Chait’s case for Kristol’s “thuggery” rests almost entirely on two sentences from an editorial Kristol wrote.

Having turned against a war that some of them supported, the left is now turning against the troops they claim still to support. They sense that history is progressing away from them–that these soldiers, fighting courageously in a just cause, could still win the war, that they are proud of their service, and that they will be future leaders of this country.

This strikes me as an overheated and unfair statement. Perhaps Jonathan Chait has made overheated and unfair statements from time to time? I don’t think it would be reasonable to take one of those statements and use it to create a theory of his essential thuggishness.

More Chait:

The notion that TNR published a Diarist merely for the edification of readers, rather than to advance a political agenda, did not occur to Kristol, because he could not imagine doing any such thing himself. He once explained his belief in the philosopher Leo Strauss to journalist Nina Easton thusly: “One of the main teachings is that all politics are limited and none of them is really based on the truth.” Whether or to what degree Beauchamp’s Diarist is true could not matter less to him.

The quote about Strauss and the limits of politics–presumably Kristol means that no set of political positions captures the whole capital-T Truth–does not prove, or even suggest, that Kristol doesn’t care about the truth, that he is uninterested in edifying his readers, etc.

I understand Chait’s pique: He thinks his magazine is taking unfair abuse. But I think he has gone at least as overboard as any of TNR’s critics in his response.