Pure partisan-jousting. Which may be the point, I guess:
The purpose of having Kristol on the op-ed page is to inoculate the paper against charges of lefty bias. To that end, it’s more effective to have a pure party-line propagandist without a shred of honesty in him than an actual independent-thinking person of somewhat conservative tendencies. Plus, it runs less risk of accidentally convincing one’s readership of anything; they read Kristol’s tripe, they get angry and hurl down their bagels in disgust, they say "How can the Times actually be printing this crap?" and they go off to vote for Obama or Hillary.
The Dish 