Quote of the day

This is William Kristol’s last column.

-This appears below Kristol's column. Kristol himself said nothing about this being his last column. There was no thanks to the NY Times for the opportunity, or to anyone that he worked with. Just the usual drivel about how wonderful conservatism is, and wondering if Obama is up to the task of defending liberty. With, of course, absolutely no mention of the peril that liberty has been placed in by Kristol's compadres in the Bush administration.

I don't have William Kristol, but neither do I particularly respect him. He seems like he has a good sense of humor, but he also seems like someone who enjoys waging ideological battle than actually developing policies. People like Kristol are, I suppose, needed, but they do not have to be appreciated.

Is Kristol history at The Times?

HuffPost has a post about William Kristol possibly not having his contract renewed as a columnist at The New York Times. Apparently he only has a one-year contract.

First of all, very good call on the part of Times management to only sign him to a one-year contract. Second, I would bet good money on the Times not even offering him a renewal. Kristol says that he hasn't had a conversation with Times management, and that he's ambivalent. In other words, they aren't making a lot of effort, and he's not worried about whether or not they do.

The HuffPost article quotes George Packer in The New Yorker at length. He nails it here:

The real grounds for firing Kristol are that he didn’t take his column seriously.

Which is, in a sense, unfortunate, because the Democrats do need competent opposition. I've enjoyed Kristol's appearances on The Daily Show, and thot that his best asset as a commentator was his sense of humor, his willingness to laugh at himself. Of course, not being an intellectual heavyweight makes it that much easier to not take yourself too seriously.

If Kristol leaves the Times, it would be the beginning of a winnowing of conservative intellectuals. Hopefully Jonah Goldberg would be next - he's taking up valuable space at the LA Times. I have an old friend from high school, Mark Molesky, who wrote a book, Our Oldest Enemy: A History of America's Disastrous Relationship with France with someone from the National Review. Maybe the purging of a few conservative intellectuals will open up opportunities in the public sphere for people like Mark. He's very smart - he has a Ph.d. from Harvard - and he's a nice guy, with a great sense of humor. I can see him on Meet The Press. He certainly has more intellectual discipline than Bill Kristol.

So here's hoping that Kristol does make an amicable departure from the Grey Lady, and that a new generation of conservatives - ideally less rigid, less arrogant, and maybe even more compassionate - than the current crop takes the place of the current crop. That would be refreshing.

Kristol uses up his last remaining cliches

I am reaching the point where I am almost starting to feel sorry for conservative columnists who are still in the McCain camp. At this point, what can they say? William Kristol, who at the very least tries to come up with creative ways of spouting nonsense, almost seems to be giving up. His latest column is a compendium of cliches. He has the wit to start with a quote attributed to a military leader - always fun to read.

After admitting that the Democrats are about to win in a rout - apparently he does have some meaningful relationship to reality - Kristol starts scraping the bottom of the barrel. But perhaps this is because he's used everything else in the barrel already.

Time for McCain to attack — or, rather, finally to make his case.

The heart of that case has to be this: reminding voters that when they elect a president, they’re not just electing a super-Treasury secretary or a higher-level head of Health and Human Services. They’re electing a commander in chief in time of war.

Right, because we haven't heard enough from John McCain over the last two years about his military service as a qualification for him to be President.

And then there's this paragraph, breathtaking in its inanity:

As for McCain, he needs to speak about America’s greatness and its future; about how the ingenuity and toughness of the American people will turn around this financial crisis just as the ingenuity of General Petraeus and the toughness of his fighting men and women turned around Iraq; about how America’s spirit was not undone by a terrorist attack, and will not be undone by a financial mess; about how the naysayers will once again be proved wrong; about how America will emerge from its troubles stronger than ever and will win its battles at home and abroad.

This is from William Kristol's new book, "Idiot's Guide To Political Speechwriting." Not that this is bad or silly advice. It's just Speechwriting 101. How about this idea from Speechwriting 102: Give a speech about How You Will Solve The Voters' Problems.

But to his credit, Kristol the eternal optimist tries to valiantly to make a case for being positive one last time:

McCain has a chance to close this election in a big and positive way. He has a chance to get voters to rise above the distractions and to set aside the petty aspects of the campaign. He has a chance to remind them why they have admired him, and perhaps to persuade them to vote for him on Nov. 4.

Would this turn things around? Unlikely. But why not take a shot?

