The utter PANIC on the left at this hire is telling. At newspapers and college faculties, its not enough to have 98% of the writers and faculty who agree with them, they must have 100%. Shut up you spoiled cowardly brats. So the self-alleged "paper of record"....not an opinion journal mind you like the Weekly Standard or the Nation, just moved to have its staff less than 1% closer to the center in this nation of 50/50 voters. Do you realize how afraid you all look when call to silence someone because you disagree with him and he is being allowed to speak his mind in an organization where by any measure his voice will be a VERY lonely one??? What have you to fear? Are you not embarassed to be seen throwing a fit and demanding a silencing of the opposition for a newspaper you don't own? Who the hell are you to try to silence one of two conservatives at the biggest paper in the country which has more than a hundred million conservative readers?

What a charade you have made of your alleged belief in a free press and free expresion. You don't really believe in free expression at all just like you don't believe in true diversity on the college campus (diversity that matters like diversity of thought), this couldn't possibly be more evident now. You demand conformity, and your weapon is the threat using of the now totally useless term "hate speech." YOU ARE THE NEW MCCARTHY.

I'm not so fonda groupthink. Let's see what the guy says and then proceed to tear up the turf. I know he's got a history -- we all do. And Happy New Year, all.

...The utter PANIC on the left at this hire is telling...

Why do people like you and Mr. Shafer think the left is AFRAID of Bill Kristol? We're not afraid of him--we HATE him. Get the difference?

I certainly understand that you HATE him. I understand that your idea of "tolerance" is highly limited. And that your alleged support for REAL diversity and free expression is a joke.

The utter PANIC on the left at this hire is telling.

I'd describe it more as disgust. Hey, the Times can obviously hire anyone they want but why they would want to hire Kristol after he all but called the paper traitorous because they published a story on the tracking of terrorist network activities by means of financial records, a program that the Bush administration had previously announced has many people shaking their heads. And wasn't it Ann Coulter who blithely shrieked that her chief regret about 9/11 was that one of the planes hadn't plowed into the NYT's editorial offices? (I guess she'd forgotten that the paper had called for Bill Clinton's resignation during the impeachment fiasco).

Kristol is a well-connected ideologue who serves up the same old hackneyed crap in a more palatable way than, say, Charles Krauthammer and his ilk. Now that Judith Miller is gone from the reporting side, I guess the powers that be decided they needed some else to carry Bush's water. The Paper of Record? The crazy old gray lady is more like it.

I'm fine with Kristol writing for the Times, even though I think he's a hack. I think it'll be interesting for both sides.

That said, you misunderstand the left position. People don't want a respected (despite what the right thinks) paper giving just anybody the microphone. Freedom of the press and free expression have nothing to do with it - nobody's saying Kristol should not be able to express himself. We're just saying the Times, given his style and substance, shouldn't give him help. Do you understand the difference? It's not that these people fear Kristol, it's that they don't respect him.

As for the college campus issue, I agree with you, but that's beside the point. I don't go to college campuses for my news, just the killer weed.

Relativists like you seem to make their appearance more and more often dressed in conservative clothes. Im sure you loved McCarthy and have no interest in liberal voices at conservative sites (how about telling us what comments you've made at conservative sites bemoaning the lack of liberal voices in conservative newspapers.) Since you only believe in the truth you can see Bin you ought to take up some liberal causes here in the USA what with our high poverty and huge prison population- but my guess is you never venture into those neighborhoods huh?

All your guesses are wrong.

I am more of a real Liberal than you will ever be. I believe in bountiful social freedoms, including not only legal drugs but legal prostitution. There is of course a big difference between calling for diversity at a newspaper and an opinion journal retard. You dis-prove all of your compatriots who allege the NYTimes isn't left wing by claiming as a birthright an absence of conservatives there like it was Mother Jones. I hate the idea of the original McCarthy (even though he was right about a lot of people he outed including the traitor ALger Hiss) and I hate his modern incarnation- the leftists who should down dissent wherever they see it. Only the red herring isn't communism anymore, its "hate speech."

Joe McCarthy didn't "out" Alger Hiss as a traitor. That was Whitaker Chambers, an editor at Time magazine and a former member of the Communist underground. Richard Nixon, then a congressman, rode an investigation into Hiss' spying activities to fame and fortune, becoming a Senator about a year later.

As for McCarthy, seeing how the issue of Communism made Nixon into a big deal, started throwing around mostly-unsubstantiated charges of Commie Infiltration at the State Department (by the time that Chambers dropped the dime on Hiss, he had left the State Department and was working for the Carneigie Endowment). Along the way, as was pointed out a when the movie Good Night and Good Luck came out, he probably named a few people whose ties to the Communist Party deserved serious investigation, but by talking so much crap, those allegations got thrown out along with the nonsense. And all in the name of improving an utterly undistinguished political career.

Of course, the real villain here was the Republican Party, whose lust for the White House had become so insatiable that they would let a monster like McCarthy roam about spreading destruction for the sake of regaining it. Mind you, once Eisenhower was elected, he started chatting with his friend Bill Paley at CBS, who suddenly allowed Edward R. Murrow to go to work on McCarthy. About four years after Drew Pearson, at considerable risk to his career, had started catalouging McCarthy's misdeeds.