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.
