George Packer at The New Yorker notes that Kristol's one-year contract is up for renewal:

The real grounds for firing Kristol are that he didn't take his column seriously. In his year on the Op-Ed page, not one memorable sentence, not one provocative thought, not one valuable piece of information appeared under his name. The prose was so limp (“Who, inquiring minds want to know, is going to spare us a first Obama term?”) that you had the sense Kristol wrote his column during the commercial breaks of his gig on Fox News Sunday and gave it about the same amount of thought.

In other words, in hiring Kristol, the Times lowered its bar--its editorial standards--and Kristol crawled under the bar all year.

Gee, we're shocked.