Bill Kristol on The Huffington Post

GM CEO To Continue Flying Private, Company Will Downsize Jet Fleet

2008-11-21T13:23:21Z

From ABC News:

General Motors said today that it is putting two of its five corporate jets out of service because the planes are not being used enough. The top three executives at GM, however, will continue to use the private luxurious jets for all of their business and personal travel, despite a flurry of criticism over the perk following an ABC News report this week.

An ABC News investigation revealed that the top three automakers have together spent several hundred million dollars to buy, maintain, and operate a fleet of top-of-the-line private jets for their top executives.

Kristol Defends Palin But Says Lieberman Would Have Been As Good

2008-11-20T11:12:21Z

Bill Kristol defended yet again of the choice of Sarah Palin as McCain's Vice President during a breakfast conference on Thursday. But the prominent neoconservative pundit and Weekly Standard editor did make one small concession: had John McCain tapped Sen. Joseph Lieberman for his number-two post, the results could have been just as good, if not better for the GOP ticket.

Speaking at a National Journal 2008 campaign retrospective event, Kristol argued that had the Connecticut Independent been the Republican vice presidential nominee, McCain would have lost "20 percent of the vote at the convention," staff would have "left the campaign," there would have been protests on the convention floor, and the news media would have been obsessed with the inter-party friction for a solid month.

Nevertheless, he added, "I think it could have been managed and it could have ended up net-net by the time of the election. But that is a very tough choice to make in real time..."

Kristol had, in fact, made the suggestion that McCain choose Lieberman as his VP in the period leading up to the convention. But he is best known as one of the media's most vocal Palin cheerleaders, once urging McCain to fire his entire campaign staff in part for mishandling the Alaska Governor.

During the event Kristol debated the notion -- put forward by Democratic Pollster Stan Greenberg and confirmed by most empirical data -- that Palin was a drag on the Republican ticket. He acknowledged that the governor lost McCain some votes, "mostly blue state swing voters," but added that she gave McCain "at least a shot of getting the Electoral College votes he needed in states like Ohio."

Speaking earlier, Greenberg noted that in nearly every poll he had examined the top reason for voting against McCain was his choice of Palin. He argued that another choice, like Tim Pawlenty or Mitt Romney, would have made the election closer.

"I was very nervous about this election going into the Democratic convention when they were focused on national security and safety issues. Had they kept those core ideas... through the economic crisis, they would have been much stronger," Greenberg explained. "But they gave up experience, they lost fundamental points by choosing her."

McCain's pollster, Bill McInturf, was the last to speak and took umbrage with Greenberg's analysis. Arguing that Palin brought important features to the campaign -- enthusiasm and money, primarily -- he echoed Kristol in saying there would have absolutely been a crisis on the convention floor had McCain chosen Lieberman.

"Do you want to spend three to six weeks after this convention talking about the Republican Party or moving on," McInturf said he told McCain. "My point in the room was that it would be at least three straight weeks of discussion on the Republican coalition."

All of the panelists, including Democratic strategist Ruy Teixeira, said Palin would be a major player for the Republican presidential nominee in 2012.

Bill Kristol, Pete Hamill Fight Over Images Of War Dead At IFC Media Panel (VIDEO)

2008-11-19T11:52:25Z

IFC hosted a panel on the state of the news media Tuesday afternoon at New York's Michael's restaurant. The panel, moderated by Arianna Huffington, featured Bill Kristol (Weekly Standard/New York Times), Gideon Yago (IFC Media Project), Christopher Buckley (Daily Beast, formerly of National Review), and Pete Hamill (New York Daily News).

The afternoon's most memorable moment came when Kristol and Hamill went head-to-head over images of dead soldiers in Iraq. In a heated exchange, Hamill argued that there is "no sense of what reality is on the ground by editing out corpses," while an incensed Kristol said that was "nonsense" and that Americans are smart enough to know what goes on in war without seeing "brains in the road." (WATCH THE EXCHANGE BELOW, CLIP 2)

Read more about the panel at Portfolio, the New York Observer, Silicon Alley Insider, and Editor & Publisher, or watch video highlights below.

