Over at City Journal, writer Harry Stein underlined just how infuriated liberals are that the New York Times has hired William Kristol as a columnist. "For conservatives, long accustomed to self-serving liberal pieties about tolerance, the orgy of outrage at having to face an alien point of view was wonderful to behold...Here is just a tiny, tiny sample of the reaction on the Huffington Post to the announcement that William Kristol will be writing a weekly column in the New York Times:
– "William ‘the Bloody’ Kristol is a beady eyed warmonger."
– "Worthless suck up Kristol should be cleaning toilets in public restrooms for his GOP ‘friends.’"
– "I will never, ever, buy another issue of the newspaper, I will never again be a subscriber to your newspaper and I will do my level best to avoid any purchases from any NY Times advertiser."
– "If the New York Times is going to hire a liar and a racist like Bill Kristol then they might as well hire Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, Bill O’Reilly, and Ari Fleischer."
– "Kristol is an arrogant warmongering prick. I can’t stand the sight of him."
– "Listening to Kristol, that war mongering crater face, is worse than listening to Bush, Cheney, and Richard Pearle all rolled up in one . . . I hate that decision and I will do everything I can to discredit this decision until they finally flush him down the toilet like the turd he is."
And so it went, on this and dozens of other left-of-center sites. Sputtering fury. Vicious name-calling. Denunciations of the Times for this unspeakable act. Threats to cancel subscriptions and otherwise exact revenge....Over and over on the Web, one found variations on the following: "I never read William Saphire [sic], and I never read David Brooks. I will take great pleasure in never reading Bill Kristol!"
Stein added:
As [David] Brooks once wryly put it, "Being the house conservative at the New York Times is like being the chief rabbi in Mecca."
PS: Over at Radar, liberal media critic Charles Kaiser approvingly quoted comic writer Jon Schwartz:
"It's as though an NFL coach decided to start a four-foot, 65-pound Korean eight-year-old at middle linebacker, and when he got criticized, responded: 'People are mad we're using a player of such tremendous size and experience, just because he's Korean. How intolerant!'"
