Fun With Hypocrisy

“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.’ ”

Sounds like my mom and stepdad, who oppose government creation of jobs except in the case of military contractors and the forest service. We’re all connected to some kind of special interest group, I would’ve hoped as adults we could at least realize that much. I guess that’s part of the trick of dividing politics up into things like normal folks vs. everyone else. Screw it.

via Balloon Juice » Blog Archive » Watch out, Kristols, Podhoretzes, and Kagans!.