Thanks to Jay for pointing to George Packer's post on the New Yorker's website echoing a call I made a few weeks ago: the NY Times really, really needs to fire William Kristol from the op-ed page (or, more precisely, not renew his one-year contract). Here's Packer's case — he deserves enormous credit for burrowing through the Kristol archives to unearth a year's worth of malfeasance in punditry:
For Pinch Sulzberger and Andy Rosenthal to renew Kristol’s one-year contract, in 2009, would be for the Times to reward failure—and look where that got Wall Street and General Motors. It’s not just that Kristol isn’t another Safire (although an absence of verbal playfulness and wit is a consistent hallmark of the Kristol prose style). It’s not just that his views are utterly predictable (if that were firing grounds, close to half the Times columnists would lose their jobs). It’s not just that he was fundamentally wrong at least every other week throughout the year (misattributing a quote in his first column, counting Clinton out after Iowa, placing Obama at a Jeremiah Wright sermon that Obama didn’t attend, predicting the imminent return of a McCain adviser named Mike Murphy who ended up staying off the campaign, all but predicting a McCain victory, sort of predicting that McCain would oppose the bailout, praising McCain’s “suspension” of his campaign as a smart move, preferring fake populism to professional excellence and Joe the Plumber to Horace the Poet, urging Ayers-Wright attack tactics as the way for McCain to win, basically telling McCain to ignore all the advice Kristol had given him throughout the year, but above all, vouching again and again and again, privately and publicly, for Palin as an excellent Vice-Presidential choice). What the hell—it was an unpredictable year.
The real grounds for firing Kristol are that he didn’t take his column seriously. In his year on the Op-Ed page, not one memorable sentence, not one provocative thought, not one valuable piece of information appeared under his name. The prose was so limp (“Who, inquiring minds want to know, is going to spare us a first Obama term?”) that you had the sense Kristol wrote his column during the commercial breaks of his gig on Fox News Sunday and gave it about the same amount of thought.
Part of my argument against Kristol was Kristol's inability to appreciate the colossal irony when he criticizes others for things of which he is far more guilty, particularly his repeated criticism of “media elites,” which is actually an excellent way to describe Kristol himself. Here's Packer's similar point:
That’s just the problem with Kristol: he is always ready to vulgarize, but he can’t see that he, more than his antagonists, has become a member of what Orwell called a “permanent and pensioned” class of critics, and that “the quality of [his] thought deteriorates accordingly.”
Hypocrisy and rampant self-aggrandizement are unattractive qualities in general, and in particular on the op-ed page of a major newspaper. Why on earth would the Times sign up for another year of that?
UPDATE: Turns out there's quite a lot of chatter out there about Kristol's future at the Times, including some from Kristol himself. Apparently he's aware that there's a good chance he won't be renewed. Asked if he wanted another year, he answered: “I'm ambivalent. It's been fun. It's a lot of work. I have a lot of things going on. But I haven't really focused on it.”
Sure, sure. Here's my prediction: Kristol will inform the Times that he does not want to renew his contract. That way, they can't fire his sorry ass.
David Frum. Frum just bolted from the National Review; he’d actually be a rational conservative voice of a caliber the NYT could actually take some pride in.