The New York Times Crawls Into the Gutter Agtain...

on hiring William Kristol:

To Whom It May Concern,

It is not so much my vehement disagreement with the beliefs of William Kristol that compels me to write against his hiring, it is his intellectual laziness and obvious and unquestioning partisanship, better suited for formats that seek profit through shrill pronouncements and simplifications rather than clarity and understanding through reporting. Perhaps this is the direction of your newspaper, it is not a direction I am comfortable with, nor one that does justice to conservative political beliefs. He lacks intellectual stamina and often fails to parse arguments with any kind of sophistication.

For instance, in his article "The 2008 Formula," a dismal piece that appeared in Time Magazine (for which he was paid to write an article that said exactly nothing) he argued that this was a "war election" and that war elections typically engendered results favoring hawkish candidates. Fair enough. What his argument ignored was how central the idea of winning the war was to Americans during these elections, in which, whether it was defeating fascists or communists (for naively, we thought communism was what we were fighting in Viet Nam and Korea and not anti-imperialist nationalism with totalitarian overtones, less communist than we could believe), we felt the future survival of America was at stake. Kristol has failed here and elsewhere to understand that Iraq is not central to Americans' idea of winning against terrorism. Winning Pakistan is more central, winning Saudi Arabia and Iran are more central, and to a lesser extent, winning states unstable and easily belligerent like North Korea. Americans understand these will be the future battlegrounds where terrorism will either flourish or dissapate, and the battles to contain terrorism will be fought not so much with weapons and attempts to force others to bend to our ways, but through deal-making, diplomacy and hard bargains on both sides. Sacrifices will have to be made, and for sure, the might of the United States must back up its desire to create stability and destroy havens of terrorism, but the policies Kristol has supported with weak argument and false evidences have completely failed. Kristol's columns, here particularly, relied on a basic fallacy common in arguments that use history: the fallacy of historical analogy.

Comparing one thing to another in a straightforward statement that takes into account none of the external factors in the case of either thing is a common mistake often leading to a misunderstanding both of history and of the current object of study (like Iraq). Americans understand this and they understand that the paranoias of 1952 and 1968 led only to more heartache and often, half-baked and self-destructive policies (vietnamization, Abu Ghraib, HUAC and other needless and painful reminders that democratic principles remain things to be aspired to rather than bedrocks of our country), and I believe that most Americans don't see the future of Iraq leading to a victorious conclusion in the war on terror - they see it for what it most probably is: a disastrous detour that stole much needed resources from the war on terror as well as the struggle to create an America that can keep up with the rapidly progressing Europe and Asia. The "war on terror" remains most what it should not be: a long wet kiss to the various cartels that control so much of America today.

The idea that a New York Times columnist would be so lazy as to make the kind of sophistry evident in the above cited article, in which history is so sloppily compared and contrasted, and in which a conclusion is so cavalierly arrived at, is depressing. Can anybody write for the New York Times? Who's next? Bill O'Reilly?

I understand that the New York Times is committed to the illusion of a neutral point of view in its reporting, and to the idea of offering room on its pages to "both sides of an argument." This would work if you hired people who were not partisan, but genuinely philosophical, married to ideas rather than interest groups and parties. People who were not afraid of complexities and who could think with any kind of empathy. You are offering the reputation of your paper to a writer who deserves neither that aura of respectability nor the space on your pages that could be offered to any number of more well qualified persons.

The decision to hire William Kristol represents another low point in this first decade of the 21st century of your paper's history. Not a decade that will make the future editors of the New York Times proud of the legacy they carry. Perhaps, we can hope though, they will be inspired to commit to a more rigorous examination of the news than this generation's editors. I pray that the New York Times will, at some point, take its responsibilities to report the news that is rather than the news certain policy groups and political parties wish it to be, more seriously.

best wishes,

Sarge
Brooklyn, NY