"Pulling at the Kristol Thread"

Robert Farley considers Bill Kristol's latest piece (which I noted below) continuing to defend Palin and predict how she's totally gonna pull it out for McCain, and wonders if Kristol will ever be shunned by the Right if he turns out to have been totally and completely wrong.

And herein lies the rub. Relationships are the currency of conservative punditry, and that currency is essentially secured by Kristol. If the bedrock of this currency starts to founder (if Kristol drops the mask, or comes under sustained attack from conservatives), then the entire financial system is in trouble. It's not that people think that the entire system will collapse; they just don't know what exactly will happen if the Kristol derivatives turn toxic. At the very least, the system will undergo an earthquake, and the result of that earthquake could be unpleasant. As such, the entire system has a vested interest in making sure that the Kristol derivatives don't turn toxic, and thus that the bedrock currency remains stable.

And so we see a happy convergence trends that will work to prevent a reckoning in conservative punditry after the election. I'm not saying that the reckoning won't happen, just that pulling at the Kristol thread is likely to have wide-ranging consequences in conservative journalism. As such, even though Kristol played an important role in many of most disastrous elements of this administration/campaign, those who might gun for him are going to have to be careful.