Kristol: No Comment

On Fox News Sunday on June 25, 2006, Bill Kristol said, “I think the attorney general has an absolute obligation to consider prosecution” of The New York Times for publishing an article that revealed a classified government program to sift the international banking transactions of thousands of Americans in a search for terrorists.

Clark Hoyt, the Public Editor at the NYTs, thinks it's absurd that his paper require opposition to the war as a litmus test to hiring a conservative OP/ED columnist. Hoyt thinks this is the reason that Kristol should have not been hired as a regular OP/ED contributor to the NYTs.

...Kristol’s leap to prosecution smacked of intimidation and disregard for both the First Amendment and the role of a free press in monitoring a government that has a long history of throwing the cloak of national security and classification over its activities. This is not a person I would have rewarded with a regular spot in front of arguably the most elite audience in the nation.

Kristol refused to talk with me about this issue, or an earlier statement that The Times was “irredeemable,” or the reaction to his appointment — an odd stance for someone who presumably will want others to talk to him for his column.

My problem with Kristol is that I think he is an intellectual light-weight who has been wrong for years on Iraq. He didn't just get the WMD wrong, but everything ever since, and has never had the intellectural honesty to re-think.

The NYTs should have conservative voices on their OP/ED pages and no choice will please the left, but then pleasing the left is not the point.

But is Bill Kristol really the best the Right has to offer? If that's true, they are more intellectually bankrupt than I thought.