Long National Nightmare Ends, etc. etc.

Today is William Kristol's final column for the New York Times.  I won't link or comment on it because it's the usual pap, but this passing does deserve notice.  As a fitting eulogy to one of the more annoying journalistic blips in recent years, I offer this context on Kristol's dubious career provided last October by commenter "Harry Hopkins" at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

I remember back in the late '90s when Ira Katznelson, an eminent political scientist at Columbia, came to deliver a guest lecture to an economic philosophy class I was taking. It was a great lecture, made more so by the fact that the class was only about ten or twelve students and we got got ask all kinds of questions and got a lot of great, provocative answers. Anyhow, Prof. Katznelson described a lunch he had with Irving Kristol...The talk turned to William Kristol, then Dan Quayle's chief of staff, and how he got his start in politics. Irving recalled how he talked to his friend Harvey Mansfield at Harvard, who secured William a place there as both an undergrad and graduate student; how he talked to Pat Moynihan, then Nixon's domestic policy adviser, and got William an internship at The White House; how he talked to friends at the RNC and secured a job for William after he got his Harvard Ph.D.; and how he arranged with still more friends for William to teach at UPenn and the Kennedy School of Government. With that, Prof. Katznelson recalled, he then asked Irving what he thought of affirmative action. "I oppose it", Irving replied. "It subverts meritocracy."

Comments

[Akaky]

I didn't think Kristol would last long at the Times. The paper's shrinking band of devotees do not get their fingers smeared with ink everyday and twice on Sunday to learn what is going on in the world; they read it in order to have their prejudices confirmed, in much the same way as the dittoheads listen to Rush Limbaugh. If the devout could hardly stand the presence of so mild a conservative as David Brooks on the op-ed page, then the presence of an actual neocon would be about as unwelcome as that of a unrepentant pig farmer amidst a delegation of ulema. It still surprises me that the Times made the offer in the first place; it surprises me even more that Kristol took the offer.

[Reg]

William Safire was a pretty popular Times columnist for nearly three decades. His erudition and often-contrarian nature served him well with Times readers.