Really, seriously, what is it with politico William Kristol? He exhibits this apparent irresistable Vulcan-like urge to periodically guest on The Daily Show and be skewered, dismembered, eviscerated, flayed, beaten into the ground like a Loony Tunes cartoon coyote, all the while smiling a sickly grin as if to say, I'm lovin' it--all the while whispering, '"I'm here with my whip-lashing, black leathered, exquisite master of pain, Jon, the Visitor of Purification, Stewart?"
In my last blog I marveled at how Kristol, the co-founder and Editor of the mindlessly conservative The Weekly Standard and wrong-way FoxNews (where else?) pundit extraordinaire for anything anti-liberal or anti-Obama, would visit Jon Stewart in his lair and play piñata to Stewart and his audience's baseball bat. It is like a moth to a flame, a love affair that always ends badly, a laughably bad, kamikaze opera.
I also noted that Kristol had dropped out of sight in non-congenial, non-Conservative venues in recent months, played it safe, perhaps to regroup, give both sides of his mouth a rest. Then a last Monday, BOOM!, there he was again, ready for his ritual, "please sir, may I have another," whupping, this time on the issue of Obama's health care legislation initiative.
This time, Stewart pulled out of Kristol and, in true to Roman crucifixion form, nailed his derrier to the cross with an embarrassed admission that the government can offer quality health care (at least to veterans), something he has repeatedly denied in his conservative safe havens.
Truth is, I don't understand why Kristol does it beyond some ritual purification need he may have. He's not garnering recruits to his political causes. He's not showing the wisdom of social conservatism - quite the opposite! He's not charming the studio audience. It's not the allure of the AFTRA minimums to appear on the show.
It reminds me of the times I made the afternoon talk show rounds (Oprah, Sally, Montel, Geraldo, et al) and would marvel how young men would come on the shows with their wives, girl friends, lovers, you-name-it, only to get roundly and predictably trashed for being loutish, insensitive, neurotically incapable of commitment men (ugh!) who go through life cluelessly beer guzzling and pock marking their existential road maps with one bad choice after another. It never was otherwise on these shows and yet the men just kept coming on, like pigs to slaughter.
Was it just the plane trip, the limo ride, the opportunity to appear on TV, even it you came off like a horse's ass and even if the audience always gave you a thumbs down trip into the lions mouth? Maybe. I can't be sure.
Perhaps for many of these young men, the opportunity to be on TV is worth anything, even pride, if they had it, which they probably didn't, which is why they would go on the show in the first place. Maybe it was just to keep their girlfriends from wandering off the reservation. I never knew for sure.
Kristol is yet another enigma. He has fame, he has a name, he has pride, he has bully pulpits all over the media landscape. He even had a NYT weekly column for a nanosecond. Just what the hell is he doing there? 
Does he just like abuse, enjoy psychological pies in the face?
Any ideas?
Addendum: Here is a link to a New Yorker article which provides a very nice answer to my question. Thanks to one of my faithful readers, Alan Bloom:
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2009/08/why_conservative_pundits_love.html
