News broke over the weekend that Fox News analyst and Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol will be taking arguably one of the most sought-after jobs in print punditry: a yearlong op-ed columnist gig with The New York Times. The Huffington Post first reported the rumor on Friday, and the Times made its official announcement the next day.

Since then, the Left has erupted in outraged fury, threatening to cancel subscriptions, particularly on the blogs, with The Nation’s Katha Pollitt topping it off by telling readers: “Just shoot me.” Running amok are conspiracy theories like this one connecting Rupert Murdoch, who owns The Weekly Standard, to a plot to infiltrate and sink the Times with second-rate talent, advantaging his newly acquired Wall Street Journal.

Fairer-minded critics object to Kristol because of his over-the-top opinions, his perceived buddy-buddy relationship with the White House and his notoriety as perhaps the most unrelenting pundit-advocate of the Iraq war, one who also advises additional military action against Iran. They contend he lacks mainstream appeal by pointing out that in December Time effectively fired Kristol, whose once-prominent column in the magazine had undergone a slow fade into obsolescence. The hard-headed Kristol has fueled the fire. He told Politico.com he’s “flattered watching blogosphere heads explode.”

Times’ editorial page editor Andy Rosenthal has tried to defend the Gray Lady’s move, saying “this weird fear of opposing views” puzzles him. “We have views on our op-ed page that are as hawkish or more so than Bill,” he said.
The Times is giving a voice to “a guy who is a serious, respected conservative intellectual,” he added, “and somehow that’s a bad thing. How intolerant is that?”

The response to Kristol becomes more bizarre in light of the fact that currently The New York Times has just one center-of-right columnist: David Brooks, a “National Greatness” conservative who’s also an old Kristol acolyte. It has seven others occupying varying shades of leftiness — from Tom Friedman to Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich. And Brooks’ lone voice of conservatism, however revered, is itself an aberration: Being Jewish, pro-choice and a supporter of gay marriage, Brooks is an anomaly.

In reality, the Kristol’s selection may point to how narrow-mindedly the Times defines conservatism, says Jonah Goldberg: Kristol and Brooks are both considered neoconservatives, part of a group much derided by the Left whose brand of nation-building interventionism reshaped President Bush’s foreign policy after 9/11. As more conservatives distance themselves from the gung-ho policies of Kristol and his Standard, many on the Right say they, too, would have preferred someone else. But despite the shots from both the Left and Right, few critics have offered up their alternatives to Kristol, whose Harvard Ph.D. and professorship, editorship of an influential magazine, chairmanship of the Project for the New American Century and bloodline as son of one of conservatism’s most influential figures make his résumé — at least up next to the other Times columnists’ — hard to fault.

Photo: Fox News Channel