We were preparing to write something else fairly epic about the end of Bill Kristol’s tenure as the New York Times‘ “lightning rod conservative” columnist, a position he accepted one year ago for the sole purpose of annoying people during an election year, but… something’s happened!
Let’s think about this!
So, the New York Times. The Times is a junk-rated company with an op-ed page read by certain brands of mean liberals. Rich teenagers are the first group. They get free hard-copy delivery at their boarding schools and are required to read the whole thing, every day, by their liberal professor, Allah. At first they only like the Bono column, but then they think, hey, Tom Friedman is a pretty cool dude with his rich people columns about “green” BlackBerrys he saw while jet-setting in Java and Fiji, and that Maureen Dowd sure is a stitch, and how cool is it that Nicholas Kristof gets to fly to Africa all the time.
In college, however, they start to hate Tom Friedman and throw pies at him. They think Kristof still does an able job but eh, so boring after a while.
As for Maureen Dowd, well, this is the key to everything. Those who go through college and *still* think that Maureen Dowd is funny or witty or worth reading at all, they become the die-hard Times opinion page readers for life. You may know some of these people. They hold mid-size dinner parties with white wine and bruschetta. All of their favorite albums are soundtracks. They complain non-stop about the quality of the produce at their grocery store. And so on.
As for the other group of mean liberals — the ones who discover in college that alliteration isn’t really the best vehicle for humor, and that it’s actually sort of offensive for this Maureen Dowd person to have 800 words in the Paper of Record twice-weekly — they just stop reading the Times op-ed page entirely, and then the other sections, one-by-one, until they’re only checking out NYTimes.com for ~3 minutes each week to study the latest revelations about John Yoo’s torture memos. Then they get drunk, navigate to Wonkette, and comment about violent sex until Sara gets pissed and bans them all.
The last group is the one the New York Times was hoping to win back by hiring Bill Kristol. Since Bill Kristol may be the actual worst person in the world — not really exaggerating! — it was fun to mock ~30 of his columns in the last year at the expense of increased page views for the fucking Times that hired him. Anti-Dowd liberals hate both themselves and Bill Kristol, so this must have been a profitable arrangement. But he was fired last night, about when everyone expected, and, goddamnit, now we have to grow up! Obama’s president! The Era of Low-Hanging Fruit is over and retired in a Dallas mansion! This demon, “nuance,” is going to force us to write thoughtfully! EVERY SINGLE PUNDIT IS SUDDENLY FUCKED.
Ha ha, just kidding. The Washington Post hired Bill Kristol today. Like the Times, they just want angry page views. We’d love to defy them and ignore Kristol, but c’mon… we’re not heroes. He’ll write “Reagan ended slavery” or something in his first column and we’ll be all over that. “GOD BILL KRISTOL IS SO RETARDED HE KNOWS NOTHING IT WAS OBAMA ST. LINCOLN ENDED IT, WHERE IS CORRECTION EDITOR?” or whatever. The Era of Low-Hanging Fruit will never die. There’s nothing we can do. It’s just too goddamn profitable.
Too long? Well how about YOU perverts try justifying in under 500 words how it is that Bill Kristol has been hired to write columns for both the New York Times and the Washington Post in the course of two years, HMM?
Read More:
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- It's Official: Maureen Dowd Is As Creatively Inept As David Brooks
- Are Therapists Necessary?
{ 113 comments }
the reasons for kristol having a column are somehow associated with that theory about monkeys typing shakespeare…sooner or later he’ll get something right.
He gives good head?
Dan Brown sold like, what, 800 billion books? This is essentially the reason that Bill Kristol has a job, somehow.
[re=228920]dougbob[/re]: Yes, but how many Bill Kristols will it take and for how many years will we have to see this shit – and whatever happened to the Law of Diminishing Returns?
I’m not upset about Kristol Meh moving to the WaPo for a monthly column. It just means that this is the beginning of his career flatspin and he will probably only realize how low he’s fallen when he’s stuck writing his annual rant about his cat’s breath next to the ad for a puppet show in the local Penny Saver.
Y’know, he has a purty mouth…
“Then they get drunk, navigate to Wonkette, and comment about violent sex until Sara gets pissed and bans them all.”