At least someone is saying it. There are seven days left. Advising a candidate to remind voters of why they like him is about the most basic you can get. But I have to agree with Kristol: at this point, resorting to the tired, but tried and true, might be McCain's best chance.

I'm damning with faint praise here, but at least Kristol isn't blaming anyone but McCain for his looming defeat, and at least he isn't writing about the sniping between the various factions within the campaign. Maybe cliches are the best he can do.

Strange wisdom from Bill Kristol

Just when you thot things couldn't get weirder: William Kristol writes a column for the ages today. His first line has some really different advice for John McCain:

It’s time for John McCain to fire his campaign.

Wouldn't that be fun. Kristol then goes on to do what oh so few of his conservative compatriots have been willing to do of late: he acknowledges reality.

[McCain's] campaign is totally overmatched by Obama’s. The Obama team is well organized, flush with resources, and the candidate and the campaign are in sync. The McCain campaign, once merely problematic, is now close to being out-and-out dysfunctional. Its combination of strategic incoherence and operational incompetence has become toxic. If the race continues over the next three weeks to be a conventional one, McCain is doomed.

Having done the brave - for a conservative - thing and disabused himself of some delusions, Kristol goes straight back to his old bad habits, notably dreaming aloud in bright, cheery nonsense, painting word pictures with neon psychedelic colors. Take, for example, this bit advice for McCain:

Keep just a minimal staff to help organize the press conferences McCain and Palin should have at every stop and the TV interviews they should do at every location. Do town halls, do the Sunday TV shows, do talk radio — and invite Obama and Biden to join them in some of these venues, on the ground that more joint appearances might restore civility and substance to the contest.

I would be a big fan of restoring civility and substance to this contest. That would be great. And I would love to have some of what Kristol is smoking if he thinks that McCain and Palin are capable of doing that. I would not, however, want whatever Kristol is smoking that makes him think that McCain and Palin are going to be convinced to do press conferences, because that must be dangerously mind-altering stuff. He thinks Sarah Palin is going to be doing regular press conferences? He must be WAY past crack.

For all his conservative credentials, Kristol apparently forgets that alleged key component of conservatism: personal responsibility. John McCain should fire his campaign? Who does he think hired these people in the first place? Sarah Palin should be doing press conferences whenever and wherever possible? If that were even a remotely good idea, wouldn't they have started doing that, oh, say, a month and a half ago? The people on the McCain campaign know something that is holding Sarah Palin back from giving press conferences. Maybe the fact that her interviews so far have become the stuff of political pop culture legend - and not in a good way for her - provides a clue.

I'll say this for Kristol: the man takes risks. Ain't no one else out there suggesting this kind of thing, at least not on Op-Ed pages of the large metropolitan newspapers. He's going to get a lot of flak for this. I think it's completely delusional, but it is bold. Delusional but bold: there are worse combinations for a NY Times columnist. At this point, the second line of his column applies as much to him as to McCain: "He has nothing to lose." At this point, he can claim that he gave McCain radical advice, and, if McCain doesn't take it, he has a smidgen bit of independence from his failure. Handing out radical, apparently substantive advice while effectively bailing from a sinking ship. In one column. That takes talent.

I can't think of much that William Kristol has written that I agree with, but damn can he be entertaining. I mostly agree with this, but you will be able to knock me over with a feather if McCain does any of this.

Actually, I take that back. With John McCain, the only certainty is uncertainty. He might very well do everything Kristol is suggesting tomorrow, and then won't Kristol look like a genius. Anything is possible. As Hunter S. Thompson said, when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

William Kristol's cloudy crystal ball

I will say one thing about William Kristol: he's entertaining. He's a good writer, and, even when I find his ideas absurd or repugnant, he can write about them with a sense of humor. Such he does today, taking us through his own emotional roller coaster of the last few days, as he goes from fear and despair at the prospect of an Obama presidency to the hope that maybe, just maybe, John McCain can pull it out.

It's not just the writing itself that is amusing, of course: I also enjoy him grasping at the thinnest of straws.

What I particularly enjoyed was his attempt at justifying the tiny shred of hope that he has. His argument is obtuse at best, and very much the product of an inside-the-Beltway imagination. He hopes that voters, looking at the prospect of Democrats holding both members of Congress as well as the Presidency, will rebel, and vote for John McCain. It's possible that some voters will be motivated by this logic, but I doubt that it will be enough to help McCain win.

