Exactly why Kristol is poison to the New York Times
Mon Mar 17, 2008 at 04:54:14 PM PDT
Obviously, I hang around the Daily Kos site and have a high regard for many of the things I read here. Some of the writers here are rock stars to me. I also believe that a person writing a diary here with mistakes of fact tends to get called out with amazing speed.
However, I recognize that this site is far more amenable to some points of view than others. I would not expect a writer or columnist for a major media publication to cite a diary on the Daily Kos as the sole evidence to something he is publishing in his periodical. While a diary, or even a front page item, might be a great lead for an item or column, I would expect that journalist or columnist to do a bit more digging to confirm the veracity of what they read here, which, after all, has a partisan axe to grind.
This is why the Kristol/Newsmax boner is a textbook example of what a horrible decision it was for the New York Times to hire Kristol in the first place. We expect the Times to engage a range of columnists representing differing political perspectives. What we do not expect is willful endorsement and use of transparent propaganda in the service of that diversity.
William Kristol has a very enigmatic demeanor. He can write or speak the most appalling lies as if they were as apparent as the sum of two and two, almost as if he is embarrassed at the obviousness of his observation. He can lie in such a blatant, bald-faced way, it staggers one's imagination to think that he really believes it, that he is really too smart to believe such idiocy, that he has become a sort of Zen Master of lying. But for someone to be lying instead of merely mistaken, he must know that he is lying, and so we assume that he knows he is a liar and suffers the accompanying Death of the Spirit that comes with it.
But then Kristol goes and depends on Newsmax as the sole source for a damning column that he submits to the most widely disseminated editorial page in the world.
Now, a liar knows he's a liar, and he knows the other liars who have been lying alongside of him for years. So he presumably knows that Newsmax is a major propaganda organ of the Right and that most of what they publish is at best semi-sourced, semi-vetted half-truth and heavily varnished with wingnut distortion. And he may give his impish "well, I know this is crap, but it serves my purposes and it may change someone's opinion to my side" smile, but he knows it's crap, right? He knows that it doesn't pass muster under any acceptable rules of journalism, right? He wouldn't use it to source anything under his byline in the mainstream media, right?
Or perhaps he thinks Newsmax is real. Perhaps he thinks that they are a perfectly acceptable and reasonable news-gathering organization and that it is entirely appropriate to use them as the sole source for his Times column that day.
But if that's possible, then that leads us to another mind-blowing possibility -- maybe he thinks that he himself is real!! Maybe he believes the crap he spews. Maybe it's not all a smug, self-satisfied act. Maybe he is sincere!!!
We live in a world where liars somehow achieve a Ph.D. in lying and acquire the title "spin doctor." They are paid to lie. They know they're lying, the interviewers know they're lying, but they say their lies into the mike, the interviewer nods and accepts their lies without challenge, and the lies get put out as reasonable thought into the public sphere.
But when a liar's skills become so deeply embedded in himself that he loses that one little thread that gives him a small promise of redemption -- that he knows he is a liar and can hope to one day reconcile his sins -- when he starts believing his own bullshit -- that way madness lies. What was once a convenient skill that facilitated an agenda becomes a pathology.
There is a significant difference between the inveterate liar, who lies often and knows it and doesn't care, and the pathological liar, who lies almost as a default, for whom lying is so instinctual and natural that he doesn't even realize he is doing it most of the time. Sometimes the inveterate liar is more dangerous because he can mix in a few truths to appear reasonable. But the pathological liar is someone who needs help. I'm not sure what you do with him, what can be done to minimize the harm he causes and help him rehabilitate. But one of the very first things one most do with the pathological liar is to make sure he does not have a column on the Editorial Page of the New York Times.
Kristol did more than cite an erroneous fact. He has lost himself in his own web of finely spun horseshit. He is inextricably entangled in it, and he is ensnaring the Times in the process.
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