But caring, loving, emotional sex is still cool, right? RIGHT?
well, we needed someone to replace Novak on the nasty, bitter, wrong front, right?
But no, really, we didn’t. Barf.
Because hiring somebody that just got fired by a prominent paper is a good way to initiated a narrative in which the former paper doesn’t ‘get it’, and this new paper somehow does?
You had the long version of why this is OK. Here’s the short version: BK’s no doubt being paid in American dollars and, well, they’re completely worthless now THANKS TO HIM, so he’s responsible for the fact that he’s working for free. Ta da.
The Washington Post?? Likes angry page views? Wha…?
If that was the case, would paper with a female ombudsmen run a Charlotte Allen hit-piece asking rhetorically “Why Women are So Dumb?” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/29/AR2008022902992_pf.html) If they cared about the issues women care about, they would.
Well Jim, the reason William Kristol is now at the Washington post is that it is from Washington that we send those out to, and you betcha it has to be all about job creation also, and healthcare, and Kristol is a lightning rod conservative who dontcha know has a good worldview and doesn’t let the filter of the mass media also keep him from talking directly to real America and real American people from Washington, in the Washington Post, without the filter of the media, also.
Kristol has another column because he knows where Cheney hid the bodies.
Frankly, I think y’all are petulant brats.
You know what (or “who” . . . no . . . “what” was right) Billy Kristol gave us: Sarah Mofo Palin, that’s what. Think about your lives without the youtube Couric interview clips, the turkey slaughter, the garbage bag full of clothes, and babies, lots and lots of babies. Pretty damn empty, aren’t they?
Thanks be to Santa Clause, and the Washington Post, there will be humor in 2009.
[re=228930]I_KILL_ZOMBIES_ALSO[/re]: Maybe, but careless, hatefilled, cold-hearted sex has a lot going for it, sometimes.
Well..uh..haha!..I thought alliteration was, you know, kind of funny. Hehehengh and all.
Crap.
Have mistakenly read, “angry page fucks,” Mark Foley turns off the computer, slinks off to his masturbatorium and madly faps away.
Then they get drunk, navigate to Wonkette, and comment about violent sex until Sara gets pissed and bans them all.
*raises hand*
The man is comedy candy. Thanks, Washington Post!
What’s wrong with violent sex?
[re=228921]nestor[/re]: Oh puhleeeze. That is just too much. Good Lord.
“All of their favorite albums are soundtracks”
Bwahahaha
Kristol was the only man capable of making me miss William Safire’s intelligently snide pieces. And for that, he will be missed.
[re=228952]Godot[/re]: With Kristol? EEWWWWW….
Ah tink da Kristul bringz da funnee!!!
Kristol is popular among neoconservatives because he purports to be an intellectual with an appeal to the know-nothings of his movement. That he’s a complete failure at both of these angles won’t tarnish his image at all, as neocons are at heart faith-based, and so no amount of failure can dissuade them from worshipping their idols. With the support of his flailing, stupid base, he will carry on embodying the worst of all worlds, rather like Kid Rock trying to play Pachelbel’s Canon on the bagpipes. But as long as there’s still popcorn left, I’ll keep watching.
WaPo hired Kristol-nacht because it knows that Preznit McHopey is committed to Equal Opportunity Wingnuttery. Also.
Let us libtards be thankful that Caribou Barbie still has a platform in the Maindream Media with which to keep ruining the Repugnicons’ chances in 2012.
And given how Billy has been 100% wrong on all his predictions since, oh, his first column on the ascendency of the Austo-Hungarian Empire, how else will we know what will definitely *not* happen? It’s not like we want to give the National Review any of our precioussssssss pagehits and eyeballs.
A Kristol classic: “If [Hillary Clinton] gets a race against John Edwards and Barack Obama, she’s going to be the nominee. Gore is the only threat to her, then. … Barack Obama is not going to beat Hillary Clinton in a single Democratic primary. I’ll predict that right now.” —William Kristol, Fox News Sunday, Dec. 17, 2006.
