David Margolick has an interesting piece about NPR in the new issue of Vanity Fair. He spends much of his time on Juan Williams, but this observation about NPR's right-wing critics is an important observation:

Apart from the occasional stories about gays or Palestinians (and maybe even gay Palestinians), there's precious little on NPR these days for conservatives really to hate. For them, despising NPR and cutting off what amounts to the few pennies it collects from the federal budget has increasingly become more a matter of pandering, or habit, or sophomoric sport, than of conviction or serious policy. The editor of the Weekly Standard, Bill Kristol, once confessed to former NPR ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin that he really didn’t believe NPR was liberal; he just said so "to keep you guys on the defensive." And that still seems true.

As Janine Jackson pointed out here (10/7/11), when you hear about new NPR boss Gary Knell talking about his desire to "depoliticize" the debate, what he means is try to do more to placate people like Kristol. Since that's not going to happen, the only real consequence is to push NPR to the right.

Taking the brave position (ScholarsAndRogues.com, 4/20/09) that the National Review Online is so bad that it makes William F. Buckley's print version look "semi-respectable" by comparison, former U.S. Navy Commander Jeff Huber writes that in his April 11 NRO post, "military historian and former classics professor Victor Davis Hanson comes across like a rabid war mongrel":

Frothing over the recent Somali pirate caper involving a U.S. flagged merchant ship, Davis insists that, "To end Somali piracy, disproportionate measures against the shore should be taken--for every one pirate assault, a lethal air assault should immediately follow." It's perhaps understandable that Hanson doesn’t mention what Somalia offers in the way of suitable air strike targets; underdeveloped nations like Somalia don't have any. Hanson probably doesn't understand that, because like so many hawkish military historians, he doesn't understand anything about the military. He doesn't know much about warfare theory, either. He calls for extreme (though ineffectual) military measures in response to something he admits "may not be a matter of American national security" committed not by a peer competitor or a group of global extremists but by "two-bit pirates." When a giant purposely crushes an anthill, he's not pursuing a political objective; he's feeding his perversions. That, like waterboarding someone 183 times, is not the sort of thing a global hegemon needs to be doing, Victor.

Calling things "even wackier at the other end of the nut farm," Huber further points to one issue of the Weekly Standard in which both "Barnacle Bill Kristol" and Seth Cropsey call for U.S. troops "going ashore in Africa to destroy the pirates' safe havens"--a bellicose position lamentably popular across many right-wing media.

Reading this at the bottom of neo-con William Kristol's column in the New York Times (1/26/09):

This is William Kristol's last column.

Homer says, "Woohoo!"

Then reading this at the Politico:

EXCLUSIVE: Progressives will delight when they get to the italic note at the end of Bill Kristol's column in the Times today say, "This is William Kristol’s last column." His one-year contract was up. Sources tell Playbook that he’s now beginning a monthly column in the Washington Post.

Homer says, "D'oh!"

On Fox News Sunday (11/16/08), NPR reporter Mara Liasson offered her take (which was essentially the same as neo-con co-panelist Bill Kristol) on why picking Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State would be good for Barack Obama:

In terms of Obama, I think he wants--it would send a lot of important signals. Number one, she is hawkish, as Bill pointed out. He has to kind of put to rest this notion that he was naive, which, of course, came from her during the campaign.

She’s hawkish, which will balance out his naiveté. If this is supposed to be a reference to the fact that Clinton supported the Iraq War, then it makes even less sense.