Cartoon for January 26

There’s always been a desire to vote for the most likely winner, but the 2008 presidential race has accelerated this inane trend, thanks in no small part to media coverage that validates determining an early winner (maybe it’s cheaper to cover one candidate than six?). The New York Times, endorsing Hillary Clinton in the New York primary, openly stated in its editorial that it did not consider endorsing John Edwards because he was a “long shot.” (Never mind that he might not be a long shot if the Times endorsed him, or the paper’s conscious–and unconscionable–role in reducing his chances.)

Funny, I was under the impression that we were supposed to vote for the best candidate, and let the election returns fall where they may.

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Cartoon for January 21

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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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