Thursday, July 19, 2007

Media Putz of the Week

Media Putz:

William Kristol is living proof of how the American media has turned the concept of meritocracy upside its head and now puts chronic failures at the top of the pundit pyramid.

Kristol is the scion of leftists turned Neo-Cons. He has the East Coast pedigree that used to be a prerequisite for entrance into the neo-liberal ruling class. But somewhere, something went horribly wrong.

As the paid shill of Rupert Murdoch, who underwrites the Weekly Standard that Kristol "edits," Kristol has emerged as the favorite Neo-Con "expert spokesman" on the mainstream media. This is despite the reality that Kristol has a record of being a smiling booster of just about every failed "Masters of the Universe" foreign policy pursued by Bush and Cheney.

Lately, Kristol has been advocating the nuking of Iran when not doing the Sunday morning "news show" circuit, boasting about what a great job Bush is doing in Iraq. He's the kind of insider that the D.C. media establishment thinks of as a "nice guy" and "one of them."

That's just the intro. Specifics follow.

Which brings us to the specific recent reason for Kristol occupying the Media Putz hat this week: a July 15 column in the Washington Post that the Washington Post prominently promoted online with the teaser, "Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol will chart the remarkable -- and often ignored -- successes of the Bush administration."

Many BuzzFlash readers took note of this "Neo-Con in Wonderland" view of a presidency that has made us more vulnerable as a nation to external threats, at a grave cost in lives and hundreds of billions of dollars.

Then the winning nomination. Definitely worth the read.

I like these lines in the close:

Bill Kristol loves to be perceived as a player in the Bush White House, which is kind of like feeling macho because you hang out at the Gotti crime family's poker club.

With Kristol, you need a crowbar to separate the facts from the fiction, if you can find any facts in his endless, chipper blather. With columns like this one, you remind us how easy it is to separate journalism from the truth.

Hell yeah it's easy - all you have to be is deluded and lie a little. Well, OK, be really deluded and lie a lot.

Update:

Go read David Corn's rebuttal to Kristol's idiot op-ed:

Who knew Bill Kristol had such a flair for satire?

How else to read his piece for Outlook on Sunday, in which he declared, "George W. Bush's presidency will probably be a successful one"? Surely Kristol, the No. 1 cheerleader for the Iraq war, was mocking himself (and his neoconservative pals) for having been so mistaken about so much. But just in case his article was meant to be a serious stab at commentary, let's review Kristol's record as a prognosticator.

And review Kristol's prognostications he does! The word 'wrong' pops into mind a lot...

The Bush-Cheney years have been marked by ineptitude, miscalculation, and scandal. A successful presidency? Bush will be lucky if he gets a public elementary school in his adopted hometown of Crawford, Tex., named after him. He has placed this country in a hole. Yet Kristol, with shovel in hand, points to that hole and says, Trust me -- we're about to strike oil!

If it's true that history repeats first as tragedy and then as farce, Kristol has short-circuited the process and gone straight to parody. His Bush boosterism -- an act of self-justification -- would be amusing were it not for all the damage he has helped Bush to cause.

Perhaps there's a spot for Kristol right next to his idol Bush in a nice quiet Eastern European secret CIA prison. Or at The Hague.

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