Foreign Policy magazine said this was the No. 1 Worst Prediction of 2008, adding “The Times is currently rumored to be looking for his replacement.” And for the grand finale … The Post owns Foreign Policy! Guess it will be one big happy family, right?
I just lost my job– will the Washington Post hire me, then?
Who on earth is this Bill Crystal guy? Is that the guy from “City Slickers?”
“All of their favorite albums are soundtracks” – you’ve shot your 2009 load already
Bill Kristol gives people hope. For, after reading one of his columns, they can say to themselves “I am not Bill Kristol” and find the strength to make it through one more day in foreclosure/retail-layoff/bankruptcy/New Depression/Coleman-vs.-Franken/$1.2-million-office-redecoration/infrastructure-collapsing/elephantine-public/Chinese-owned/Hooverville/Paul-Blart:-Mall-Cop day in America.
The fact that this paper hired
him to write his drivel upsets
me far less than the fact that
this man was actually taken seriously
by John McCain in the last election —-
once an asshole gets called
a “serious thinker” by the self-
perpetuating club of “serious thinkers”
it doesn’t matter WHAT they do
any more.
This is almost as laughable as
Alan Greenspan explaining how to
fix the mess brought on by the
asset inflation bubble, caused
by Greenspan’s own interest rate
policies.
Send him back to Alaska where he belongs.
When will the MSM give a column to somebody under 30, who…I don’t know, has actually served in Iraq maybe? And knows something about life in the 21st Century instead of all these old farts. And you know Billy K was an old fart even in elementary school. Some people are just born old and cranky.
I doubt that he gives good head. look at that belly. He can barely bend over.
I’ll say this for Kristol – I occasionally followed the link to read his letters from Bizarro-World in full. Even an allusion to Dowd is usually enough to make me lose interest finishing in a sentence.
Well, time to cancel the Post again. I killed it last year because I hated that they took seriously anything Bush said. They tempted me back by giving me a new subscription for 99 cents a month. I’m going to cancel again, and this time they’ll have to pay ME to take it back.
The Times hired Kristol for the same reason it hyped up the WMDs before Iraq–because it was eager to prove to the Bush administation that they are not a bunch of wild-eyed New York liberals who read books and debate ideas but, rather, are ‘serious’ about the world the US confronts. They fired him because Obama is now in office. The Post hired him because they are idiots.
Hey I love it. Thanks to Bill, Sarah and JTP we were able to elect a black man with a muslim sounding name to be our pres. Another 8 years of these jokers = President Kucinich.
01/26/2009 NEVAR FORGET
THIS IS WRONG. Are they hiring him to somehow prove they have a diversity of opinions? That is ridiculous because the Post always have supported the right in most foreign policy issues especially Israel. Are they hiring him because he has anything to say that isn’t being said elsewhere? That is ridiculous because most network news, daily papers, and all AM radio ape his views. Are they hiring him because he’s a witty or even an interesting writer to read? That is ridiculous because he can barely right his way out of a paper bag.
Something is very, very wrong and when I get to be king I’m going to damn sure set it straight.
Also, Fred Barnes I’ll have made into dog food.
Also.
I have this fantasy where one of those douchey right-wing pundits/columnists lose their job and their life savings due to the very economic policies called for by their douchey right wing views and have to go out and find a job whereupon they discover that there is not much need in the real world for douchey right-wing pundits/columnists. In order to survive, they will have to live on unemployment but see it run out because their influential columns have made influential people in DC think that people don’t need unemployment for long periods of time. They will also lose their health care and will be unable to be covered due to their heart disease they got by attending all those free, lobby sponsored banquets. Unfortunately for them, they will eventually run out of medicare because their their influential columns have made influential people in DC think that poor people shouldn’t get medicare for long periods of time.
In order to get by, they will then have to get by through a series of demeaning temp jobs and low-wage service jobs until they retire in their 70′s after spending years as a Wal Mart greeter, the only job they could get because their influential columns have made influential people think that WalMart is good for the country and social security is just welfare for old people.
Naturally, they will die bitter and alone, mourned by noone
Thank you for this blurry picture. There is nothing worse than looking at a photo of the BK that is in focus.
Does a move from the Times to the Post constitute failing upward or failing downward? Discuss.