1. Gideon Yago and Bill Kristol argue about the coverage of the Iraq War. Yago argued that it is incredibly difficult to find actual images of the way the war is conducted on the Internet, while Kristol claimed the claim was "ridiculous." Kristol based his argument on the claim that the coverage of the debate over the Iraq War and over the surge were more well-informed than the debates over Vietnam in the 1960s, but Yago fought back, saying that the message is manipulated when Americans cannot actually see images of what war looks like.

2. Pete Hamill fights with Kristol over showing images of dead soldiers in Iraq.

"There's no sense of what reality is on the ground by editing out corpses, for example," Hamill said. "Nobody died, there was no bloodshed."
"Oh, nonsense," Kristol shot back, and the two heated up in crosstalk. "You think Americans are such idiots, Americans wouldn't understand that people die in a war unless you show brains in the road?" Kristol asked.
"They think it's a movie," Hamill said. "Let them see a coffin."

3. Arianna Huffington explains the difference between the mainstream media's Attention Deficit Disorder and the online media's Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

4. Christopher Buckley decries the way "the term 'breaking news' has become a little bit degraded." He describes how, growing up, "Breaking News" on TV meant that "a President had been assassinated or Fidel Castro had put missiles in Cuba. Now, it seems every time I walk through an airport...I look up, and CNN says 'Breaking News.' And what it now means is that a truck with flammable something has overturned."

The IFC Media Project is a six-part documentary examining the influences shapin today's news media. Episode one premiered Tuesday night on IFC. Watch a clip below:

Bill Kristol "Ambivalent" About Staying At New York Times

2008-11-18T15:31:00Z

Portfolio.com's Jeff Bercovici spoke to Bill Kristol at a luncheon Tuesday to promote IFC's The IFC Media Project (video of the luncheon to come shortly). Bercovici asked Kristol about the status of his New York Times column, which is rumored to be ending when his contract expires next month, and Kristol said he was "ambivalent" about staying on:

"I don't think I've had that conversation yet," he told me.

Okay -- but would he like to have it renewed? "I'm ambivalent. It's been fun. It's a lot of work. I have a lot of things going on. But I haven't really focused on it."

Kristol said he planned to talk to Andy Rosenthal, the Times's editorial-page editor, "soon."

The Huffington Post broke the news last year that Kristol was hired for the Times gig.

The New Yorker's George Packer weighed in this week on the topic of whether Kristol should stay at the Times — in a scathing critique, Packer argues strongly that Kristol's contract with the Times should not be renewed:

It's time for the newspaper to move on. For Pinch Sulzberger and Andy Rosenthal to renew Kristol's one-year contract, in 2009, would be for the Times to reward failure--and look where that got Wall Street and General Motors. It's not just that Kristol isn't another Safire (although an absence of verbal playfulness and wit is a consistent hallmark of the Kristol prose style). It's not just that his views are utterly predictable (if that were firing grounds, close to half the Times columnists would lose their jobs). It's not just that he was fundamentally wrong at least every other week throughout the year (misattributing a quote in his first column, counting Clinton out after Iowa, placing Obama at a Jeremiah Wright sermon that Obama didn't attend, predicting the imminent return of a McCain adviser named Mike Murphy who ended up staying off the campaign, all but predicting a McCain victory, sort of predicting that McCain would oppose the bailout, praising McCain's "suspension" of his campaign as a smart move, preferring fake populism to professional excellence and Joe the Plumber to Horace the Poet, urging Ayers-Wright attack tactics as the way for McCain to win, basically telling McCain to ignore all the advice Kristol had given him throughout the year, but above all, vouching again and again and again, privately and publicly, for Palin as an excellent Vice-Presidential choice). What the hell--it was an unpredictable year.

The real grounds for firing Kristol are that he didn't take his column seriously. In his year on the Op-Ed page, not one memorable sentence, not one provocative thought, not one valuable piece of information appeared under his name. The prose was so limp ("Who, inquiring minds want to know, is going to spare us a first Obama term?") that you had the sense Kristol wrote his column during the commercial breaks of his gig on Fox News Sunday and gave it about the same amount of thought.

