The Democrats are worse than McCain.
Seriously, how much are they paying this guy?
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Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
The Supreme Court is corrupt. Democrats must win in November and force court reform.
Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.
When we show up, we win.
Nothing worth doing is easy.
The arc of the moral universe doesn’t bend itself. it’s up to us.
They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.
We’ll be taking my thoughts and prayers to the ballot box.
President Biden is doing good where he can, and getting it done.
Republicans do not pay their debts.
And we’re all out of bubblegum.
Elections aren’t won by handwringing, cowering, and/or bashing your own candidates.
Of course you can have champagne before noon. That’s why orange juice was invented.
You cannot shame the shameless.
It looks like winning debates is a black job!
“Can i answer the question? No you can not!”
Damn right I heard that as a threat.
Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.
Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.
Let’s not be the monsters we hate.
The most dangerous place for a black man in America is in a white man’s imagination.
Accountability, motherfuckers.
The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.
Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.
There are some who say that there are too many strawmen arguments on this blog.
Zifnab
Assuming its by the word, they’re paying him his salary divided by 2.
Caidence (fmr. Chris)
This is #3 or #4 for Kristol, no?
I think we can say now:
The Times made a brilliant decision in hiring this guy. Makes all their Establishment-Left muttering look dignified and nuanced when this guy in the corner shits himself every time he opens his mouth.
Brilliant. Gray Lady, I applaud you.
But you still fucked us over with Judith Miller. Get back to work, I might by a Sunday Times in the next decade.
Jorge
Kristol is the political equivalent of a Penthouse letter writer. A spectators fanatastic distortions of reality.
Zifnab
An interesting point in this piece, on a somewhat secondary note. Here we have a generally respected Republican Senator and a sitting Republican President sitting in an evenly split Congressional delegation. Senator stands up and bloviate on how a few thousand more troops would be all it took to go from losing in Iraq to Mission Accomplished 2: Electric Bugaloo. President hops on the fairy tale and goes chasing after victory for real this time, srsly. We trundle deeper into the clusterfuck.
Without a dimwitted and arrogant Presidency, we never would have conducted a surge (or entered Iraq to begin with). But it took a loud and obnoxious Senator to put the “Surge” card on the table. Without leadership in the Senate, would we have seen more troops on the ground in Iraq? I somehow doubt it.
Compare this to Dodd’s telecomm filibuster, in which skillful Senatorial leadership killed a bill championed by the Senator’s own caucus and rallied support against what would easily have been another Congressional roll-over.
Getting good, competent, intelligent Senators into office is nearly as important as winning the Presidency. The Senators we elect in ’08 will be the voices that guide the party in ’10 and ’12 as well as the next batch of Presidential Candidates in ’16. Just worth noting.
Danton
The Times is paying Kristol $50,000 a year to write a column per week. You gotta pay for good comedy.
jnfr
He’s a very bad writer, and a very poor thinker. That doesn’t leave him with much to offer. Unless you’re looking for Republican talking points, in which case I guess he’s your go-to guy.
Dug Jay
I think that’s a tad unfair to one of BJ’s hosts.
TenguPhule
Kristol is the political equivalent of a Penthouse letter writer. A spectators fanatastic distortions of reality.
Jorge, you had no call to go and insult Penthouse letters like that.
The Other Steve
Minimum wage, and the damn Democrats just voted him a pay raise last year!
RSA
And by “worse than McCain”, I mean “less happy about waging war in the Middle East for the next hundred years”.
I did like this bit:
This is the long-winded political columnist’s version of Bush’s whine: “Being President is hard!”
Z
You know, the dark wicked cynic in me has another theory about all this. We all know that McCain has p*ssed off a lot of Republicans: Evangelicals, Xenophobes, Lobbyists, Bush worshipers (who don’t think Rummy screwed up or that torture is bad), etc. So, on lot’s of levels, he is an apostate. I understand their dislike for the man. But, take Coulter, she gains if Hillary wins. Her brand of hate-lit gets huge sales for the next 4 years. With Romney, she gets to continue to pretend to live in a fantasy world where lies=truth and liberals (who are repeated pointing out the lying) are evil and anti-American. With McCain, there is a risk that he is going to get into office and put some blame on Bush and other Republicans for the mess.
The pundit class cannot allow that. Their wingnut welfare depends on characterizing Democratic objections to bad policy and leadership as unpatriotic and dangerous.
