Bill Kristol's Burden


And then Bill lamented the difficulty of finding good, legal, documented, and affordable help these days:

Reading Kristol and other writers he assembles at the Weekly Standard is another of my embarrassing pleasures. I often get a glimpse of the mentality of Kipling, the thinker whose loftiest thoughts include the "white man’s burden" and the long recessional into the twilight in the defense of civilization and Empire. Sometimes it’s a glimpse of the Proper World, a view of European men in stiff white linens sitting on a veranda and discussing the Great Questions of the Day as they are served tea from a shining silver service by some dark-skinned houseboy. Or perhaps it’s the noble gallantry of the Light Brigade charging off to certain death. Or the humorous rough-and-tumble of Tommy Atkins, the soldier...

Kristol and Kipling are alas so much alike. But they differ in one fundamental respect. Kipling was a conservative, but he was not a party man. Kristol is little but a creature of his party...Kipling at least offered us poetry, but as Orwell noted, it was "good bad poetry."