[re=228991]Hooray For Anything[/re]: Your fantasy will come true when human stupidity comes to an end.
[re=228998]Tommmcatt[/re]: Times was weekly. WaPo, monthly. Therefore the change is from Monday Madness to PKS, preKristol Syndrome, when you crave sugar, feel your lymph nodes getting tender and feel like screaming loud enough to break the Kristol sham-da-rear.
Billy Kristol II: The legend of curly’s gold
[re=228978]Arfer[/re]: He can probably get down on his knees just fine. Getting up afterwards, now that’s a different story with a less happy ending.
I guess we now know roughly the date of beginning of the next “conservative era.”
I think I heard about this Theory of Collegiate Dowd Schism in my Intro to Sociology class.
Excellent analysis of the trajectory of NY Times readers. I myself used to devour the grey lady every morning at breakfast over the eggs and b., back when Walter Lippmann was writing. At any rate, my best observation is that the contemporary undergraduate snatches up the hard copy only to fill out the crossword during lectures. Or to clean the hamster cage after bouts of violent sex.
[re=228930]I_KILL_ZOMBIES_ALSO[/re]: Caring, loving, emotional sex was never cool.
Hooray For Anything: You forgot to throw welfare in there. For an entire niche of professionals who spend at least some time railing against the evils of “welfare queens” it would be ever so poetic should they all become welfare queens.
And, um, yeah, Kristol likes teh ghey buttsecks!
Question to WaPo veterans: Is Katie Graham spinning in her grave?
“Well how about YOU perverts try justifying in under 500 words how it is that Bill Kristol has been hired to write columns for both the New York Times and the Washington Post in the course of two years, HMM?”
I’m pretty sure you meant “HENGHH”.
Krisco is going to be disappointed when he finds he’s slated for the comic section.
Conservatives burn Christopher Buckley for his heresies, but love Kristol.
Really is all you have to know about the complete failure of Conservative thinking.
Now if we can only collect up Kristol, Jonas Goldberg and every other failed Republican clone and ship them off to Australia, then our long national nightmare could truly be over.
[re=228947]shortsshortsshorts[/re]: Admit it, shorts, if you were having sex with Kristol, it would have to be violent.
They should Gerson and Kristol small desks directly across from each other so they can give each other hand jobs while they type their lies.
Welcome to the WaPo op-ed page: home of Eugene Robinson and every discredited Jew hawk in America!
Makes you wonder why newspapers are going the way of the dinosaurs, doesn’t it?
http://democralypsenow.blogspot.com/
pandit kitteh’s in ur opeds, farten in ur airlocks.
Well how about YOU perverts try justifying in under 500 words how it is that Bill Kristol has been hired to write columns for both the New York Times and the Washington Post in the course of two years, HMM?
There is no God. Got it in four!
setting aside the fact that no reasonable human being should ever hire that idiot to give his opinion on anything, one could say they are slowly but steadily moving toward accumulating all the garbage in one place; that could be considered progress.
Critical Issue:
http://wonkette.com/405784/and-also-bill-kristol-brought-us-sarah-palin-which-is-a-federal-offense#comment-229034
[correction to above: "with his/her bum"]
Here in Texas we love Bill. He puts words together, adds commas and periods and the sentences are grouped into paragraphs. What more could you ask for? Maybe tacos or ribs?
You would think that the Post would not want to draw attention to the fact that they bought, hook, line and sinker, everything that the Bush Administration ever said about the war.
Maybe they just want to gather up all the people no one should ever listen to in one place, so we can ignore them without having to think about it.
This gives Kristol an entire month to plumb the golf ball-dimple depth of neo-con thought. Well done, WaPo, well done.
Then they get drunk, navigate to Wonkette, and comment about violent sex until Sara gets pissed and bans them all.
You forgot: start a Facebook campaign to get unbanned, piss off the editors so much with their whining that they just unban them to shut them the fuck up, lather, rinse, repeat.
Did someone say golf ball?
He’s just plain fun?
The Washington Post was firmly neo-con throughout the war, so this is not that much of a surprise. Plus, they’ve already got Krauthammer on their payroll. Adding Kristol is sorta like having Darth Vader and Ming The Merciless on their side.
