The Abbreviated Pundit Roundup by BarbinMD directed us to the op ed piece by David Brooks in the NY Times.
http://www.dailykos.com/...
specifically at http://www.nytimes.com/...
The comments by Brooks and many others, including the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, the regular location of writings by the late Mr. Kristol and his son, William Kristol, failed to mention the revealing comment in the actual Wall Street Journal obituary where the late Mr. Kristol is quoted as calling those he served with in WWII "thugs and near-thugs".
In light of the books, articles and movies about the "Greatest Generation" and "Band of Brothers" this comment from Mr. Kristol bears more notice.
David Brooks, excerpted below, does note that Irving Kristol served in WW II, but Mr. Brooks fails to note, what was in the obituary in Mr. Kristol’s home paper, the Wall Street Journal, in its page A4, September 19, 2009, obituary, that Mr. Kristol thought what some call the Greatest Generation, were "thugs or near-thugs".
Because the obituary comments were so revealing and so contrary to the accolades found on the editorial pages of the WSJ about Mr. Kristol after his death and for years before, as a matter of fact, I will set out the section of the obituary, below:
"His education, he once wrote was mostly ‘acquired outside the classroom.’
"Any remaining faith in the masses was obliterated by his experience serving in the Army during World War II alongside ‘thugs or near-thugs.’"
The rave comments by Mr. Brooks, excerpted below, mentions the military service but not the insults to the citizen soldiers who fought WWII.
The revealing comment in the WSJ obituary does explain a good bit about the attitude commonly found in the editorial pages of the WSJ and in editorials of those like Mr. Brooks.
The Brooks editorial excerpts:
Three Cheers for Irving
DAVID BROOKS
Published: September 21, 2009
Irving Kristol was born into a fanatical century and thrust himself into every ideologically charged battle of his age. In the 1930s, as a young socialist, he fought the Stalinists. In the 1940s, as a soldier, he fought fascism. In the decades beyond, as a writer and intellectual, he engaged with McCarthyism, the cold war, the Great Society, the Woodstock generation, the culture wars of the 1970s, the Reagan revolution and so on.
. . . . .
He would champion certain causes. He could arrive at surprising and radical conclusions. He was unabashedly neoconservative. But he also stood apart, and directed his skeptical gaze even on his own positions, and even on the things to which he was most loyal.
. . . . .
So while others were marching to barricades, picking out bits of the truth that confirmed their own prejudices, editing contrary evidence and working themselves up a righteous lather, Kristol would adopt an attitude of smiling forbearance. He was able to pick a side without losing his clarity.
. . . . .
Kristol championed middle-class virtues like faith, family and responsibility, especially during the 1960s when they were so much under attack. But he acknowledged that bourgeois culture could be boring and spiritually unsatisfying.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
Of course, I love it when the WSJ reminds me that I read it’s editorials to understand what the evil doers state as the marching orders to their greedy followers. It reminds my why I prefer my association with the sergeants.
In case you cannot download the full WSJ obituary due to its limited access, here it is:
Wall Street Journal Obituary: http://online.wsj.com/...
Irving Kristol: 1920-2009
Neoconservative Pioneer Paved Way for Reagan
By STEPHEN MILLER
Irving Kristol, who died Friday at 89, was an editor, political essayist and provocateur universally known as the "Godfather of Neoconservatism."
In a six-decade career, Mr. Kristol's politics evolved ever-rightward, most markedly in reaction to the Great Society programs of the 1960s. As his opposition to what he saw as excesses of the welfare state crystallized, he helped provide the intellectual underpinnings of the Republican resurgence that began with the 1980 election of President Ronald Reagan.
Neoconservatism became a Washington byword for supply-side economics, defense-budget increases and entitlement cuts. The neoconservative framework came to the fore again under President George W. Bush, who awarded Mr. Kristol the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002.
"America has lost one of its finest thinkers and greatest patriots," House Minority Leader John Boehner (R., Ohio) said in a statement Friday. "Irving Kristol added intellectual rigor and heft to the conservative movement by redefining how we apply the values and principles our nation was founded on to the challenges of the modern era."
Mr. Kristol was appointed an editor of Commentary magazine in his 20s. But it was in his own tart essays and as an editor of literary-political journals that he helped found, including Encounter in Britain and the Public Interest in the U.S., that he fostered his reputation as a public intellectual.
Later, he was a professor at New York University, an executive vice president at Basic Books and a longtime contributor to The Wall Street Journal's editorial page.
Mr. Kristol at first resisted the label "neoconservative," but later accepted it. As much an avatar as a progenitor of neoconservatism, Mr. Kristol once described the credo as that of "a liberal who has been mugged by reality."
Mr. Kristol grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y. His father was in the garment trade and Mr. Kristol, like many of his bright contemporaries, attended City College of New York, then a hotbed of student radicalism.
He was a self-described student "Trotskyist," but soon after graduation rejected that label. Of his youthful leanings Mr. Kristol later wrote, "It was a useful inoculation that rendered me not only immune, but positively indifferent to the ideological chatter around me."
Any remaining faith in the masses was obliterated by his experience serving in the Army during World War II alongside "thugs or near-thugs."
"Again and again, and to my surprise, I found reasons to think better of the Army and less well of my fellow enlisted men," he wrote in 1993. "The Army may have radicalized Norman Mailer; it successfully de-radicalized me. It caused me to cease being a socialist."
Energized by the writings of Lionel Trilling and Reinhold Niebuhr -- self-described liberals both, but thinkers critical of the human capacity for perfection -- Mr. Kristol became managing editor of Commentary in 1947.
In 1952, he left Commentary and traveled to England to found Encounter with the British poet Stephen Spender, as a counterblast to left-wing intellectual publications.
He returned to the U.S., and in 1965 founded the Public Interest, a quarterly journal he edited with Daniel Bell, a sociologist and friend from his City College days. The journal was hardly a bastion of right-wing thought, and Mr. Kristol identified himself more as a moderate than as a conservative.
In his 1972 book "On the Democratic Idea in America," he wrote, "I regard the exaggerated hopes we attach to politics as the curse of our age, just as I regard moderation as one of our vanishing virtues."
Later, though, his positions hardened. By 1993, he wrote, "What is wrong with liberalism is liberalism -- a metaphysics and a mythology that is woefully blind to human and political reality."
Paul Wolfowitz, former deputy defense secretary, said Mr. Kristol infused policy debates with a practical, "more fact-based" approach and showed thinkers that "it's not enough just to have a sense of what's right and what's wrong, you also have to have a sense of how the world works."
Nathan Glazer, another of the founders of the Public Interest, said Mr. Kristol had "a wonderful way of formulating things" and that his Trotskyist years had helped shape his work. "I think his conservatism is clearly inflected by where he came from and how he came to it," Mr. Glazer said.
Mr. Kristol is survived by his wife, Gertrude Himmelfarb, a noted historian often identified with the neoconservative movement, and his son, William Kristol, a former chief of staff for Vice President Dan Quayle and editor of the journal the Weekly Standard.
—John D. McKinnon contributed to this article.