NonyNony
I’ve often wondered about that whole kabuki dance that led to the Surge. I figured McCain was laying out the talking points to be able to criticize Bush once he got to the general election (“If only the President had listened to me and sent in more troops we’d be winning.”) Then Bush undermines him by deciding that Straight Talk’s idea is a good one and thus we get “the Surge”. And Straight Talk suddenly has to jump on board to defend Bush’s war policies because suddenly they’ve become his babies.
Honestly, I don’t think Straight Talk ever really believed that “the Surge” was a good idea – his talking point that he was hammering was to set up in people’s minds that Bush and Rumsfeld had bungled what should have been a good idea by not sending in more troops in the first place. Sometimes I wonder if Bush and Co. really thought the Surge was a good idea, or if they just wanted to undermine Senator Straight Talk’s ability to be critical of Our Fearless Leader – consequences be damned.
Garrigus Carraig
Wait, who’s resisting big government? Is Kristol a Paul supporter now?
Oh, that’s brilliant. I guess he’ll be here all week, & we should try the veal. Seriously, I feel diminished after reading that.
Jake
I’d go one further and say it is more important. Shit, I’d settle for CongressCritters who understood and defended the balance of power. The courts have to be sick of doing all the heavy lifting.
Is he calling for a draft? No?
StFu Bill.
Caidence (fmr. Chris)
Little does Kristol-Jr. realize that this was not only good for him, but necessary for him.
If Democrats and college kids knew how to let go of their dicks and start doing things in gov’t, Krissy would have been out on his ass years ago.
Irony, thy name is Kristol’s apprehension deficit.
The Other Steve
I think it’s clear that the opposition in Iraq is purposefully working to make it look like Iraq is calm and peaceful because they want a Democrat to win the presidency.
Then they will unleash their fully armed battlestation upon the unsuspecting masses.
Vote John McCain!
ThymeZone
Seriously, I don’t know. Can anyone find this information?
D-Chance.
Mark Levin wants to post a sober thought.
Money quote: “If McCain moves to the right during the general election to try to appeal to more conservatives, Obama will be able to portray him as a disingenuous flip-flopper.”
Understand, Levin is a Romney supporter. And I seriously doubt he was sober when he posted. No Romney supporter could claim to worry about McCain being a flip-flopper without a shot or two under the belt.
Ned Raggett
Yeah, I noticed that as well. At least Freddoso over there immediately responded with due if polite incredulity.
Jake
Smart ass answer 1: Ask his hooker.
SAA 2: Too much. Even if he gets a buck a column.
I’m not sure if it would be possible to find that information short of beating it out of someone. I think the best you could do is hunt around for the salary of a similarly popular columnist.
ThymeZone
Heh, somebody admired by six people in the White House, and three or four members of Ehud Olmert’s administration?
And of course, Rick Moran.
Jake
Sorry. Popular was a poor word choice. I was trying to stay away from “Clueless fuck who continually gets to waste ink despite the fact he is insanely wrong, wrong, wrong about everything in the multi-universe.”
Should have said “distributed” or perhaps “syndicated.”
Belae
From what i have read on other blogs (big media matt iirc) i believe kristol is being paid 5 bucks per words.
Emma Anne
Even if he gets a free newspaper with his column in it.
Zifnab
I have my reservations about that theory too. McCain was nuzzling back up to Bush all through ’06 and ’07, in order to get his hands on the little black book of Bush Backers from ’00 and ’04. The Bush name carries a great many dollar signs.
I don’t know if he genuinely intended to see a Surge take place. At one point, after the President proposed an extra 30k troops, I remember McCain mentioning something along the lines of really needing more like 60k or 80k to get the job done right, blah blah blah. But the point is that a Senator got up and talked his way into heavily influencing Iraq policy. Had John McCain been hit by a bus before he began his little Surge-o-thon, I don’t know if we’d have those extra troops invested in the country. Had Lieberman lost to Lamount, and the new freshman Senator from Connecticut had a floor to protest the war, I don’t know if we’d have seen the US moving in another direction by his guidance.
The point being that Senators can have just as much influence on the process as Presidents, and an election of Obama or Clinton won’t get us out of Iraq on its own. You need Senators capable of winning over popular support for whatever good/bad/ugly strategies or ideas they cook up.
grandpa john
Z
What Bill Kristol left out:
Its not easy convincing others to let me speak on their TV programs or write columns in their paper when I have been consistently wrong about everything. It is not easy relentlessly supporting a clearly failed foreign policy by a inept leader. Its not easy saying and writing things that are demonstrably false. Its not easy looking clean, tanned, and cheerful when the truth is the Magical Unity Pony makes me cry.
Jake
Jesus Christ:
Shorter Billy K: I hates me some h****y bitches.
Thursday
Isn’t the question why?