In one sense, this mental shallowness and literary poverty come as a surprise from the son of Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb, the student of Harvey C. Mansfield, the devotee of Leo Strauss, and the colleague of Robert Kagan, David Brooks, et al. Kristol was never an intellectual--he's always been a Republican strategist with various public platforms, including government office--but under his editorship the Weekly Standard managed to be lively and interesting on a regular basis. By his own account, Kristol is the sort of person who browses through a used bookstore at the Milwaukee airport while waiting for a plane and picks up an old edition of Orwell's essays.

Read Packer's entire (link-heavy) critique here.

Kristol: Right-Wing Media Will "Try To Be Cheerful"

2008-11-16T11:00:17Z

Since the Weekly Standard launched in 1995, there's one scenario the conservative magazine hasn't yet faced: Democrats in control of both the White House and Congress.

But that's what lies ahead in just two months, leaving staffers there and at other media outlets on the right bracing for a period on the outside, looking in.

The Weekly Standard has long supported the national ambitions of John McCain, going back to the 2000 primary race, and boosted Sarah Palin a year before she was well known to the Lower 48. Nevertheless, editor William Kristol, speaking from the Republican Governors Association meeting, seemed to be taking the loss in stride.

"We're not going to sit around sniping and wailing and wish, 'if only things had gone differently,'" Kristol said. "We'll try to be cheerful."

Jeff Danziger: Dog Barks, Caravan Moves On

2008-11-14T11:13:36Z

Michael Sigman: Prediction Fiction

2008-11-12T11:40:21Z

"It is difficult to predict, especially the future."
--Niehls Bohr, physicist

The Oracle at Delphi pronounced Socrates the wisest man in ancient Greece. Socrates accepted the designation, but with the stipulation that his wisdom be defined as awareness of his own ignorance.

When I started working at LA Weekly in the early 1980s, the paper was bursting with lefty politics, passion and humor. Accuracy? Not so much. Case in point: The owner/editor declared that the U.S. was about to invade Nicaragua, and published precise details of the coming invasion, which never happened. We eventually hired fact-checkers, but theirs could be a thankless job, as when our best-known writer bellowed, "You have your facts, I have mine," after a correction was made to his column.

This election season reached new heights in Oracular nonsense, kick-started by Dick Morris' 2005 volume "Condi vs. Hillary." The toe-sucking right winger that Human Events magazine calls a "political analyst extraordinaire" takes as a given that Hillary will get the Democratic nod. Fair enough, lots of people were wrong about that. But Morris goes on to intone: "There will be a search for a real (Republican) candidate, someone of stature, someone charismatic who can beat Hillary. And the party faithful will turn to Condi Rice."

I doubt anyone, including the author, believed that prediction, but it did presage three years of howlers, mostly from the Right.

Take the ubiquitous conservative pundit Bill Kristol. Please. Let's give him a pass on such absurdities as, "Fred Thompson knows what he's doing, and he will be formidable," which Kristol confidently stated when the former Senator and Law and Order actor entered the race. Maybe he actually believed that at the time. But he really pushed the envelope when he told Fox on the eve of the North Carolina Democratic Primary that despite a double-digit Obama polling lead, Hillary would prevail. Obama won by 14 points, a landslide in anyone's book. Was Kristol wildly out of touch with reality, or just dishonest? We report, you decide.

Kristol did get one thing right: that Sarah Palin would be the VP nominee. But it turns out, according to a recent New Yorker article by Jane Mayer, that he used his considerable influence to get Palin the job. Which is sort of like predicting what you're going to have for dinner, and then ordering it.

But back to the oleaginous Morris, whose dead-wrong forecasts continued throughout the campaign. On October 31st, by which time an Obama victory was all but certain, he wrote on his website, "Iraq isn't the only place where the surge seems to be working. John McCain's gains over the last five days are remaking the political landscape as Election Day approaches." On Election eve, he doubled down on the McCain "surge," writing, "What's up? We think that the advertisement being run by GOPTrust.com is having an effect. It is an ad featuring Rev. Jeremiah Wright decrying America and calling it "the USA of KKK" while Obama sat, deaf-mute in the congregation."

