Last week, I wrote: “Bill Kristol’s New York Times column debuted today. It included a factual error, attributing a Michael Medved quote to Michelle Malkin. That was an appropriate beginning, as Kristol will surely have the Times corrections desk working overtime. Kristol regularly twists facts as he strains to back up conservative talking points.”
This week, Kristol lives up to expectations. Greg Mitchell writes (via Eschaton):
His first column for The New York Times’ op-ed page last Monday held a major attribution mistake, and then the paper’s public editor came out against his hiring. Now a key claim in William Kristol’s second column for the paper has been undercut by an news article at the Times a few hours later.
Kristol in his column, which hailed the success of the “surge” in Iraq, concluded with this trump card: Now the Iraqi government had agreed on de-Baathification, a key gain that proves his point and pretty much destroys the Democrats’ stand. But now at www.nytimes.com comes a kind of corrective from the paper’s Solomon Moore in Baghdad. It opens:
“A day after the Iraqi Parliament passed legislation billed as the first significant political step forward in Iraq after months of deadlock, there were troubling questions — and troubling silences — about the measure’s actual effects. The measure, known as the Justice and Accountability Law, is meant to open government jobs to former members of the Baath Party of Saddam Hussein — the bureaucrats, engineers, city workers, teachers, soldiers and police officers who made the government work until they were barred from office after the American invasion in 2003.
“But the legislation is at once confusing and controversial, a document riddled with loopholes and caveats to the point that some Sunni and Shiite officials say it could actually exclude more former Baathists than it lets back in, particularly in the crucial security ministries. …”
Also today, Campaign for America’s Future released a new “Failure of Conservatism” video, “Don’t Believe The [Conservative] Hype,” featuring its chief spokesperson, Mr. Kristol himself.
While Kristol’s hackery may be dragging down the credibility of the New York Times, at least it’s not doing much else for conservatism either.
(More from Tapped’s Alex Rossmiller, Ezra Klein and Juan Cole.)
