My headline includes words I’d use in my headline if I were in the newspaper business.
I’m not prone to sentimentality and sensitivity over monikers and name-calling (you’ve read my blog, right? You’ve read our Ann Coulter columns, right?). But the National Post, in its infinite wisdom and respect and reverence as a newspaper rather than as a 22-year-old blogger’s lefty-blog, (where you expect to find the same lame and somewhat derogatory—or at least they mean it this way—nomenclature for conservatives), chooses to save ink and call Irving Kristol a “neo-con” in their sub-headline. In fact, they helpfully conflate “NEO-CON” with “GODFATHER” for that “mobster” feel.
I imagine when Ed Broadbent dies, they’ll call him a “DIPPER” and “GOOMBA”. Or a “DIPSTICK” and a “MALIK” or an “IMAM”. Or a “SOC” (short for socialist, see) and “DESPOT” or “PUPPET LEADER”. To save all the ink. And as a sign of their great apolitical respect.
Meanwhile, respectful articles appear at some non-liberal mainstream media, but Kristol, one of the most important thinkers and figures in politics today, is mostly ignored by the ever respectful and balanced media today.
Irving Kristol
The man who put ‘neo’ into conservatism.Perhaps the greatest gift of the gifted Irving Kristol, who died yesterday at 89, was prescience. This does not mean predicting the future. Prescience, a more useful gift, is seeing the direction in which the future is headed.
In his early years, Kristol saw that the Marxism which fascinated him and many others at mid-century had no future, and he embraced the ideals of the West, holding them tight for a lifetime. Later as a Democrat, he saw that many of the social welfare policies of the 1960s would fail, and so he undertook a long, unsparing critique of his own party’s most cherished ideas. Later still, as a Republican, Kristol realized that his party’s economic ideas were moribund, and he turned his energies to leading the pro-growth, “supply-side” revolution that culminated in the historic Reagan Presidency.
Irving Kristol is most often credited with leading the movement in American politics that came to be called neoconservatism. Begun in the 1970s, it may be counted as a testament to its enduring strength that as recently as the administration of George W. Bush, critics were bursting blood vessels screaming, again, that the government had fallen into the hands of “the neocons.” Nothing more made Irving break into his familiar wide smile than the intensity of his opposition.
[…Read the rest…]
The liberals’ Washington Post division managed to eke out a positive review of a conservative:
Irving Kristol’s Intellectual Universe
By Robert Kagan
The passing of Irving Kristol is a very sad occasion. He was a truly great man, a great intellectual, and a great, patriotic servant to his country. He was also a unique inspiration, to me personally, and to untold thousands of other young people for whom he provided a model of the intellectual life well-lived. He was a deep and fierce thinker, who nevertheless delivered his thoughts in the most amiable fashion, without animus or bile. He was curious and invited others to be curious, to engage in serious dialogue on the important issues of the day.
He was also a creator of communities and institutions. He occupied a unique space between the world of the mind and the world of action. Networks of thinkers, policy-makers, and politicians revolved around him—and not because he thrust himself into their midst but because his mind and character attracted them to him. To go to work for him, as I did fresh out of college almost 30 years ago, was to enter a rich and exciting intellectual universe, filled with learning and integrity and a commitment to the well-being of society. I fear such a universe may no longer exist. But the memory of what Irving Kristol created is enough to warm the soul for a lifetime.
I could find nothing at CBC.ca (just as well, as their rabid-left reader comments would be tough to read), the Globe and Mail, CNEWS.canoe.ca, or CTV.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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