The blogosphere is in a state of celebratory snarkiness because Bill Kristol’s column today in the New York Times will be his last.
Bill Kristol, conservative pundit and editor of The Weekly Standard, signed a year-long contract to be the New York Times’ token conservative columnist despite hating the paper and pretty much everything associated with it.
New York Times readers weren’t having ANY of it. The hate mail started as soon as Kristol’s contract was announced. I’m not sure the guy could have succeeded if he tried, but we’ll never know because it never seemed like Kristol did anything but phone it in.
People gave him all kinds of hell about being flat out wrong in his predictions. Hell, even Jon Stewart managed to get in some pointed, informed jabs when Kristol appeared on his show shortly before the election. Stewart asked him, “Aren’t you ever right?” to which Kristol replied that Stewart read the New York Times too much.
Oy.
It’s not his failure to predict the future that bothers me. Aside from Nate Silver, nobody had that great of a track record predicting the twists and turns of this past election.
What bothers me is that Kristol racked up corrections in a way that would have rendered just about anybody else unemployed. He made mistakes that ranged from claiming that Barack Obama was at Rev. Wright’s church services on days that he wasn’t, to factual mistakes about polling data and, at one point, where the Supreme Court of California was. Surely some portion of responsibility lies with his editors, and the Grey Lady HAS gotten a lot of flack about the way they edit their columnists, but a columnist of Kristol’s stature should know better and write better. Period.
So surely, with the media being in the sad state of affairs that it is now, Kristol will have to settle for just his editing gig at The Weekly Standard and his frequent appearances as a talking head on Fox News, right?
Wrong.
Kristol will now write a monthly column for The Washington Post and he will also participate in an online program presented by the Washington Post called “Post Partisan.” Seriously? Is there not another conservative writer who we can give the job to? Someone who deserves it? I guess not.
Another activity Kristol will have to look forward to is a proposed debate with Matt Damon. Their beef would be that Damon called Billy an idiot for saying that the US has won the war in Iraq, which made it into an article in the Miami Herald. I’m not 100 percent sure I believe that the debate will actually go down, but I’d watch it if it did.
What I’m more excited to see is who The New York Times picks to replace Kristol. Hopefully the new columnist will care more about their coveted gig than old Billy did.
