The Scheuneman-Kristol Axis

Scheuneman was always a McCain man. In my own not very deep off-the-record inquiries into what the hell was going on these past two months, he was not regarded at first as a Palin-pod. But at some point, he became one. Scheuneman is a close friend of Palin's patron, Bill Kristol, which might help explain the shift (Kristol was desperately trying to defend Palin because his entire career was at stake). Or maybe Scheuneman just felt pity for this shopaholic picked out of nowhere and told to become a replacement president overnight.

But it seems clear that Scheuneman was funneling pro-Palin spin to Kristol, who was just spewing it directly, like raw intelligence reports, into the New York Times, using his column - how else does he see journalism? - as a pure means to advance his own interests within the GOP factional battle. Money quote:

Whatever the permutations, the advisers said they strongly believed that Mr. Scheunemann was disclosing, as one put it, “a constant stream of poison” to William Kristol, the editor of the conservative Weekly Standard and a columnist for The New York Times.  

Mr. Kristol, who wrote a column on Oct. 13 calling on Mr. McCain to fire his campaign because it was “close to being out-and-out dysfunctional,” said in a telephone interview on Wednesday that the campaign advisers were paranoid. Mr. Kristol has been a strong supporter of Ms. Palin.

 

“I wasn’t writing poison,” Mr. Kristol said. He added: “Randy Scheunemann is a friend of mine and I think he did a good job. I talked to him, but I talked to a lot of people at the campaign.”

Any columnist who sounds that much like a politician is in fact a propagandist.