Jeff Bercovici grabbed a spare moment of Bill Kristol's time today as he did the rounds for The IFC Media Project (he's a part of that? Well, that's not promising). Somehow the Portfolio blogger was able to smooth talk the conservative writer into discussing his contract with New York Times: a position, rumors say, that is up for grabs since he's gotten on one too many editors bad sides.

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If anyone is keeping abreast of Dan Rather's $70 million lawsuit against CBS, you'd know that recently there was a firestorm of previously non-public information that was just shitted upon the media by Rather's attorneys. It includes internal memos, documents, and transcripts that went down during Memogate in 2004, when 60 Minutes put some documents up about George Bush's military service in the Air Force that later turned out to be forgeries.

So that's a lot of stuff to wade through, but what's turned up so far is the revelation that the "independent panel" CBS was forming to review Memogate — and how the Bush story aired on CBS without being thoroughly fact-checked — wasn't so much "independent" as it was "slanted to the right by ridiculous levels." You know, so they could adequately defend themselves from right-y criticism regarding their findings that, hey, maybe CBS was in the clear.

Except, maybe CBS just wanted to insulate itself before throwing Dan Rather under the bus by staffing up on some very conservative names to make up the panel?

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Weird how The Times, infamous for the amount of anonymous sourcing they produce per year, would finally go against its own policy of accepting quotes from whoever, whenever, just so they could screw over conservative columnist Bill Kristol. Well, personal politics before (lack of) ethics, we say.

Kristol was the guy, remember, who brought Sarah Palin to the national forefront, and then had no trouble turn-coating once it became obvious that she was just a hot tranny mess.

But in today's expose about GOP in-fighting, the name Randy Scheunemann came up as a possible source of Kristol's info.

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This is two clicks away from being the plot of Fatal Attraction. Or maybe Cape Fear. Or perhaps…a Nora Ephron movie??

Over news that the New York Times might be firing conservative columnist Bill Kristol, WaPo's Nora Ephron writes an annoyed love letter to her favorite hate-fuck.

Then Kristol's column began. I read it religiously every Monday. And slowly but surely, I became infatuated with him. How could I not? The man could not write his way out of a paper bag. His column was simply awful. Reading it was like watching someone dance on the head of a pin: his need to prove to his base that he hadn't gone over to the other side was so strong, his need to please his constituency was so moving, that I began to wish he would quit his job as editor of the Weekly Standard and become a Times columnist full-time. It was certainly not going to inconvenience him: the column couldn't have been taking him more than about twenty minutes to write. And it was great having him there, visible, so people like me could see what people like him were like. He was wrong about everything. It was such a comfort.

We see Meg Ryan in the role of Nora, and maybe Billy Crystal as Bill Bristol.

Ah, we were so close, liberal media! So close to ensnaring Keyser Söze, a.k.a. Republican pundit Bill Kristol in his devious plan to take over the world without anyone ever knowing.

But he eludes us yet: months after allegedly forcing the McCain campaign into picking Palin for VP (and four years after he wrote Bush's inaugural speech and then tried to not take credit for it), the sly fox Kristol does a 180 and changes his opinion on Palin and the GOP camp amid rumors that a) Obama is leading in the polls and b) that John McCain listening to Kristol instead of his advisors on the Palin issue may have something to do with his drop in popularity.

So from the most vocal supporter of the camp after August ("Let Palin be Palin!") to a terminal detractor, ("The McCain campaign, once merely problematic, is now close to being out-and-out dysfunctional. Its combination of strategic incoherence and operational incompetence has become toxic."), Kristol is now freed himself of his unsavory choices and lets McCain walk away with all the mud on his face. Classy.

Now, political anylists are given a little more leeway on flip-flopping than the candidates, but since Kristol seemingly hand-picked this team, you'd think he'd have a little more faith in his fantasy league draft.

The story of Public Editors at The New York Times has been a little like Goldie Locks and the Three Bears. The first one, Daniel Okrent, had too much fun with the column. His succeesor, Byron Calame had too little. The current Public Editor, Clark Hoyt, is just right.

This week he writes about the “scandal” du jour: The New York Times giving Bill Kristol a one-year contract to be an op-ed columnist. In the two weeks in between the Times announcement and Kristol’s actual first column, blogger mayhem ensued, with everyone being outraged for no real reason.

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BLAME THE NEO-CON The Times has cut their local opinion pages, in parts because no cared about Gateway National Recreation Area, and also to fund their new conservative columnist, Bill Kristol. First Iraq, now this. Democrats in '08. [NY Observer]

You know what's hard? Having opinions about current events. Because not only do you need to, you know, read about current events, you also have to make judgments from objective information. Also, forming coherent opinions with rhetorical flair? That's the worse.

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