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Monday, December 01, 2008

By this logic, holding up a bank because you need to feed your family is acting in good faith
Posted by Jill | 6:31 AM
Can William Kristol possibly get more stupefyingly, mind-bogglingly, Oh God Please Make Teh Stupid Stop dumb?

Now he's calling for not just pardons, but the Medal of Freedom for everyone who tortured, illegally spied, or did any of the Bush Administration's dirty work in the name of the so-called "war on Terror":
One last thing: Bush should consider pardoning–and should at least be vociferously praising–everyone who served in good faith in the war on terror, but whose deeds may now be susceptible to demagogic or politically inspired prosecution by some seeking to score political points. The lawyers can work out if such general or specific preemptive pardons are possible; it may be that the best Bush can or should do is to warn publicly against any such harassment or prosecution. But the idea is this: The CIA agents who waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and the NSA officials who listened in on phone calls from Pakistan, should not have to worry about legal bills or public defamation. In fact, Bush might want to give some of these public servants the Medal of Freedom at the same time he bestows the honor on Generals Petraeus and Odierno. They deserve it.


I realize that Kristol runs the Weekly Standard, having created it with fellow neocon lunatic scion John Podhoretz using Rupert Murdoch's money. But you'd think that in trying to make his rag pass as a legitimate, mainstream publication, he'd at least try to not sound like a complete idiot?

This is a perfect example of what Neal Gabler was talking about in the article I linked to earlier -- that modern conservatism has nothing to do with the documents on which this country was founded, nothing to do with the Founding Fathers or the Constitution, or any of the patriotic foofarah they trot out every time they want to make political hay, while they squat and squeeze out turd after turd all over what this country stands for. No, theirs is the conservatism of fear -- fear of change, fear of those who look different or behave differently or who have different cultural customs, or worst of all, think differently. It's a conservatism that has somehow managed to turn living in a constant state of fear into a kind of macho toughness. It's Joe McCarthy conservatism, and guys like Kristol are his heirs.

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Monday, June 23, 2008

Monday Big Blue Smurf Blogging: What They Said
Posted by Jill | 7:14 AM
Today's honoree: Mustang Bobby, for having the intestinal fortitude to take on William Kristol's sputteringly preposterous op-ed piece in today's New York Times.

Money quote:

William Kristol, who has never had a problem heating up the war rhetoric to get someone else to go fight a war for some neo-con vision, never chose to serve either; growing up the only person he ever saw in uniform was the doorman at the Waldorf Astoria. He glorifies the service of others as if he was re-enacting some G.I. Joe Saturday-morning cartoon fantasy, doing the bidding of the nation's leaders. He serves as the chief cheerleader of sending others, including the sons and daughters of the keepers of BlueStarChronicles.com, to fight his wars, but never thought of doing it himself, and when he was faced with it during the time he was eligible for the draft, he found a way to avoid it. Someone else served instead of him. And he has the nerve to chastise MoveOn for pointing out that there are some people who don't want their child to go to war.

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Monday, January 14, 2008

Thank you, sir, may I have another?
Posted by Jill | 7:01 AM
And speaking of William Kristol....

Is there anything that better represents the folly of "reaching out" to conservatives than the New York Times deciding that Kristol would be a good conservative voice for the paper?

Believing that William Kristol will somehow turn into William Safire is sort of like Barack Obama believing that his sheer force of personality will turn intransigent Republicans into happy furry puppies panting at his feet to compromise on policies on which he's running.

Like today's Republican Party, Kristol isn't content to follow the "intelligent people of good will can disagree" notion that even as big an idiot as David Brooks at least seems to remember. Instead, Kristol is perfectly willing to take a paycheck from the New York Times for trashing its readership:

When President Bush announced the surge of troops in support of a new counterinsurgency strategy a year ago, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Democratic Congressional leaders predicted failure. Obama, for example, told Larry King that he didn’t believe additional U.S. troops would “make a significant dent in the sectarian violence that’s taking place there.” Then in April, the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, asserted that “this war is lost, and this surge is not accomplishing anything.” In September, Clinton told Gen. David Petraeus that his claims of progress in Iraq required a “willing suspension of disbelief.”

The Democrats were wrong in their assessments of the surge. Attacks per week on American troops are now down about 60 percent from June. Civilian deaths are down approximately 75 percent from a year ago. December 2007 saw the second-lowest number of U.S. troops killed in action since March 2003. And according to Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno, commander of day-to-day military operations in Iraq, last month’s overall number of deaths, which includes Iraqi security forces and civilian casualties as well as U.S. and coalition losses, may well have been the lowest since the war began.

Do Obama and Clinton and Reid now acknowledge that they were wrong? Are they willing to say the surge worked?

No. It’s apparently impermissible for leading Democrats to acknowledge — let alone celebrate — progress in Iraq. When asked recently whether she stood behind her “willing suspension of disbelief” insult to General Petraeus, Clinton said, “That’s right.”

When Obama was asked in the most recent Democratic presidential debate, “Would you have seen this kind of greater security in Iraq if we had followed your recommendations to pull the troops out last year?” he didn’t directly address the question. But he volunteered that “much of that violence has been reduced because there was an agreement with tribes in Anbar Province, Sunni tribes, who started to see, after the Democrats were elected in 2006, you know what? — the Americans may be leaving soon. And we are going to be left very vulnerable to the Shias. We should start negotiating now.”

But Sunni tribes in Anbar announced in September 2006 that they would join to fight Al Qaeda. That was two months before the Democrats won control of Congress. The Sunni tribes turned not primarily because of fear of the Shiites, but because of their horror at Al Qaeda’s atrocities in Anbar. And the improvements in Anbar could never have been sustained without aggressive American military efforts — efforts that were more effective in 2007 than they had been in 2006, due in part to the addition of the surge forces.

Last year’s success, in Anbar and elsewhere, was made possible by confidence among Iraqis that U.S. troops would stay and help protect them, that the U.S. would not abandon them to their enemies. Because the U.S. sent more troops instead of withdrawing — because, in other words, President Bush won his battles in 2007 with the Democratic Congress — we have been able to turn around the situation in Iraq.


No, I'm not willing to say "the surge worked." The increased troop levels in the occupation of Iraq have caused a decrease in violence that is dependent upon those increased troop levels being there in perpetuity, at a cost of $15 billion a month. Can you say that "the surge worked" when it is not a surge but an indefinite, perpetual occupation that continues to bankrupt the country?

Apparently, when your name is William Kristol and you're collecting three or four paychecks for saying so, you can.

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