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Kristol Out, N.Y. Times' Loss

By Wlady Pleszczynski on 1.26.09 @ 2:15AM

At the end of his weekly New York Times column today comes this cold announcement: "This is William Kristol's last column." That completes the rout of Nov. 4, 2008. There'll be dancing in the liberal streets. And so we have that rarity in today's economically declining media -- someone let go for purely political reasons. On top of that, someone let go who is its lone conservative voice and a most readable, not only Washington- but New York-savvy voice.

Kristol notes in his piece that Jan. 20, 2009 marked the end of a conservative era, and challenges liberalism to defend liberty to the same extent the right has since the election of Ronald Reagan. Or to the extent FDR did. President Obama's success, he writes, will depend on whether he follows their lead. Dinner with Barack Obama didn't save Kristol at the Times, but it did give him the last word. And now the Times can return to talking to itself.

View all comments (25) | Leave a comment

ruth| 1.26.09 @ 3:09AM

Pinch doesn't have to worry about providing diversity of opinion in his paper, he'll just find another Mexican billionaire to bail out the dying ragsheet that is the New York Times.

Cody| 1.26.09 @ 3:49AM

Don't worry. I'm sure someone else from the Weekly Standard will take Kristol's place.

Mike| 1.26.09 @ 4:46AM

The bell tolls for neoconservatism. With Frum gone from NR and Kristol from the NYT, the neoconservatives are moving on to greener pastures since they cannot even hope to trick the Obama administration into outlandish, foreign interventions-adventures. Goodbye and good riddance. Thank you for wrecking the GOP!

Haarball| 1.26.09 @ 7:21AM

How do you say this with a straight face?

"Conservatives have been right more often than not — and more often than liberals — about most of the important issues of the day: about Communism and jihadism, crime and welfare, education and the family."

kravitz| 1.26.09 @ 7:55AM

To write good columns, you need good ideas. And real facts. Kristol still lacks both requirements.

It never helped to be so pro -war when his servants have done his heavy lifting since his birth either. Maybe if he learns to sweat, he can start to learn credibility.

Les Grossman| 1.26.09 @ 8:46AM

No great loss. The leftists didn't read him, and a conservative has no time for the Times.

William R| 1.26.09 @ 9:05AM

Good riddance. It would be hard to find anyone that has done more damage to conservatism than Kristol. The GOP will start to recover when it purges the NeoCons.

Jeremiah| 1.26.09 @ 9:19AM

Bill Kristol often has had interesting points to make, but not in the Times.

His columns were lazy and shallow. Today's parting column reads as though it were written by the president of a young republicans club at a college. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

I hope and expect that the Times will replace Kristol with another conservative.

J David| 1.26.09 @ 9:38AM

Kristol was one of the Knee-Pad RINOs that gave us Juan "Petain" McVain. I hope that he wanders around in the wilderness until he rediscovers conservatism, or declares outright that he has been converted to Obamunism.

Michael Roush| 1.26.09 @ 9:59AM

I find it interesting that nobody has pointed out that David Brooks is still published by the New York Times. I guess he doesn't qualify as a conservative among the readers and commentators at the American Spectator.

A Balrog of Morgoth| 1.26.09 @ 10:34AM

As a matter of fact, yes, it is entirely possible that David Brooks doesn't qualify as a conservative among the readers and commentators at AmSpec, probably because they are...conservative.

David Brooks may be a standardbearer for the sort of squishy northeastern Republican who is going the way of the dodo, but he is hardly a conservative.

David Brooks is conservative in the same way that Thomas Friedman is a deep thinker whose observations go beyond conventional wisdom.

JP| 1.26.09 @ 11:33AM

This harping on so-called Neocons is getting old. Speaking of Conservatives, how's the famous class of 1994 doing? Who was the last conservatives that ran successfully for President? What became of Govenors Owens? Engler? Thompson? The conservative voters of Arizonia, South Carolina, and Nebraska gave us McCain, Hegal, and Lindsay Gramm -not exactly Calvin Coolidge Republicans.

Where are all these mythical conservatives who come save the day. Most of you have already conceeded New England and the Rust Belt. Add in California, Orgeon, and Washinton, not to mention increasing blueish Montana, Arizonia, and Colorado.....well how will the GOP ever retake Congress or the WH? Blame all of our problems on a mythical political (or is it a racial) subgroup, that's how. Feith, Kristol, Leo Strauss, and Alan Bloom are to blame.

Going into Iraq didn't lose Iraq for Bush. In 2002 and 2004 he campaigned for and won several Congressional seats -all based on taking the fight to the enemy in Iraq. Bush and the GOP lost in 2006 and 2008 not because of going into Iraq, but for almost losing it.

The mythical Neocons didn't create the real estate bubble or appropriate nearly $4 trillion in borrowed tax payers money from 2002-2006 - GOP Congressional members -many who ran as conservatives did.

One can be upset with pundits who made a fortune riding the GOP wave for a decade or more and then jumping ship once the gravy train has left the station (ex Noonan and Parker), but at least get your categories correct.

William R| 1.26.09 @ 12:40PM

Iraq took down the GOP and no one favored it more than Kristol. As far back as the mid 90s he was urging Clinton to invade Iraq. He finally got his war.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=280279

National Greatness Conservatism. Big Government at home and abroad. Good riddance.

