You would think that being selected as a New York Times columnist would spur you to churn out some of the highest-quality prose you could muster. It was surprising, then, when Bill Kristol, founder of the Weekly Standard and scion of the right-wing punditocracy, blessed the Gray Lady’s Op-Ed pages with possibly the worst writing it’d ever seen. Kristol, no stranger to the argumentative essay or the persuasive piece, regularly gave his name to columns that were shoddily structured, shabbily researched and just plain boring; it seemed at times as if the veteran polemicist were doing little more than filtering propaganda into the backside of the front section.