What Jim Fallows began ("breathtaking banality of expression" still echoes), George Packer finishes:
It’s not just that [William] 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....
Kristol’s performance on the Op-Ed page during the most interesting
election in a generation is a historical symptom, not merely a personal
failure. He wrote badly because his world view had become problematic
at best, untenable at worst, and he had spent too many years turning
out Party propaganda to summon the intellectual resources that a
difficult situation required. Now the Times owes it to its readers to find someone better.
--Christopher Orr