[I]t occurred to me that one man’s “deadlock-proof” Democratic majority is another’s unchecked Democratic majority. Given the unpopularity of the current Democratic Congress, given Americans’ tendency to prefer divided government, given the voters’ repudiations of the Republicans in 2006 and of the Democrats in 1994 — isn’t the prospect of across-the-board, one-party Democratic governance more likely to move votes to McCain than to Obama?

What is deliciously ironic here is that one of the examples he cites, of the voters rejecting Republicans in 2006, is very much still on voters' minds. He has a good point, of course, about the inherent problems of one party controlling all of government. But the best example of that, the failure of Republicans in the first six years of the Bush Administration, is the reason why Obama is ahead. The best possible proof of Kristol's theory is also a thorough repudiation of his ideology.

I almost feel sorry for the man. But not enough to stop enjoying watching him try to squirm his way out of his predicament.

Bill Kristol on Iraq - oh so wrong

Andrew Sullivan dug up a book that William Kristol wrote in 2002/2003, before the invasion of Iraq. Of course, he predicted an easy victory. Of course, he was spectacularly wrong. How wrong? Sullivan:

In fact, it would be very hard to think of a piece of analysis so riddled with misconceptions and errors and so self-evidently wrong in almost every respect only five years later.

He predicted that we might need as many as 75,000 troops at a cost of $16 billion a year. A year. Sullivan again, on how wrong Kristol was:

Kristol was off in his troops levels by a factor of two at the start of the occupation and by up to 20 today and he was off in his cost levels by a factor of ten. He also predicted "several thousand" troops by 2005, compared with 150,000 today.

What this brings up, obviously, is questions of accountability. Sullivan, who has done a great deal to admit his own mistakes and try to atone for them, has the moral authority to write this:

It seems to me that we demand accountability from our politicians and we should demand accountability from our intellectuals. Not that they always get things right - but that they give a full accounting when they are wrong. Instead we reward and celebrate those who not only get things wrong - Kristol and Rove now have prominent columns in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal - but those who have never taken personal responsibility for their own mistakes. Until we purge all these tendencies from Washington, we will not learn from history and we will keep repeating it.

The first element in holding these people accountable will be to hold their favorite politicians accountable. Kristol is still riding on Bush's coattails. He can still claim connection to the Bush White House. If and when Obama wins, he will naturally turn into the oppressed voice of the opposition. But it will be very easy to ridicule him if he tries that tactic. Bill Kristol, ultraprivileged straight white American male, voice of the oppressed? The satire will practically write itself.

MoDo enjoys the race

We are witness today to an odd phenomenon: Maureen Dowd saying someting positive about Hillary, even if it's positive in a tangential, slanted, sideways,"Hmm, well, maybe sorta" kind of way.

"Whether or not she wins, Hillary has already given noble service as a sophisticated political tutor for Obama, providing her younger colleague with much-needed seasoning. Who else was going to toughen him up? Howard Dean? John Edwards? Dennis Kucinich?"

Some have questioned whether or not Obama was tough. I answered that a long time ago; I've always thot he was tough. But I have to admit that part of his being tough was, at the start of this campaign, more potential than actual. He has the resilience to respond to difficult situations, but he had not had to respond to them on the national stage. Hillary has had that experience, and, in a perverse way that MoDo points out, this has been good for him.

"Without Hillary, he never would have learned to be a good debater. He never would have understood how to robustly answer distorted and personal attacks. He never would have been warned about how harmful an unplugged spouse can be. He never would have realized how a luminous speech can be effective damage control."

He addressed all of those issues almost as quickly as they came up, and therefore toughened up before our eyes. Which, ironically, Hillary did not anticipate. And what she particularly did not anticipate is that he answered her toughness with eloquence.

But MoDo misses something. It's not just to Obama's benefit in the primary and the general election that he has been through the fire in the primary. McCain has not. Of course, McCain has been through the fire in ways that no one else has or can even imagine. William Kristol, in a very good column (I finally appreciate why the Times hired him), appropriately titled "Biography Is Not Enough," points out that military veterans have not always won the general election; otherwise George H. W. Bush, Al Gore, and John Kerry would have won their elections.

"When we elect a president, we’re not giving a lifetime achievement award. We’re choosing someone to govern for the next four years. The qualities of a young military hero may not be those of a successful president."

McCain will run on his biography, not his domestic policies or vision. And while the Democratics are having at each other, those domestic policies of McCain will lie unexamined until the general. At which point Obama will be very well prepared for him. So it's not just that Obama is getting tougher by the day; it's that McCain is not being forced to sharpen his knives.