at Mort Zuckerman – he uses his publications to promote financially lucrative positions for his interests and for his 'friends' (probably in exchange for something) but also as a pro Israel super-megaphone.
The New York Times has always been Pro Israel – whether its Labor or Likkud Israel – and there is the reality of its hypocritical, bigoted readers who self -identify as liberal Jews.
Like Safire and, to a "kinder and gentler" degree, Brooks, Kristol will be an enthusiastic supporter of the Likudniks.
With Brooks and Kristol as the house conservatives on the Op-Ed page, supporters of Greater Israel can be assured that nary a criticism of Israel from the American right will ever be voiced on that page. With Safire, Brooks and Kristol, it appears that neo-conservative voices are about the only acceptable conservative voices permitted there. (Harmless libertarian conservatives like Tierney were also given a limited run.)
The real threat to America's unconditional support for Israel has always come more from the right than the left. While there is more criticism of settlement policy, Likudniks, etc. in the Democratic Party, an underlying attitude of general support for Israel is more firmly established and less likely to result in abandonment. There is no Democratic Party equivalent to Pat Buchanan, Ron Paul, Jim Baker and allies of Middle East oil interests.
One could cynically assess The Times' hiring practices as an effort to ensure that leading conservative voices continue to echo a strong pro-Israel and neo-conservative line.
So The Times now has as house columnists Friedman, Cohen, Brooks and Kristol all of whom supported the neocon position on Iraq.
What a wonderful diversity of views.
And let's not forget that spineless wasp cum jellyfish, Times Editor, Bill Keller, who had the gall to describe himself early on in the Iraqi War as a liberal who been forced to support the invasion and occupation of Iraq by the overwhelming force of President Bush's arguments.
Be sure to read Kevin MacDonald's 'Thinking about Neoconservatism' article and his 'Neoconservatism as a Jewish Movement' monograph which are both linked at the top of the following URL:
http://www.itszone.co.uk/zone0/viewtopic.php?t=32606
http://NEOCONZIONISTTHREAT.BLOGSPOT.COM
Completely off-topic: The sarmatian might like to begin the year reading some of the thoughts in the 2008 Edge Annual Question:
link to edge.org
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Self-inquiry for the inquisitive mind.
And "me" I wish Pearlman was alive to give you the chance to have some entertainment. If he couldn't win the argument at least he would swear and make threats, to the amusement of the old english devil. But right now all you have to deal with are chicks and barons and I see you are playing with the food before eating it, only to have some reason to stay for a while. Anyway it is good to have you around.
http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/?p=91
Kristol Expands His Audience Thanks to New York Times
The New York Times’ decision to add Bill Kristol to its stable of weekly columnists seems pretty shocking to me and not only because Kristol, as pointed out by Josh Marshall, has virtually charged the Times with treason. As the main foreign policy muse of David Brooks — call him Kristol-Lite — Kristol was already communicating his views on the Times op-ed page quite effectively, I thought.
More than that, if you look at the list of those Times columnists who specialize in foreign-policy (Tom Friedman, Roger Cohen, Nicholas Kristof), you can see that the addition of Kristol tilts the balance even more sharply — unanimously, in fact — towards interventionism. Like Kristol and Brooks, all three tend to see (a) foreign policy in highly moralistic terms and (b) the U.S. (and Israel) as “exceptional” in that respect. For liberal (or humanitarian) interventionists, such as Friedman, Cohen and Kristof, as for neo-conservatives, Munich and all that followed it loom larger in the way they see the world than Vietnam or, more recently, Iraq. Indeed, while Kristof was quite skeptical of the Iraq War — or at least the administration’s stated reasons for starting it (thanks in part to Joe Wilson) — the others (Cohen at the International Herald Tribune) were pretty darn supportive, if for no other reason than Saddam Hussein was a brutal and tyrannical ruler.
Moreover, all three have no patience for what passes for the “left” or the traditional right in the U.S. and all three have at times, I think, contributed — albeit not necessarily in a consciously deliberate sort of way (certainly not Kristof) — to Islamo- and Arabo-phobia in their writings. (Kristol’s Weekly Standard, of course, excels at the latter.)
Of course, these three have been balanced to some degree by Frank Rich, Paul Krugman, Bob Herbert (and Maureen Dowd’s often-dead-on analyses of the psychodynamics behind the war), but the latter group are not foreign-policy specialists in the same way. (The first were all foreign correspondents for most of their careers.) Nor, of course, are Brooks and Kristol who, despite his disdain for the kind of “on-the-ground” experience of actual foreign correspondents, has been prolific on the subject of foreign policy since his and Bob Kagan’s ground-breaking Foreign Affairs article, “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy,” almost 12 years ago, and particularly since 9/11. I think it highly likely that, unlike Brooks, Krugman or Herbert, Kristol, who co-founded the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) with Kagan the following year, will devote most of his columns over the next year to foreign policy, and specifically to the importance of maintaining high troops levels in Iraq; a hostile posture toward Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, and Hamas; spending much more on defense; and depicting any candidate (particularly a Democrat) who disagrees as a Chamberlain-like appeaser.
In that respect, Friedman, Cohen, and Kristof — as “liberals” — can be expected, in varying degrees, to take different positions from Kristol, but, because they share the two basic assumptions mentioned above about the nature of the world and Washington’s benevolent role in it, I think the Times’ op-ed page will serve more to limit the foreign-policy debate in this critical election year than expand it. Essentially, why feature yet another interventionist, when, it seems to me, the country could benefit from a more fundamental discussion that seriously challenges those assumptions and the interventionist policies that flow from them? I can think of some very compelling thinkers on both the right and the left — and the “radical center” of the New America Foundation or the “realist” Nixon Center, for that matter — who could at least offer a serious and coherent critique of both neo-conservative and liberal interventionism. I’m not advocating non-interventionism (least of all, “isolationism”, a very slippery term); I simply think that a foreign-policy debate bounded by the Clinton administration on the one hand and the Bush Doctrine on the other will not be particularly edifying.
This leaves aside questions about the peculiar choice of Kristol who, after all, played a leading role in a well-orchestrated campaign beginning immediately after 9/11 to take the country to war on what were clearly false premises. (Asserting a link between Saddam and al Qaeda became a Standard obsession. As a columnist, of course, Kristol will be expected to offer his opinions rather than new facts. But based on his and his magazine’s record, what fact-checking standards or rules of evidence, if any, will the Times seek to apply to his polemics? Giving Kristol a weekly column in the Times must rank as the journalistic equivalent at least of giving the Medal of Freedom to George Tenet, Tommy Franks, or Paul Bremer — something that Rich, Herbert, Dowd, and Krugman all complained about at the time.