Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

“But what about the lurkers?”

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

Fuck that bum, let’s go Joe!

American History and Black History can not be separated.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

No Justins, No Peace

When do the post office & the dmv weigh in on the wuhan virus?

“Can i answer the question? No you can not!”

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

T R E 4 5 O N

“In the future, this lab will be a museum. don’t touch it.”

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

Books are my comfort food!

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

We know you aren’t a Democrat but since you seem confused let me help you.

I desperately hope that, yet again, I am wrong.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

Dead end MAGA boomers crying about Talyor Swift being a Dem is my kind of music. Turn it up.

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Reader Interactions

76Comments

  2. 2.

    WereBear

    It’s Idiocy On Purpose.

    Bill Kristol is sincere! He believes everything he says! He doesn’t care what the rabble thinks!

    It’s just not possible to be an ironic wingnut, now is it?

  4. 4.

    I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet

    PSA:

    A couple of triple-matches are going on now at the DCCC and the DSCC. Yeah, I know the arguments about not supporting them. But, like it or not, the national Democratic party has a big role to play in the election. If you’ve got some cash to spare, it could be spent in much worse places.

    Cheers,
    Scott.
    (Who knows that triple-matching has been going on for weeks, but time is running out…)

  7. 7.

    Corner Stone

    @WereBear:

    It’s just not possible to be an ironic wingnut, now is it?

    They killed Irony. They took her out in the backyard and shot her dead, dead.

  8. 8.

    opiejeanne

    I’m sorry, someone explain this to me. It just sounds stupid but it’s part of a meme that I’ve missed, right?

  14. 14.

    The Other Chuck

    @opiejeanne: Let’s start with Bill riding the coattails of his father Irving Kristoll. Then let’s follow up with his best buddies W, Jeb, and Mitt.

  15. 15.

    Tokyokie

    Kristol is very highly compensated to never question the entitlements of a social structure that permit someone as grievously intellectually incapable as himself to be highly compensated.

  16. 16.

    Trentrunner

    It’s a defining feature of white privilege that you ALWAYS think you bootstrapped yourself up, no matter how high up on the mountain you were fucking born.

    Bill O’Reilly
    Bill Kristol
    Mitt Romney (he lived on tuna in college!)
    George W. Bush

    He’s not being stupid. He thinks he’s self-made. Too bad the blahs and the browns don’t have the gumption and chutzpah and initiative to choose the right birth canal out of which to slide.

  17. 17.

    Corner Stone

    Damn, that’s two things I’ve long been advocating for:
    MPs Want To Shorten Work Week
    Ok, it’s not in the US, but still. It works!

    “The bill points out that other countries which have shorter full time work weeks, such as Denmark, Spain, Belgium, Holland and Norway, actually experience higher levels of productivity. At the same time, Iceland ranked poorly in a recent OECD report on the balance between work and rest, with Iceland coming out in 27th place out of 36 countries.”

  19. 19.

    piratedan

    you would like to think that someone who is being paid as handsomely as he is to be a political shill would have an modicum of self-awareness, but in this case Kristol’s cluelessness is a feature, not a bug.

  23. 23.

    Mike in NC

    Hey, Billy Kristol remains one of America’s finest stand-up comedians! A man at the top of his profession, who publishes a magazine called “The Weekly Slapstick”.

  24. 24.

    Chris T.

    @Corner Stone: Interesting. Perhaps I should buy and read the study, but I think somewhere around 70% is more likely, if only because at 90% there’s a huge incentive for fraud: If you fraudulently hide your last $10 million of income, and are successful, you keep ($10M minus cost of setting up fraud scheme) or probably $9+ million. If you don’t attempt to hide it, you keep $1M. So there’s $8M per $10M (80% incentive) for fraud, vs whatever the risk of getting caught is—probably paying out about $12-24M total in lawyer’s fees, taxes, and penalties. At a 70% marginal rate, there’s only about a $6M (60%) “pro fraud” gain, so your risk is about two to four times your gain: worthwhile only if your risk of getting caught is below about 20%.