Red Phillips| 1.26.09 @ 3:42PM

Good ridance is right. Kristol's neocon interventionism was Jacobin, not conservative. That the "conservative" movement bought it is to their shame, but the tide is turning. Non-interventionism is a rising tide on the right, as it should be, and the neocons know it.

Ben Blue| 1.26.09 @ 4:46PM

Kristol, Perle, Feith, Wolfowicz are disgusting freaks who start fights and then run off to let others do the dirty work. Pure filth

WendyG| 1.26.09 @ 4:46PM

Kristol will, however, be writing column for the Washington Post.

I guess the NY Times prefers the menopausal musings of Maureen Dowd and the like.

Adam| 1.26.09 @ 5:32PM

Good riddance. If Kristol is conservative, then Karl Marx must have written the Constitution. Neocons are not conservatives. They are idiots who have worn out their welcome with real conservatives. I think the NY times kept him on so long to hurt the Republican party since he did SUCH a fine job running it into an iceburg.

Thomas O. Meehan| 1.26.09 @ 6:05PM

Kristol and company used the GOP until it lost it's usefulness. I suspect that from The Times point of view Kristol outlived his usefulness the moment he no longer had access to power. After all, when Othello dies, Iago is out of a job.

Dave| 1.26.09 @ 6:51PM

Kristol is neither an intellectual nor a conservative. The GOP will flourish again once it returns to its Constitutional roots and purges the influence of these big government, Israel first, neo cons.

Paul E. More| 1.26.09 @ 7:41PM

David Brooks has declared that he isn’t conservative, a fact that is easy to see if one isn’t a cheerleader for Neocons.

Bill Kristol has praised FDR, Truman and LBJ as models of what a politician should be on substance.

Allan Bloom was a homosexual who died of AIDs, and that story was only brought to light because his good friend Saul Bellow wrote a book about it.

Neoconism is a left of center ideology, which more often than not fails to come to grips with reality and attempts to impose preconceived and fallacious ideas onto a reluctant reality.

Only if and when the Right rejects Neoconism will it return to offering ideas and policies that can put American back on track.

Demand real conservatives with real conservative principles and ideas. And if you don’t know what those are, read the old conservatives like Russell Kirk or Robert Nisbet or James Burnham. Start with Burnham’s book Suicide of the West and then go on to Kirk’s Conservative Mind and Prospects for Conservatives (aka Program for Conservatives).

JP| 1.26.09 @ 8:27PM

Nisbet and Burnham? Two men who were sure that the West could not defeat the Soviet Union, and who in thier own minds believed the fight was over, and the West lost. Kirk, who loved to write, was not directly involved in politics. He was more of a philosophical historian than any actual partisan. The first 2 had absolutely no influence on GOP politics, and Kirk had more influence after his death.

"The GOP will flourish again once it returns to its Constitutional roots and purges the influence of these big government, Israel first, neo cons. "

Ja, und mussen wir diesen Bewegung Judenfrie machen. Ein Reich, Ein Volk..."

If I was the editor of this magazine I would be quite depressed that it attracts some many anti-semites.

Red Phillips| 1.26.09 @ 10:55PM

JP, saying someone is "Israel first" or calling them a neocons (which in Kristol's case is indisputable) makes one an anti-Semite? Interesting. Very interesting.

If the NYT is truly interested in diversity (ha ha) Kristol's replacement will be a right-wing non-interventionist. To counter the left-wing and "right-wing" interventionism that is dominant.

Paul E. More| 1.26.09 @ 11:52PM

JP demonstrates that the Neocons are no different than the Jeremiah Wright racists. If one finds the behavior and ideas of Neocons deplorable, which any civilized conservative (or even classical liberal) would, then instead of arguing over ideas, JP and the rest of the discredited Neocons play the “race” card, or the ethnicity card or the “religion” card.

It should be obvious to all that the reason the Neocons, like Obama, play the race card all the time is that is the only card they are holding. Neocons have no legitimate ideas, only a thuggish sense of self-interest and a pathological self-absorption.

The reason Kirk is important is that he provides us with a fairly recent and very accurate framework of the Anglo-American conservative worldview. If one doesn’t have a knowledge of the world of ideas that Kirk writes about, one will be open to being defrauded by the likes of Neocons.

It is interesting that a bigoted Neocon hack like JP would claim that old-fashioned conservatives didn’t think the West could win in the Cold War. Because it was Neocon characters like Norman Podhoretz, the Kristol clan, the Commentary Crowd and the Neocons who had already infiltrated National Review that argued that President Reagan had “sold out” the anti-Soviet cause late in his administration. Maybe the Neocons were really upset because Reagan didn’t support unending war in the Middle East.

AMG| 1.28.09 @ 12:03AM

James Burnham influenced Reagan, who awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom and spoke of having read his work for many years. Bill Buckley called him either the greatest cold war strategist or the greatest post-WWII foreign policy thinker, something like that (it's from "The Reagan I Knew"). Until his retirement he was the main foreign policy writer for NR, and an infinitely greater thinker than that degenerate pervert Allan Bloom and all other neocons. Not sure where this business about him not being an influence on the Republicans came from, he was when they were still realists.