Irving Kristol (neocon godfather) dies

[Vympel]

If you don't have anything nice to say ...

Godfather of neoconservatism dies

The man known as the "godfather of neoconservatism", Irving Kristol, has died from lung cancer at the age of 89.

Mr Kristol rejected the communist beliefs of his youth to become a leading right-wing thinker and writer.

His ideas had a huge influence on the Bush administration and in 2002 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W Bush.

The magazine edited by his son William Kristol, The Weekly Standard, paid tribute to his "wisdom" and "wit".

It added that his "generosity of spirit made him a friend and mentor to several generations of thinkers and public servants".

Trotskyist

Irving Kristol was born in New York's Brooklyn neighbourhood, the son of Jewish immigrants from Ukraine.

In the 1930s he was a Trotskyist but he turned his back on his radical left-wing beliefs in favour of liberalism.

In the 1960s he rejected that after the rise of the New Left.

In the 1970s he completed his move across the political spectrum by joining the Republican Party, which he said had once been as "foreign to me as attending a Catholic Mass".

Writing in 2003, Mr Kristol described neoconservatism as a "persuasion" and underlined that it had its roots among "disillusioned liberal intellectuals in the 1970s".

He also once famously described neoconservatives as liberals "mugged by reality".

Huge influence

The term neoconservatism was created by the socialist writer Michael Harrington in the early 1970s.

Fellow neonconservative founder Norman Podhoretz wrote that "the influence of Irving Kristols' ideas has been one of the most important factors in reshaping the American climate of opinion over the past 40 years".

Mr Kristol was a driving force in a series of think-tanks like the American Enterprise Institute that made conservatism a reigning ideology for at least two decades.

He wrote for many media outlets and penned several books including "Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea".

Former US President George W Bush, whose administration included several neoconservatives, issued a statement calling him "an intellectual pioneer who advanced the conservative movement".

But the reputation of the group was hit by controversy over the Iraq war in 2003 - which many neocons pushed for - and by the global economic downturn.

Mr Kristol did not comment much in public on the war.

With the election of Barack Obama, Mr Kristol's son William said that the liberals had regained the ascendancy.

"All good things must come to an end. Jan 20, 2009, marked the end of the conservative era," he wrote in the New York Times.

Irving Kristol married critic-historian Gertrude Himmelfarb in 1942. As well as his son William, he had a daughter Elizabeth.

Yes Shrub, he was an 'intellectual pioneer' who peddled infantile fantasies to malleable minds.

[Bluewolf]

Not much to say about him but hopefully as these people die; it will become easier for what they started to fade away or at least weaken slightly.

[Tanasinn]

Good riddance. The fewer neoconservatives with even a vague ability to think, the better.

[Companion Cube]

Saw this article linked on another forum:

"I remember back in the late 1990s, when Ira Katznelson, an eminent political scientist at Columbia, came to deliver a guest lecture. Prof. Katznelson described a lunch he had with Irving Kristol during the first Bush administration.

"The talk turned to William Kristol, then Dan Quayle's chief of staff, and how he got his start in politics. Irving recalled how he talked to his friend Harvey Mansfield at Harvard, who secured William a place there as both an undergrad and graduate student; how he talked to Pat Moynihan, then Nixon's domestic policy adviser, and got William an internship at the White House; how he talked to friends at the RNC [Republican National Committee] and secured a job for William after he got his Harvard Ph.D.; and how he arranged with still more friends for William to teach at Penn and the Kennedy School of Government.

"With that, Prof. Katznelson recalled, he then asked Irving what he thought of affirmative action. 'I oppose it,' Irving replied. 'It subverts meritocracy.' "

[Pick]

I'd piss on his grave, but the nitrogen might fertilize his grave and make the plants grow better. As it stands, I'm glad he's dead.

[Elfdart]

Exhibit A for why Irving Kristol was a douche nozzle:

A bitter quarrel over an embattled exile's testimony

Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number (TIME, June 15) is a riveting tale of a man who underwent unspeakable torture and survived. In horrifying detail, exiled Argentine Publisher Jacobo Timerman, 58, details the sadism, brutality and anti-Semitic abuse he suffered during 30 months of imprisonment in Argentina between 1977 and 1979. His recently published book is also a devastating indictment of Argentina's junta, which the Council on Hemispheric Affairs has called the most flagrant violator of human rights in Latin America.

Initial reviews of Timerman's memoir were generally favorable. Now, however, an increasingly acrimonious quarrel has erupted over Timerman's testimony, involving prominent U.S. intellectuals and leaders of both the Argentine and American Jewish communities. In part, the arguments have arisen because of Timerman's political impact. On U.S. television, he has criticized President Reagan's low-key human rights policy and the Administration's efforts to improve relations with Argentina's military dictatorship. Last month Timerman was a silent but nonetheless potent presence at Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on Reagan's nomination of Ernest W. Lefever as Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs. Timerman, who has become an Israeli citizen, was not invited to testify at the confirmation hearings, but he had evidently become a symbol of liberal opposition to Lefever's view that human rights questions should not interfere with U.S. alliances. When Committee Chairman Charles Percy introduced Timerman at the hearings, the applause was loud and demonstrative. Democratic Congressman Richard Ottinger of New York even wrote Timerman that if the committee rejected the Lefever nomination it would be "clearly attributable to your efforts."

The first resounding volleys against Timerman were fired by conservative intellectuals who also happen to be supporters of Lefever. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, the neoconservative political scientist Irving Kristol characterized Timerman as a "Solzhenitsyn of the left" whose liberal partisans prefer to castigate friendly "authoritarian" regimes like Argentina's rather than hostile "totalitarian" governments like the Soviet Union's. Kristol also questioned Timerman's assertion that he had been imprisoned and tortured primarily because he was a Jew and a Zionist. According to Kristol, the real cause was Timerman's association with David Graiver, a mysterious Argentine financier who allegedly looted two U.S. banks of some $40 million while serving as a bagman for the Montoneros, Argentina's leftist guerrillas. Kristol expressed astonishment that Timerman's book makes no mention of Graiver, who had been part owner of La Opinion, the newspaper published and edited by Timerman before his arrest. Still, Kristol conceded that there was "no evidence" that Timerman had known about Graiver's alleged misdeeds.

In other words, Timmerman was asking for it. Keep in mind that this was the same Junta in Argentina that less than a year after this article was published (June 1981) attacked a NATO ally and was utterly humiliated by the Royal Navy, thus leaving egg all over the faces of the neocons who had a hard-on for Galtieri.

His son is every bit as slimy. Where Irving Kristol was a groupie for Argentine fascists who tortured and "disappeared" people, bungled their half-baked wars and bankrupted the country, William Kristol is a fluffer for those who tried to make the US a clone of Galtieri's Argentina (torture, kidnappings, lost wars, bankruptcy).

[Thanas]

True, but at least he is not a coward like 99% of all the other conservatives and refuses to appear on "liberal" shows. In other words, at least he appears at places where there is the danger of him having to actually defend his ideas. Not that this is such a huge improvement, but I prefer someone like William Kristol over someone like Limbaugh. At least Kristol has the guts to go out there and defend his theories, which is not something you can say for the vast majority of american conservatives.