  25. 25.

    I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet

    @Ruckus: :-)

    I sometimes think of these “match” things (which the local NPR stations have started doing a lot as well) as a way to squeeze more money out of the millionaires and billionaires who put up the matching funds. Redistribute the moneys from the plutocrats!!! ;-)

    If one wants to give more directly to candidates, one could throw some funds at the Red to Blue House seats, but it’s more of a long shot. Of course, if an undetected wave is building, then it may help a great deal…

    Lots of choices!

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  26. 26.

    Patrick

    Quotes from Bill Kristol:

    [the war in Iraq] “could have terrifically good effects troughout the Middle East”
    September 18, 2002 column

    [removing Saddam] “would start a chain reaction in the Arab world that would be very healthy”
    November 21, 2002

    If we free the people of Iraq, we will be respected in the Arab world… and I think we will be respected around the world.
    February 20, 2003

    Very few wars in American history were prepared better or more throughly than this one by this president.
    March 1, 2003

    The first two battles of this new era are now over. The battles of Afghanistan and Iraq has been won decisively and honorably.
    April 28, 2003

    Barack Obama is not going to beat Hillary Clinton in a single democratic primary. I’ll predict that right now.
    Fox News Sunday, December 17, 2006

    http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Kristol

  27. 27.

    scav

    Very obscure what passes for thought and deep pundritty in those sort of circles. I’m seeing the generations of trust-fund bubble-boys have acclimatized and see themselves as the bedrock norm. Or something. Imagine admitting to knowing, let alone being related to, someone who actually personally worked for accomplishments!

  28. 28.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Trentrunner: and don’t forget John Sidney McCain III, who wasn’t exactly born to hardscrabble farmers on the unyielding windswept plain, and is Bill Irvingson’s nec plus ultra of politicians.

    The story about his mother calling the head of Annanpolis has a great Billie Burke in a screwball comedy ring to it (or maybe the Dowager Countess calling Shrimpy to make sure Matthew can take a servant into the trenches), but I think there is some evidence that Punk wasn’t about to get kicked out because he was a lovable scamp, but because he wasn’t that bright. It’s a hunch.

  29. 29.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Patrick: “I think there’s been a certain amount of, frankly, Terry, a kind of pop sociology in America, that, you know, somehow the Shia can’t get along with the Sunni, or the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of fundamentalist regime.

  31. 31.

    I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet

    @Chris T.: Mike Kimel went through this type of analysis starting around 2006. I saw it at Angry Bear.

    I’ve been writing about the relationship between tax rates and growth since I started blogging in 2006. A lot of those posts have focused on the quadratic relationship between tax rates and growth. That is, it turns out that if you take US data going back to when the BEA started keeping track, 1929, you can easily build a model of the following form:

    % change in real GDP from t to t+1 = a + b*Top Marginal Tax Rate at time t
    + c* Top Marginal Tax Rate squared at time t

    I have modestly referred to that as the Kimel curve. Now, it turns out that for most variations on that theme I’ve come up with, b is positive, c is negative, and both are significant at the 5% or 10% level. That allows you to find a top marginal tax rate that maximizes growth… which turns out to be somewhere between 60% and 70% depending on how the model is specified.

    […]

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  34. 34.

    MattF

    Kristol is the poster boy for failing upwards. For just one example– I recall that he was Palin’s biggest fan among the commentariat– but there are many, many more. Will he ever actually be held to account for his multiple, continued, dangerous stupidities? Doubtful.

  36. 36.

    Corner Stone

    I swear to goodness if I have to grab FitzPat by his full on hipster douche beard and explain to him he is NOT A RUNNING QB, I just might.
    Stop it! You’re a wicked smaht guy. Use the F’ng clock in your head.

  38. 38.

    Corner Stone

    Speaking of. Who said this?
    “It’s an amazing thing: Obama is essentially what we used to call a liberal Republican, who faces implacable opposition from a very hard right. But Obama’s moderation is hidden in plain sight, apparently invisible to the commentariat.”