He has to make Gerson and Kraut hard at the same time to get the job.
How can Washington Post hire this idiot? Shouldn’t his reputation be more damaged than Christopher Hitchens’ liver.
what are these “papers” of which you all speak? Are they attached to the tubes through which we send the “emails”?
also
without Kristol, what would my bird shit on?
[re=228975]Mr. Herpes[/re]: Exactly — both chronological and emotional age matter. The papers send people to seminars about why papers are dying, then hire a tired hack like Kristol because in their hearts they think that only reactionary old folks read their paper. But it isn’t as much columnists under 30 that we need (not that it’s a bad idea in any way) as EDITORS who have done something (like military service) real with their lives other than stare at a computer screen. The people I went to Medill with who became newspaper editors could not report or write their way out of the proverbial paper bag, which is why they headed for the copy desk. The newspaper editors for whom I worked that really rocked the job included Herman Kogan, a former WWII Marine combat correspondent, U. of Chicago grad, noted historian (“Lords of the Levee” may be the best Chicago history ever written) and a gifted writer for all seasons. Newspapers are suffering from bad leadership, as Kristol’s hiring shows. His columns are a complete waste of trees. The inexcusable George Will also.
And I thought Billyboy was just racist against takin’ orders from the Mexicanos who run the illegal alien rag known as the NYT.
Now that NY is dead as the financial capital of the world, the real seat of power is well, Barry’s seat. Billyboy knows which city can butter his bread, and is making a strategic move, he saw which suburbs are the richest, just like the rest of us.
[re=228926]ManchuCandidate[/re]: I have no motivation in verifying if this will indeed be a monthly vs. weekely column. If so, I will enjoy seeing how 30 days of preparation and thoughtful wordsmithing compare to 7 days.
I don’t read Dowd just because she funny and witty. She is also incredibly sexy. And she has way more rhetorical tricks than just alliteration. She also puts at least one old-timey movie reference into each column. But her signature move is what I call the Dowdversion, a pair of parallel phrases with a slight alteration that makes an ironic observation, often including a pun. In a recent column she packed over a half dozen of these in:
http://dowdreport.blogspot.com/2009/01/attack-of-dowdversions.html
I did enjoy having Kristol in the Times because he took criticism away from Dowd as being the most hackneyed and clueless columnist. Sort of like the flypaper theory of terrorism he espoused for keeping troops in Iraq.
[re=229004]PsycGirl[/re]: it’s the lumbago!!! oy, vey….
“The Era of Low-Hanging Fruit will never die. There’s nothing we can do. It’s just too goddamn profitable.”
That says everything about the failure of the national media far pithier than I could ever have.
[re=229047]Lionel Hutz Esq.[/re]: “You would think that the Post would not want to draw attention to the fact that they bought, hook, line and sinker, everything that the Bush Administration ever said about the war. ”
Like anyone cares anymore, srsly.
if this is true i will be canceling my subscription to the Post tomorrow. and Kristol can forget about that monogrammed douchebag that some of us were going to send him.
[re=228998]Tommmcatt[/re]: After Bill Kristol flutters his way to orphanage cribs at night, settles on the chest of tiny babies and sucks out their Marxist welfare state, infant breath, his WaPo columns will hint of the faint, sweet odor of Similac. Thus we shall know that Conservative Reconquista has begun.
Wrong or indulging in hyperbole or is it just that I see Kristol as the intellectual equivalent of Kool Whip? Don’t just know.
Damn, that made my day. Thank you Mr,. Newell.
NPR has an anti-snark “article ” on Tuesday. No idea when. Snark is ruining comedy.
[re=229010]honkeyman[/re]: “Or to clean the hamster cage after bouts of violent sex.” Damn damn damn that image is not going to go away soon.
When he is on Fox, Kristol always has an expression on his face like he just silent farted and the other panelist aren’t sure who dealt it.
Frank Rich is still cool though, I don’t care what y’all say.
