The New Republic runs an article on the New York Times’ decision to hire Bill Kristol, and provides the short list of candidates for the spot:

[L]ast fall, [Times publisher Arthur] Sulzberger and Times editorial-page editor Andrew Rosenthal prepared a list of some 25 conservative writers. According to a person with knowledge of the search, the names included Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, The Atlantic’s Ross Douthat, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations Max Boot and three Weekly Standard staffers: senior editor Christopher Caldwell, associate editor Matthew Continetti, and the magazine’s editor and founder, Bill Kristol. On December 30, Sulzberger selected Kristol, who gave up his column at Time magazine for the Times appointment.

This is really pretty striking. Every author mentioned is an ardent supporter of the welfare-warfare state, with admittedly varying emphases. Douthat’s focus, for example, has been on attempting to craft a European Christian Democrat-style conservatism that fuses political sops to social conservatives to economic populism (read: “expanding the welfare state”) in an attempt to buy middle class votes. Max Boot and Charles Krauthammer, by contrast, have focused more on urging the United States into pointless and massively destructive foreign wars, the first of which has already killed more Americans than 9/11 and sucked half a trillion dollars from taxpayers’ pockets.

I’m loath to predict political outcomes. Maybe as a political matter this sort of thing will sell. But abandoning conservative economic principles in the pursuit of political success and simultaneously indulging the worst jingoist excesses of neoconservatism is a positively revolting platform. Looking at the slate of candidates for the Republican presidential nomination, maybe this new welfare-warfare fusionism has legs. But it certainly doesn’t offer very much to libertarians.