As late as 8:30 pm on election night, Morris was still at it, blogging that things "could go either way." Less than an hour later, after Ohio essentially clinched it for Obama, Morris still hedged, blogging, "It would appear that Obama is going to win although not by the margins that had been predicted."

After Obama won by almost exactly the margins predicted, was Morris contrite? Quite the opposite. Although even he couldn't deny that Obama had won, he wrote, without irony, "If ever there was an election that was not worth winning, it was the contest of 2008."

Meanwhile, budget cuts have eliminated the fact-checking department at LA Weekly. But until Rockie Gardiner's sad passing two weeks ago at the age of 70, the paper was still the home of the delightfully wacky "Rockie Horoscope," our present-day Oracle at Delphi. At last count, Rockie had correctly predicted 10 of the last two earthquakes.

Kristol Re-Starting Militaristic Neocon Think Tank

2008-11-10T12:29:51Z

It looks like Bill Kristol may be making good on his threat to revive the Project for the New American Century. Since May, visitors to PNAC's website were informed that "this account has been suspended," but now the website is back up, though it does not seem to have been updated with any new material.

PNAC's militaristic ultra-nationalism is implicated in some of the worst mischief of the Bush years, from the "global war on terror" to the invasion of Iraq to President Bush's support for Israel's refusal to negotiate with the Palestinians. Many of its members served as advisers to John McCain's presidential campaign. Bill Kristol is still listed as PNAC's chairman, and is known to be "exceptionally close" to the senator. McCain's top foreign policy aide, Randy Scheunemann, serves as PNAC's project director. McCain spokesperson Michael Goldfarb is also listed as a PNAC research associate.

Ian Gurvitz: Rethuglicans

2008-11-10T11:24:31Z

Peter Schwartz: Obama's Biggest Challenge: Foreign Policy Revanchism

2008-11-10T07:59:40Z

I run a small technology company in Seattle, and will normally focus my HuffPosts on business, culture, and technology. As we absorb the meaning of Barack Obama's election, however, I will launch my inaugural post with some thoughts on his biggest challenge as president: which will be facing down the coming assault from the revanchist, hard-right base of the Republican Party.

Swept from power and nursing deep wounds, loosened from the responsibility of governing and free to attack without any consideration for coalition-building or compromise, the surviving Republican members of Congress, in alliance with their media allies and their geographically insulated bases of support in the nether regions of the nation, will do their best to make Obama's life miserable. And let's not fool ourselves. The politics of falsely righteous Republican anger and contempt we witnessed throughout the presidential campaign will increase in intensity in 2009.

The Republican base is like a three-legged stool, drawing support from social (values-driven) conservatives; economic (free-market) libertarians; and militaristic (nationalistic) neoconservatives. Let's focus on the foreign policy neocons, those who led us down the bloody road to Iraq and who, like Sauron separated from his ring of power, will seek with great urgency to undermine and weaken those who stand between them and a return to the unilateralism of a hegemonic power.

Obama's foreign policy will begin with the assumption of a multilateral global arena in which the United States plays a leadership role based on alliances and diplomacy. Hardened, cynical views of international relationships - in China, Russia, Iran, and Venezuela, to name four examples - will challenge Obama's commitment to multilateral diplomacy. Nonetheless, in dealing with foreign leaders, Obama will have two assets on which to draw: his personal charm - which is so important in cultivating trusted relationships among leaders - and a willingness to leverage the influence of other countries, in Asia, Europe and elsewhere, in achieving tangible policy victories with respect to nuclear proliferation, global warming, and Islamic radicalism.

Obama's major challenges therefore will not come from abroad, but from home, where a steady drumbeat of revanchist criticism from the right, and blasted through media organs such as Fox News and the Wall Street Journal editorial page, as well as from Congressional firebrands in the Republican Party, will make his path from a military-first doctrine to a diplomacy-first approach like dancing across a bed of hot coals.

