Boston Globe Was For Column Calling for Urinating in Bill Kristol’s Food Before It Was Somewhat Against It Before It Was Against It Some More Before It Was Totally Against It
By Matt McDonald | April 12, 2019, 18:50 EDT
An op-ed column published Wednesday by The Boston Globe stated that the author regretted not “pissing” in prominent neoconservative Bill Kristol’s food several years ago before the newspaper changed the word to “defiling” before the newspaper changed it to “telling [him] … what I really thought about him.”
The column, by Luke O’Neil, recounts a time when O’Neil was serving as a waiter at a restaurant in Cambridge that Kristol ate at.
O’Neil in the column bemoaned the recent lack of incidents in which Trump administration officials and allies have been harassed in restaurants, referring specifically to Kirstjen Nielsen, the recently fired Secretary of Homeland Security. (Kristol, though not a Trump ally, appears as a target of O’Neil because of his full-throated support of the second Iraq war in the early 2000s, when he was editor of The Weekly Standard, a former neoconservative magazine that ceased publishing in December 2018.)
The original version of O’Neil’s column ended with a cutely phrased call-to-arms for waiters:
“As for the waiters out there, I’m not saying you should tamper with anyone’s food, as that could get you into trouble. You might lose your serving job. But you’d be serving America. And you won’t have any regrets years later.”
On Friday, April 12, after at least three different versions had appeared on the newspaper’s web site for about two days, the Globe took the article down, publishing an editor’s note dissociating the newspaper from the author:
A search in the Boston Globe web site’s archives on Friday afternoon found a thumbnail sketch of O’Neil’s column that still included the word “defiled” in the lede – from what is apparently the second of three versions of the column published by the Globe – but the link is broken.
The column and the Globe’s handling of it have drawn fire from critics, including a former editorial page editor at the newspaper who retired last year, Ellen Clegg:
Now, that’s a courageous strategy for social change: yelling at people in restaurants or defiling their food. What about doing the hard work of political organizing to vote them out of office? https://t.co/VYppDc1ZR5 via @BostonGlobe
— Ellen Clegg (@ellenclegg) April 11, 2019
Ty Burr, the Globe’s movie critic, criticized editors of the newspaper, O’Neil, and critics of O’Neil’s column:
I have no idea how this op-ed got past our editors and a very little bit of @lukeoneil47 goes a long way with me, but, honestly, the vein-popping apoplexy on the part of the commentariat is a beautiful thing to see.https://t.co/AhG58zU9f2
— Ty Burr (@tyburr) April 10, 2019
O’Neil published a tweet Friday dissociating himself from the Globe: