Cross posted at http://www.bluecommonwealth.com
The Washington Post Op-Ed page, home to George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Michael Gerson and Robert J. Samuelson, has decided to provide some balance by bringing back...nefarious neo-con Bill Kristol!
Ugh. This is wrong on so many levels. While, in my opinion, there are only two progressive voices on that page worth reading, Harold Meyerson and E.J. Dionne, Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt immediately scoops up a big-name conservative whenever one comes on the market. When Michael Gerson left his job as Bush’s speechwriter – after penning the three most meaningless words to ever pass through a president’s lips, "axis of evil" – guess who was there to welcome him with flowers? And now that the New York Times has wisely given Kristol the ax, guess what? Like Freddy Krueger, he’s baaaaaaaaaaaack!
Meanwhile, the great explosion of progressive talent on the Internet and beyond remains unnoticed by Hiatt, et. al. While Kos gets a spot on Washington Post-owned property Newsweek, he remains a non-entity around these parts. No Ariana in the Post, none of the Center for American Progress Fellows, and never, ever, ever anyone remotely environmentalist.
At a time when newspapers are so sadly dying, the Post Editorial page gives a perfect demonstration why. These folks still seem lost in the era when the newspaper was something the dog brought in to Ward Cleaver as he smoked a pipe in his plush velvet chair. They seem utterly unscathed by the last few decades.
And in hiring back Kristol, they only demonstrate that they have learned absolutely nothing from the nightmare of the past eight years. Kristol is best known for being flagrantly, desperately wrong about everything on Iraq, from the wisdom of marching in there to what it would take to set it right. (Example from the February 20, 2003 NYT on Saddam Hussein: "He's got weapons of mass destruction ... Look, if we free the people of Iraq we will be respected in the Arab world.") That these misjudgments have cost $1 trillion and over 100,000 lives appears to be no big deal to the WaPo – perhaps because so many of the Post’s own writers were guilty of the very same blindspots. Like CEOs who send their companies into bankruptcy and escape with a golden parachute, it seems that being tragically wrong is not a liability for Kristol.
Ultimately, then, to Hiatt, it’s not about being right, it’s not about being in tune with the times, it’s not about offering diversity of opinion. It’s all about offering the same old ideological bromides from the same old geezers wearing the same old bowties.
How reassuring. Fetch me my pipe and slippers, Rex – good boy!