  40. 40.

    gnomedad

    I initially read that as “you should be the relative of someone who inherited a fortune”, though I don’t think that’s what he intended.

  41. 41.

    Corner Stone

    @Baud: Well, I’ll just be a sockalist and state that anything over $10M a year needs to be at 90%.
    Income or cap gains.

  42. 42.

    Soonergrunt

    Irving Kristol, on nepotism:

    “I remember back in the late 1990s, when Ira Katznelson, an eminent political scientist at Columbia, came to deliver a guest lecture. Prof. Katznelson described a lunch he had with Irving Kristol during the first Bush administration.

    “The talk turned to William Kristol, then Dan Quayle’s chief of staff, and how he got his start in politics. Irving recalled how he talked to his friend Harvey Mansfield at Harvard, who secured William a place there as both an undergrad and graduate student; how he talked to Pat Moynihan, then Nixon’s domestic policy adviser, and got William an internship at the White House; how he talked to friends at the RNC [Republican National Committee] and secured a job for William after he got his Harvard Ph.D.; and how he arranged with still more friends for William to teach at Penn and the Kennedy School of Government.

    “With that, Prof. Katznelson recalled, he then asked Irving what he thought of affirmative action. ‘I oppose it,’ Irving replied. ‘It subverts meritocracy.’ “

  45. 45.

    Howard Beale IV

    Bill Kristol Twitter Stats: Tweets: 181, Following: 204, Followers, 6,540
    Bruce Bartlett Twitter Stats: Tweets: 8,905, Following, 477, Followers, 14,000, Favorites, 5

    Any questions?

  46. 46.

    I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet

    Tyrant Obummer wants everyone to get Ebola just like NoiseMaxxx says:

    Ever since Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, and Mr. Christie, a Republican, announced the plan at a hastily called news conference on Friday evening, top administration officials have been speaking with Mr. Cuomo daily and have also been in touch with Mr. Christie, trying to get them to rescind the order.

    But in that time, two more states – Illinois and Florida – announced that they were instituting similar policies.

    Federal officials made it clear that they do not agree with the governors about the need or effectiveness of a total quarantine for health care workers, though they were careful not to directly criticize the governors themselves.

    A senior administration official, who did not want to be identified in order to discuss private conversations with state officials on the issue, called the decision by the governors “uncoordinated, very hurried, an immediate reaction to the New York City case that doesn’t comport with science.”

    More at the linky.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  47. 47.

    sharl

    The following excerpt on the Bill Kristol Method for Failing Upward has been floating around on the innertoobz for awhile; this one was taken from comments to an early October 2008 LG&M post, back when Mr. Grinning Media Aristocrat was proudly pushing the Wa$illa Grifter to be John McCain’s Veep nominee in the upcoming election:

    …Harry Hopkins, promoted from comments:

    I remember back in the late ’90s when Ira Katznelson, an eminent political scientist at Columbia, came to deliver a guest lecture to an economic philosophy class I was taking. It was a great lecture, made more so by the fact that the class was only about ten or twelve students and we got got ask all kinds of questions and got a lot of great, provocative answers. Anyhow, Prof. Katznelson described a lunch he had with Irving Kristol back either during the first Bush administration. The talk turned to William Kristol, then Dan Quayle’s chief of staff, and how he got his start in politics. Irving recalled how he talked to his friend Harvey Mansfield at Harvard, who secured William a place there as both an undergrad and graduate student; how he talked to Pat Moynihan, then Nixon’s domestic policy adviser, and got William an internship at The White House; how he talked to friends at the RNC and secured a job for William after he got his Harvard Ph.D.; and how he arranged with still more friends for William to teach at UPenn and the Kennedy School of Government. With that, Prof. Katznelson recalled, he then asked Irving what he thought of affirmative action. “I oppose it”, Irving replied. “It subverts meritocracy.”

