Oops. Kristol erred again, claiming Obama was at Trinity church when his pastor made questionable remarks about race and the United States, using...get this...Newsmax as a source! Only Obama was on his way to Miami that day.
My initial concern about the Times hiring Kristol was rewarding failure - this guy has been wrong about every major policy issue for years. But these concerns have evolved. The more notable problem, after two months of columns, is that Kristol is just an awful columnist, a weak and sloppy writer, and a boring political observer. (And he's been wrong about every major policy issue for years.)
How bad is it? Even William Safire agrees with the Hoyt piece that described the Kristol hire as a "mistake."
When reached by phone, Safire told me: "I saw the excellent piece that the public editor wrote the other day, and that pretty much tells the story."
Is there anyone outside the paper's leadership who still thinks this was a good idea?
Kristol is a GOP man, disingenuous, overtly political, and a crappy writer. I'd love to read a decent, well thought out conservative writer in the pages of the New York Times -- or any newspaper, for that matter - and the sooner the Mona Charens, Thomas Sowells, and Bill Kristols of the world are exiled to Newsmax, the better.
Love that the New York Times has freed up its columns for all to view. So now I can link directly to today's op-ed by Paul Krugman, "Conservatives Are Such Jokers," a gut punch to conservative rhetoric about the poor. In short, from the President on down, many conservatives show no empathy for those less fortunate, only cruel humor and callous disregard.
In anticipation of the veto, William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, had this to say: "First of all, whenever I hear anything described as a heartless assault on our children, I tend to think it's a good idea. I'm happy that the president's willing to do something bad for the kids."
Heh-heh-heh.
Most conservatives are more careful than Mr. Kristol. They try to preserve the appearance that they really do care about those less fortunate than themselves. But the truth is that they aren't bothered by the fact that almost nine million children in America lack health insurance. They don't think it's a problem.
"I mean, people have access to health care in America," said Mr. Bush in July. "After all, you just go to an emergency room."
And on the day of the veto, Mr. Bush dismissed the whole issue of uninsured children as a media myth. Referring to Medicaid spending - which fails to reach many children - he declared that "when they say, well, poor children aren't being covered in America, if that's what you're hearing on your TV screens, I'm telling you there's $35.5 billion worth of reasons not to believe that."
The thing is, with Bush and Republican policies favoring the rich at the cost of the rest of us, more and more folks are feeling the pinch of rising health care and housing costs and stagnant wages, while shouldering a disproportionate share of the taxation burden. So GOP contempt is hitting a pretty broad swath of voters.
I'm with Krugman. I believe this contempt is genuine not feigned. And it would take an exceptional amount of empathy for someone like Bush - a pampered son of privilege and power who was given everything he's had in life - to feel anything but contempt for his economic and social "lessors." He's never had to choose between credit card payments and the mortgage, health insurance or the heating bill.
CALLER: We've talked a lot tonight about healthcare, and it seems like the government pretty selective about health care. I imagine you get government health care, too? Would you be willing to give up your government health care until the rest of us Americans can at least buy into the health care plan that you're allowed to have as a Congressman? Because I know it would help our business a lot, it would lower our costs.
REHBERG: I gotta tell ya, I've gone many years with minimal health care, and, frankly, while I don't find your question to be offensive, I pay for my health care, it comes out of my salary, I have Blue Cross/Blue Shield.
I always like it when someone calls and says, "you, Congressman, don't pay any Social Security!" Well, excuse me! Yes, we do. In 1984 they passed a law saying we're on Social Security like everyone else.
And so, I pay for my health care, like anyone else pays for their health care. I have Blue Cross/Blue Shield.
And you wonder why we're seeing difficulty in reforming our health care system?
KRISTOL: Every Democratic presidential nominee is going to the DailyKos convention. That?s the left-wing blogger who was not respectable three or four years ago. The Howard Dean kind of sponsor. Now the whole party is going to pay court to him and to left wing blogs. Not a single one is going to the Democratic Leadership Council meeting in a couple of weeks. That?s the organization that Bill Clinton was head of in the early ?90s ? that was supposed to be the new, more moderate Democratic Party. The Democratic Party has gone left and it will hurt them in 2008.
Forgetting for a moment that Kos isn't organizing YearlyKos, or is even the primary froce of the convention, hat's great news! The DLC is the big-money wing of the Democratic party, and big money already has enough representation in DC. Bloggers represent the people, the base of the party. That the candidates think they need to "court" the voters is a good thinkg.
Second...that the Democrats have moved left means they're finally approaching the center after their recent fearful rightward turn.
Sorry, chump. But given the radical and now objectively untrue political views that were "respectable" 3-4 years ago, I don't know if there's a higher compliment.
Some day soon -- and that day may even be right now -- being outside of what the Beltway Dingbats considered "respectability" during the greatest failure of political and journalistic conscience in American history will be a badge of honor and courage as coveted as the ability to claim membership in the French Resistance after World War II. You won't be able to survive politically without it.
Let's hope so, tho' methinks the media will do everything in its power to bury this American Resistance. After all, the media's part of what we were fighting against.
Personally, I think blogging, populism, and the drive for reform is living a precarious existance. There are a lot of powerful people who would like to just go back to the way things were in, oh, 1998, say. Once the Iraq War is over and the Bush administration evicted from office, they'll do everything to assure the folks that everything's okay.
Of course the previous status quo was what allowed the Bush administration to exist in the first place, and the usual powers enabled and abetted the worst of the administration's overreach. That's why it's likely we won't see impeachment unless we continue to clamor for it.
This is just a beginning. And the hard part's still to come.
