To follow up on my post from yesterday re: Kristol’s hiring at the NYT, here’s a post from Glenn Greenwald’s old site listing all the different times Kristol has been flat wrong about something. A sampling:
“There’s been a certain amount of pop sociology in America … that the Shia can’t get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There’s almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq’s always been very secular.” [April 4, 2003]
Just four weeks after the Iraqi election of January 30, 2005, it seems increasingly likely that that date will turn out to have been a genuine turning point. The fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, ended an era. September 11, 2001, ended an interregnum. In the new era in which we now live, 1/30/05 could be a key moment–perhaps the key moment so far–in vindicating the Bush Doctrine as the right response to 9/11. And now there is the prospect of further and accelerating progress. [March 7, 2005]
Last week the Bush Administration’s second-term bear market bottomed out. [November 7, 2005]
If pundits were judged on how often the they are correct or incorrect, Bill Kristol would be the worst pundit in the country. He’d be out of a job. But he’s not. Somehow, there are other criteria used in judging pundits—criteria clung too so strongly that no degree of wrongness can invalidate them.
