Kristol Clarity

Well, frumps, lest you have any lingering doubt that the GOP is in critical condition with only a 50-50 chance of survival, we can now turn to Bill Kristol’s prognostications on the future of the Republican Party. If Bill says it’s going to survive and thrive, you can be fairly sure that it will be on life support in the very near future.

Kristol is so consistently and unapologetically wrong, so much of the time, that I can’t understand why conservatives haven’t pulled him offstage before this. Given his comments in his most recent opinion column for the Washington Post, though, it’s all starting to make some sort of Twilight Zone-ish sense.

Kristol’s track record for “dead wrong” has been copiously documented so I’m not inclined to add to that slush pile. If you’d like to investigate for yourself, just Google the phrase “Bill Kristol idiot” and you’ll have 53, 600 pages to plow through.

It’s a Good Time to Be a Conservative (really?)

Kristol’s latest piece of punditry – It’s a Good Time to Be a Conservative, opens with the usual citation of statistics designed to prove that conservatives are actually a vibrant, growing majority - the kind that can take back the House without breaking a sweat. Here are the most recent stats from Gallup that Kristol cites:

“Some 40 percent of Americans call themselves conservative, compared with 36 percent who self-describe as moderates and 20 percent as liberals. What’s more, fully 72 percent of Republicans say they’re conservative.”

Now I’m no math whiz but those numbers say to me that 40% are conservatives as opposed to 56% that are something else (i.e., moderates and liberals).

Kristol goes on to gleefully point out that this is the highest percentage of self-described conservatives since Gallup got into the polling business. Do you think that it’s a mere coincidence that the number of folks who describe themselves as “conservative” might go up during one of the most serious financial meltdowns in modern history? I wonder if all of those new “conservatives” would buy into Kristol’s definition of conservatism or run the other way?

Happy Days Are Here Again

Here’s the point where Kristol gets into some heavy-duty punditry:

“Obviously, many Republicans and conservatives — and lots of moderates and independents — will be grateful to Mitch McConnell if he can stop ObamaCare, and to Jon Kyl if he can induce the president to embrace a stronger foreign policy. But it’s unlikely that the minority party in Congress will be the source of bold new conservative leadership over the next three years. Even if Republicans pick up the House in 2010, the party’s big ideas and themes for the 2012 presidential race will probably not emanate from Capitol Hill.”

“The center of gravity, I suspect, will instead lie with individuals such as Palin and Huckabee and Gingrich, media personalities like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, and activists at town halls and tea parties. Some will lament this — but over the past year, as those voices have dominated, conservatism has done pretty well in the body politic, and Republicans have narrowed the gap with Democrats in test ballots.”

“And next week, in real balloting, conservative Republicans are likely to win in Virginia, a state Obama carried. Meanwhile, a liberal Republican anointed by the GOP establishment for the special congressional election in Upstate New York will probably run third, behind the conservative Republican running on the Conservative Party line, who may in fact win.”

“The lesson activists around the country will take from this is that a vigorous, even if somewhat irritated, conservative/populist message seems to be more effective in revitalizing the Republican Party than an attempt to accommodate the wishes of liberal media elites.”

Our Man in Left Field

Well, Bill, that will probably all depend upon the average intelligence of the collective remnants of the Republican Party. Here’s the possible demographic of that “revitalized” Republican Party that you’re so excited about:

• The 1% of Americans who find Beck and Limbaugh’s “big ideas” compelling (minus of course the approximately 0.4% of that audience who tune in out of morbid curiosity, like me);

• An October 2009 poll of Republicans by Rasmussen Reports put Huckabee in the lead with 29%, followed by Romney on 24% and Palin on 18%. (Keep in mind that those are percentages of a party that currently represents only 19% of the US electorate).

• What’s left of the 19% who self-describe as Republicans, once the ultra-conservative southerners and the libertarian tea baggers go careening off to create their own Constitutionalist Party or National Conservative Party or some such thing, as they are threatening to do.

• The die-hards can probably be counted on to hang around after all the money they’ve spent on designing the GOP. You know the ones, the extra-political hard-core capitalists remaining in the US Chamber of Commerce and the Chicken-hawks running the industrial side of the military-industrial complex, who circle endlessly over the Pentagon.

