William Kristol, failing upward

Perversely, under George Bush Republican loyalists fail upward at astonishing rates. That's no less true of their pundit class, none of whom are ever held accountable for manifest failures. In neocon circles especially, rank incompetence is held to be a mark of great distinction. Piling error upon error, the right-wing bloviator plunges hard up the ladder of failure. With the correct combination of ignorance and imperviousness to fact, an ambitious numbskull will ascend from weakness to weakness with dizzying speed.

Nobody has endured a more blessed string of failures than William Kristol, a man whose first, nay whose every instinct is to cheer for war. You would be hard pressed to find another private citizen who has had a more pernicious influence on American foreign policy than William Kristol. And it would be the work of many hands to catalogue all the ridiculous pronouncements made by this man since 2001. His long train of predictions about the Middle East has been gaudily, disastrously, stupefyingly misinformed.

Just the buffoon, it seems, for the New York Times to award with a guest column for 2008.

If you object to the NYT rewarding failure in quite this way then you're intolerant, according to the Times' editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal.

Rosenthal told Politico.com shortly after the official announcement Saturday that he fails to understand "this weird fear of opposing views....We have views on our op-ed page that are as hawkish or more so than Bill....

"The idea that The New York Times is giving voice to a guy who is a serious, respected conservative intellectual — and somehow that’s a bad thing," Rosenthal added. "How intolerant is that?"

Rosenthal doesn't seem to recognize that his choice of adjectives to describe Kristol – "serious", "respected" – are in fact precisely what is at issue for those whom he dismisses as having a "fear of opposing views".

Andy, why don't we just swap "serious" and "respected" with the other adjectives you toss around – "weird" and "hawkish"? There, now, that's a little closer to the truth, isn't it?

How weird and hawkish is Kristol? Here's one example from among many, chosen almost at random to illustrate the kind of nut the New York Times' Andrew Rosenthal favors.

It concerns US relations with a country now much in the news, Pakistan. On July 12, 2007, when asked by a Fox News host about reports of Taliban hiding out in Pakistan, Kristol argued that Bush should order a secret invasion of the country.

"I think the president's going to have to take military action there over the next few weeks or months. ... Bush has to disrupt that sanctuary."

"I think, frankly, we won't even tell Musharraf," Kristol continued. "We'll do what we have to do in Western Pakistan and Musharraf can say, 'Hey, they didn't tell me.'"

Now that would have been a dandy way to destabilize a nuclear-armed Pakistan, wouldn't it? Notice how, characteristically, Kristol believes that ignorance is an acceptable defense for incompetence or failure ('Hey, they didn't tell me.').

These are the kind of serious, respected, intellectual blatherings that Andrew Rosenthal is so eager to embrace.

Mr. Kristol, 55, has been a fierce critic of The Times. In 2006, he said that the government should consider prosecuting The Times for disclosing a secret government program to track international banking transactions.

In a 2003 column on the turmoil within The Times that led to the downfall of the top two editors, he wrote that it was not "a first-rate newspaper of record," adding, "The Times is irredeemable."

Looks like the Times has found redemption by making itself an object of ridicule.