Awarding Kristol a column in the Times is like awarding George Tenet or Paul Bremer the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

In these times, it seems, the more one fucks up, the more one is rewarded.

The Times is like some nerdy know-it-all who knows nothing. Can't you just see him slipping up his taped glasses, saying, with a lisp, "You know, we really need another conservative.  I know!  Billy Kristol!  Bet nobody else woulda thought about that!"  No imagination, no daring.  Had they really wanted a fascinating voice of conservatism, they would have picked someone like Andrew Sullivan.  But maybe he just don't show enough respect.  

mollysimon-

Good point. Andrew Sullivan would have been a much wiser, much more interesting choice.

But, unlike Kristol, Sullivan actually admits when he gets something--even a massively significantly something--wrong.

My sense of it is that the decision to hire Kristol was about circulation. Indeed, the explanation for the hiring offered today by the Times focuses on the drama of it all, as if the editors were deliberately trying to incite a minor blogosphere riot, thereby creating lots and lots of free publicity, which would then (or so the editors may assume) attract more readers to the paper.

From today's NYT: "Mr. Kristol, 55, has been a fierce critic of The Times. In 2006, he said that the government should consider prosecuting The Times for disclosing a secret government program to track international banking transactions. In a 2003 column on the turmoil within The Times that led to the downfall of the top two editors, he wrote that it was not 'a first-rate newspaper of record,' adding, 'The Times is irredeemable.'"

It's as if the editors are literally pleading with us to turn this into a drama. And my guess is that liberals around the country are ready to oblige, that they are now, even as I write this, composing blogs and emails and letters to the editor, furiously protesting the hiring of Kristol. But any blog or letter one might write only feeds the sense at the Times that they have captured readers' (and potential readers') attention, in that the hiring of a columnist has become a news story in itself (like the hiring of Katie Couric to anchor the CBS Evening News).

As for the ways in which awarding Kristol a NYT column stinks, Andrew Sullivan (as Isaac Chotiner has pointed out) says, ". . .ideologically, having both David Brooks and Bill Kristol as the sole representatives of the right-of-center is to focus on a very small neocon niche. . . There are about five 'national greatness' conservatives out there. Four of them now have columns in the WaPo or NYT: Kristol, Brooks, Krauthammer and Gerson [and Bob Kagan]."

Sullivan has a point, but my problem with the hiring of Kristol isn't this. It's competence (which was also my problem with the hiring of Couric). Bill K has been wrong, dead and demonstrably wrong, on the single most important issue of our time, and he's been wrong over and over and over again. Which, to my mind, is the definition of ineptitude.

But in the world we now inhabit, the world of GWB, ineptitude, apparently, is money in the bank.

But their choice, if it was meant to bring in eyeballs, shows such a lack of imagination.  Sullivan gets millions of hits.  Those could have translated into millions of hits onto the New York Times site, just via link alone.  Hence the near-sighted NYT nerd in glasses.  

Honestly, Kristol is no lure to me.  And I doubt he'll remain so to others who check him out.  He's just not that good.  Dowd is a polemicist.  But love her or hate her (and I do both) you stil want to see what she'll say next.  

mollysimon-

Kristol is no lure to me, either. I wasn't saying that he'd be a bigger draw than Sullivan. I was saying that the Times (in its nerdy, know-it-all pesona) may think that he is. Or at least that he is, unlike Sullivan, more unapologetically of the Bush/neocon right.

And having a Bush sycophant writing for the NYT, a Bush sycophant who has repeatedly reviled the NYT, makes for a more dramatic news story--and more sensational publicity--as in: THE TIMES HIRES NEOCON COLUMNIST WHO HATES THE TIMES.

It also helps that Kristol's critique of the NYT is so deluded, it's risible. And therefore no real threat to the Grey Lady (or the nerdy know-it-all).

All of which is to say, drama, conflict, extremism are all seen as marketable commodities these days. Whereas reasonableness,wit, intelligence are not. Ergo: the decision to hire someone like Kristol, instead of someone like Sullivan.

The omission of the context in which Kristol was called a thug by a writer for this magazine -- the fact that he called to account a TNR reporter who was indeed eventually discredited -- is a pretty glaring omission.

Joseph:  Absolutely.