Now if you can just herd all of those cats in one direction . . .

Out of that collection, who do you imagine doing the heavy-lifting in the Legislative branch? You know, the actual traditional work of elected representatives? Or do you expect the current post-legislative GOP to continue to find other priorities? Like passing a resolution to thank the “millions” of tea-baggers who showed up for Glenn Beck 912 March on Washington (really, it’s true); or maybe legislation demanding to see the President’s birth certificate? If that’s the legislative agenda, I’m sure Beck and Limbaugh wouldn’t mind taking a whack at it.

Help! My Left-Brain Doesn’t Know What My Right-Brain Is Doing

In case you’re unfamiliar with Kristol he is the son of Irving Kristol, the “godfather of neo-conservatism,” who, according to his bio was:

“ . . .the founder, editor, and contributor to various magazines, he played an influential role in the intellectual and political culture of the last half-century; after his death he was described by The Daily Telegraph as being “perhaps the most consequential public intellectual of the latter half of the 20th century”

Evidently, those qualities must be among those that are said to “skip a generation.” Kristol the Younger exhibits only trace amounts of his father’s intellectual rigor, discipline, open-mindedness or humaneness. He has distinguished himself mostly as an ineffective conservative apparatchik whose republican heart may be in the right place but, down through the years, has proven to be more of an embarrassment than a help to the GOP.

Kristol went to the right prep school, went on to Harvard (where he roomed with Alan Keyes) and ultimately received a Ph.D. in government. He got involved in national politics working on Patrick Moynihan’s Senate campaign in 1973 and in 1988 Kristol ran Alan Keyes unsuccessful Maryland senatorial campaign against Paul Sarbanes.

After teaching political philosophy and American politics at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Kristol went to work in government in 1985, serving as chief of staff to Secretary of Education William Bennett during the Reagan administration, and then as Chief of Staff to the Vice President under Dan Quayle in the George H. W. Bush administration. The New Republic dubbed Kristol “Dan Quayle’s brain” upon being appointed the Vice President’s chief of staff.

Once the “Brain Trust” job was over, Kristol moved on to head up the Project for the Republican Future, a conservative think tank.

There he cranked out strategy memos circulated among Republican policymakers, the most famous of those was the one in which Kristol said the party should “kill”, not amend or compromise on, the Clinton health care plan (sound familiar??). Kristol’s memo struck a chord with Republicans who united in total opposition to Clinton’s health care reform plan. A later memo advocated the phrase “There is no health care crisis,” (sound familiar??) which Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole used in his response to Clinton’s 1994 State of the Union address.

Kristol’s latest gig was as foreign policy advisor for McCain’s presidential campaign where he also gets kudos for pushing the Palin-as-running-mate bright idea.

Dinosaurs Are People Too

In my opinion, Bill Kristol represents just about every quality of thought and policy failure that is dragging the Republican Party under for the third time.

Kristol is doctrinaire, stubbornly deluded and clinging desperately to the past. Bill Kristol did a short stint at the New York Times, last year as a political columnist. I say “short” because he was fired after one year. According to a Daily Beast article citing a “reliable source with first-hand knowledge of the decision,” Kristol’s firing had nothing to do with his opinions or ideology, the main complaint was that Kristol was a sloppy, lazy journalist.

A give-away came in the form of four corrections the newspaper was forced to run over factual mistakes in the columns, creating an impression that they were rushed out without due diligence or attention to factual claims.

One public correction and apology was necessitated by Kristol relying on the right-wing extremist NewsMax site as his sole source. Most freshman journalism students wouldn’t make that mistake. It seems that whatever has gotten into the GOP’s water has made them severely fact-averse. Guess that explains why Kristol might expect the GOP’s “center of gravity” to be the likes of Beck, Limbaugh and the tea bag contingent.

Unless the GOP can come up with some more credible, responsible, reality-based spokespersons, I think we might need to get the Republican Party to sign a “Do Not Resuscitate” order and start fresh. This is getting embarrassing for the country . . .

Here’s a little sampler of Kristol Clarity for your entertainment: