Cartoon for January 19

Conservatism has been discredited. Neoconservatism is universally reviled. Even as the country moves left, the New York Times is moving in the opposite direction, hiring William Kristol, the leading neoconservative publisher of the Weekly Standard and an architect of the disastrous Iraq War, as an op/ed columnist.

It’s not as if the Times needed to right some lack of balance on its pages. Paul Krugman is the only progressive voice on the Times opinion page. There are a few assorted center-left Clintonite types–Gail Collins, Bob Herbert–and some genuine conservative voices, like Nicholas Kristoff and Thomas Friedman, the latter the nation’s most unapologetic free trader and, like Kristol, a leading proponent of the Iraq invasion.

Still, there’s nothing wrong with hiring a right-winger. If I were editing the Times, I’d hire some myself. The problem with Kristol isn’t that he’s a rightie. The problem is that he’s a liar, and that he’s usually wrong.

The job of an opinion writer is to prognosticate, and to deliver opinions from a biased, yet honest, perspective. Kristol does neither, and in most other nations would be warming a prison cell for his role in murdering more than one million Iraqis with his hate speech. The man has zero credibility, and his position at the Times degrades the paper’s already tepid (and painfully boring) opinion pages.

The following cartoon was inspired by Kristol’s column attacking antiwar types for refusing to admit that everything is better in Iraq during the current troop increase.

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Cartoon for January 14

After saying that he has no problems keeping U.S. troops in Iraq a hundred years, a reporter for Mother Jones magazine asked if he really meant it. He doubled down, affirming that, as far as he’s concerned, the U.S. can remain in Iraq a thousand or even a million years. This got me thinking about how Americans have no concept of the grand sweep of history. Consider the proposed nuclear waste disposal site in Yucca Mountain, Nevada. The facility is supposed to remain secure 10,000 years, and signs explaining the hazards would be posted outside. But 10,000 years ago was the stone age! It was prehistory! Only Americans could assume English will still be readable in 2,000, much less 10,000 years or, for that matter, that we’ll still be around at all.

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Cartoon for January 10

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