By the way, I for one purposefully avoided going to Kristol’s columns – and I enjoy reading idiocy ironically – to deny NYTimes the benefit of getting marks to pay to boo that clown. I might go to his column at the Post because I don’t read that anyway (I do for “New York Times” as Palin calls it sans “the”), but there should be awareness of the dangers of rewarding a major league troll with page clicks.
[re=229108]rocktonsammy[/re]: In Superman Bizarro World, farting is protected speech under the Anti-First Amendment. Besides Bush, Kristol is that world’s first envoy, Ka-El.
Is BK’s jaw wired shut? I always wonder. The fart idea has merit, however it will take me a while to think about it. After I drink this entire bottle of Absolut I will speak of a world of violent butt secksuality and condoms with super glue lubricants. How mean is that?
The reason the Post hired Kristol is because they’re all a bunch of stupid fucks. Really.
[re=229086]S.Luggo[/re]: Bravo on the first paragraph. But he is the pseudo-intellectual equivalent of Miracle Whip. High cholesterol, high fat, no nutrition, and always has a sourly foul and lingering bad taste. The supersized white goop for white trash but looks rosacea-pink when smeared on bologna, and is the fake version of the already fake, cheap American mayonnaise. Serve with Velveeta, Wonderbread, stale Coors and Marlboro butts.
Meanwhile David Brooks is singing “I Can See Clearly Now.”
[re=229141]Mr Blifil[/re]: Now that he is a gay fascist lesbian liberal, probably
[re=228921]nestor[/re]: I can’t beleve that comment didn’t set off some kind of matter/anti-matter quandry.
[re=228974]Arfer[/re]: Please, no.
The WaPo? Who reads that except to find out where Metro will be fucked up and why the Redskins are fucked up and why U Street is for the hipsters. Or was that City Paper? Whatev. Can anyone outside DC name a WaPo columnist who doesn’t write for the sports section. Please?
I say we dress him like a clown and force him to live in Gaza for a few years. That’ll learn ‘im.
[re=229149]DangerousLiberal[/re]: Given his rosacea, it does make sense for Kristol to be with the Redskins.
[re=229150]gournay45@gmail.com[/re]: Either that, or Mr. Wu in Deadwood would probably put him to good use.
He’s gonna pop!
[re=229141]Mr Blifil[/re]:
I can see clearly now
That any notion of
A two state solution
Is gone.
It’s a bright,
Bright,
Bushie day.
Everywhere I look on Wonkette today I see Fletch. Is there a Fletch 3 movie coming out soon? Oh god oh god oh god say yes please.
[re=228940]blinky_twinkie[/re]: That can’t be it either. Everybody knows where Cheney hid the bodies.
I wont beleive a word he writes until he starts running over pedestrians.
I swear, the people running newspapers deserve every lost reader they earn. Do they do it for the entertainment or are they just mailing it in to placate conservatives? I suppose trying to find a “conservative” who can string together anything remotely coherent is tough, but damn.
Ahh yes, Jon Stewart and Keith Olbermann must have palin eating grins this morning. Bonuses for everyone.
I gave up on WaPo years ago. I only take the Sunday post so my wife can get the sale ads and coupons.
“Well how about YOU perverts try justifying in under 500 words how it is that Bill Kristol has been hired to write columns for both the New York Times and the Washington Post”
1: Probably doesn’t have brain cancer.
2: One of a handful of remaining conservatives still in captivity.
3: Finishes every job interview with “Happy Endings” all around.
[re=228920]dougbob[/re]: It takes an infinite number of monkeys with infinite tyepwriters to replicate Shakespeare.
For Kristol, one drunk ape.
Well, he was inventive. You can say that for him.
[re=228981]slavojzizek[/re]: Your analysis is frighteningly accurate.
Not too long. Want more.
“justifying in under 500 words how it is that Bill Kristol has been hired to write columns for both the New York Times and the Washington Post in the course of two years”
He sold his soul to the devil? (7 words) (I got nothin’ else)
um, unfamiliar much with the phrase “so bad it’s good” ????
Usually when you utter these words you’re defending your PMS-induced purchase of US Magazine, but since the National Enquirer published the investigative story of the year and perhaps going back a decade or so to the NYT’s decision to print A1 in color, there’s really no way of distinguishing any of these pulp products anymore.
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