Monday, June 02, 2008

the bald hypocrisy of William Kristol

Absolutely amazing. After making a vaguely sinister implication regarding what Barack Obama did for 2 years after college*, and after arguing that $14,000 1985 dollars per year is actually a lot of money (it's $23,958; I make substantially more in an entry-level position at a library) Bill Kristol uses his NYT op-ed space to attack Barack Obama for not serving in the military and not exhorting college grads to join.

Guess who else never served in the military, even after graduating from college: Bill Kristol.

*in point of fact, Barack worked at Business International Corporation and New York Public Interest Research Group, jobs that he left to go become a community organizer. Kristol, rather than openly admitting that these 2 years were spent in mundane work and thus are not relevant to Obama's discussion of service, instead merely states: "Leave aside the fact that two years elapsed between Obama’s graduation from Columbia in 1983 and his heading off to Chicago in 1985..." which insinuates he spent that time doing something that contradicts his message when, in fact, he did not. Twice in this column Kristol withholds information from the reader in order to open up space in the narrative to launch an attack: once here not disclosing what Obama did for 2 years so he can issues sinister innuendos about it, and in the next sentence where he states that $14k in inflation-adjusted dollars is "about what we pay entry-level editorial assistants today at The Weekly Standard" instead of attaching the dollar number to it that gives away the game. It demeans the New York Times to have someone deploying such grossly dishonest rhetorical legerdemain on their op-ed page.

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