Good God

Yeah, it was probably a bad idea for the NY Times to hire Bill Kristol as one of their columnists. It's assumed-rightly-that he'd be a partisan hack. But he also doesn't know what he's talking about. Example one? Today's column wherein he writes this:

After the last two elections, featuring the well-born George Bush and Al Gore and John Kerry, Americans — even Republicans! — are ready for a likable regular guy. Huckabee seems to be that.

Whereas Bush is not. That sounds a little odd. Why is that? Oh, maybe because of columns like this one:

..cops and firefighters are, if the women in the ranks will forgive the expression, Regular Guys. They drink beer, not wine, and certainly not French wine. They played football and baseball in high school, not lacrosse. Regular Guys think Al Sharpton is a fraud and Michael Moore (who pretends to be a Regular Guy) is a fool, and they think Ted Kennedy is a criminal. Regular Guys do not blame Secret Service agents (who are Regular Guys) for knocking them down on the ski slopes, especially when those agents are there to take bullets for them. And Regular Guys relate to and prefer the company of other Regular Guys; they do not invite people like Leonardo DiCaprio and Ben Affleck to their conventions.

Even with the piles of dough they're sitting on, both George Bush and Dick Cheney still come across as Regular Guys, the kind of men you might find hanging around the fire station or the detective squad room.

Bush is also the guy that most people would have at one time wanted to have a beer with (I'm sure a few people have revoked that opinion since then.) But he's not a "regular guy." He's "well-born."

So in his very first column, Kristol engages in hackneyed stereotypes, historical revisionism, partisan hackery and shallow "analysis." Surprised? Yeah, me neither.