    Katznelson himself responded – almost a year later – in the same comment section to correct the record slightly, though still agreeing with the overall conclusion of Harry Hopkins’ account:

    Ira Katznelson says:
    September 21, 2009 at 2:47 pm

    Regarding the post by Harry Hopkins:
    Like all games of telephone, this has some truth but has become exaggerated. Irving Kristol and I had breakfast at a conference we were attending. I asked him how his son got interested in politics, and was told that when William was 15, as I recall, Irving called Pat Moynihan to ask if he might give William an internship. We also talked about affirmative action, which he opposed on grounds of protecting meritocracy. So the core is correct, but not the embellishments about Penn and Harvard. I also don’t remember any discussion about the RNC.

    (bolding and italics are mine)

    ETA: Didn’t see SG’s comment while I was putting mine together; other than the response from Prof. IK, my comment reproduces SG’s quote.

  57. 57.

    mellowjohn

    “The world is made for those not cursed with self-awareness.” –Annie Savoy in “Bull Durham”

  58. 58.

    The Ancient Randonneur

    By 1992 every right wing think thank will be filled with relatives of people who made it on their own.

  59. 59.

    Shakezula

    Maybe there’s a bounty for starting the next talking point.

    So if in a few years every neo-con is claiming that both Bushes came from average families and made it to the top without political connections, Kristal Nut will get $5 per use of his idea.

  60. 60.

    Rob

    @Corner Stone
    >Speaking of which, Bruce Bartlett on twitter is just about a damned treasure.

    I’d temporarily forgotten about Bartlett. It’s true, he is.

  61. 61.

    El Cid

    Sure, Bill Kristol began with lots of advantages, connections, and favorable maneuvering by his father.

    The important thing, though, is to focus on all the contributions Bill Kristol has made to our society, all the good he has created, all the positivity he has brought to the world.

  63. 63.

    Corner Stone

    @Rob: To be clear, I don’t agree with BB on quite a bit, but his referring to GOP people as wankers for every blurb is HI-larious.

  64. 64.

    Rob

    @Howard Beale IV:

    To be fair to Kristol, he’s been on Twitter for just 13 days, as opposed to the three years since Bartlett’s signed on.

    Reading about his internship in conjunction with his father’s comment on affirmative action makes me like Kristol even less, if that is possible.

  65. 65.

    SFAW

    @El Cid:

    The important thing, though, is to focus on all the contributions Bill Kristol has made to our society, all the good he has created, all the positivity he has brought to the world.

    I was going to respond with some sort of arch, snarky comment about Little Billy, but your comment is damn near perfect.

  66. 66.

    Rob

    @El Cid:
    “The important thing, though, is to focus on all the contributions Bill Kristol has made to our society, all the good he has created, all the positivity he has brought to the world.”

    ^This. A big fat zero.

  67. 67.

    SRW1

    @Soonergrunt:

    So, Bill’s obliviousness may be DNA-based after all.

    Did his dad also manage a comparable fail rate in his political pronouncements as his progeny, or is Bill truly in a class of his own?

  68. 68.

    Bonnie

    @opiejeanne: I’m with you, Opiejeanne. I don’t have a clue of what this means. Is it referencing something or someone in a previous tweet? I don’t do twitter; and, find myself lost when tweets are put in a blog with no explanation of what may have started the discussion. Mostly, I just move on to things I will understand.

  69. 69.

    dubo

    The real question is, “By 2018, will ANY Republican candidate be a relative of anybody (including themselves) who made it on their own”?

  70. 70.

    Jay C

    I’ll worry about Bill Kristol’s fainting-couch sighs-and-heaves about political “decadence” during (and not before) the Chelsea Clinton v. Bristol Palin primaries….

  73. 73.

    Howard Beale IV

    @Rob: All I know is if this so-called pundit ever shows up in my neck of the woods for any kind of an open forum I’ll make sure to show up and attempt to embarass him-problem is, I bet his kind can never be emabrassed short of running around drunk, naked and yelling ‘piranha!’ at a bar-mitzvah….

  76. 76.

    Rob

    Corner Stone says:
    October 26, 2014 at 5:21 pm
    @Rob: To be clear, I don’t agree with BB on quite a bit, but his referring to GOP people as wankers for every blurb is HI-larious.

    Very true.

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