For now, Obama can bask in the glow of admiration from right-wing pundits such as William Kristol, George Will and Charles Krauthammer who respect his intelligence and political skills. For a sample of the savaging he can expect to receive in the days following his inauguration, we might do better to sample Daniel Henninger in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, Oliver North on Fox News, and John Bolton at the American Enterprise Institute.

Neoconservatives voice an ideology based on two self-reinforcing principles. The first is their belief in American exceptionalism, the idea that the United States is not "like" other nations, that we are superior by virtue of our history and our values. The second is that with the end of the Cold War, the world will plunge into chaos without strong, active directives from the United States. Let's be clear. Directives are not leadership. They are more like military orders, in this case supported by the global projection of American military power throughout the world.

As Chalmers Johnson observed presciently in Blowback, first published in 2000, the territorial projection of US military power - with more than 700 US military installations housing nearly one million troops, dependants, contractors, spies, in more than 130 other nations around the world - creates local resentments and reinforces the self-fulfilling prophecy of "enemies at our doorstep." The obvious costs of these deployments aside - both financial and political - we are dancing with the the Devil for more troubling reasons that Obama may only with difficulty be able to address.

The policy of force projection and maintenance of a global military infrastructure depends upon: 1) a web of payments and quid pro quos with non-elected leaders of other nations; 2) a commitment to secrecy and the absence of meaningful oversight and transparency; and 3) a reliance upon covert activity, spying, secret missions, and subterfuge (note revelations of the order permitting secret raids on Al-Qaeda around the globe, in nations such as Pakistan, Syria, and Somalia).

We need a foreign policy for the 21st century. Obama's success in transforming US foreign policy into a tool of constructive, meaningful engagement with other nations depends upon his ability to rebuild shattered relationships upon a new foundation of open communication, outreach, trust, and accountability. To build a foreign policy for the 21st century, Obama can draw upon the success and methods of his own political campaign, which used new technologies and means of communication already widespread around the world to reach and speak directly to individual Americans.

The problem Obama will face is in dismantling the structural outposts of our dated 20th century foreign policy driven by the strategy of force projection and a global military infrastructure. Our economy in great measure depend on this stimulus - let's call it "military welfare". Our concept of national security - both psychological and physical - also depends upon this policy, with its insinuating values of strength and of a proactive, global state of military readiness to address threats that by definition this policy frames as "us" against "them".

Let's be absolutely clear. Obama will need to draw upon all the reassuring calm he inspires to shift our sense of the world from one in which threat predominates to one in which opportunities for constructive relationships abound. He must adopt his superhero identity of Ocalma and resist what will surely be a strong impulse from White House advisers and Congressional allies to not appear "weak" when tested, not simply by foreign foes but by shrieking adversaries from the Republican right. Above all, he must work, slowly perhaps, but also steadily and with determination, to dismantle the global military web of bases and policies that have themselves been the source of anger and resentment contributing to our national insecurity.

Bill Kristol Congratulates Obama

2008-11-08T10:56:38Z

New York Times columnist Bill Kristol's latest article for the Weekly Standard ends on, of all things, a note of congratulations for Barack Obama:

We at THE WEEKLY STANDARD congratulate Barack Obama on his impressive victory. We pledge our support for those of his policies we can support, our willingness to give him the benefit of the doubt in cases of uncertainty, and our constructive criticism and loyal opposition where we are compelled to differ. We hope President Obama's policies and decisions will strengthen the nation he will now lead, and that our country and the cause of freedom in the world will emerge from the next four or eight years even stronger than they are today.

Top McCain Aide Secretly Fired Last Week For "Trashing" Staffers

2008-11-05T22:53:15Z

CNN reports that senior McCain aide, and chief foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann was fired a week before Election Day for "trashing" McCain staffers to the press over their handling of Sarah Palin:

Randy Scheunemann, a senior foreign policy adviser to John McCain, was fired from the Arizona senator's campaign last week for what one aide called "trashing" the campaign staff, three senior McCain advisers tell CNN.

One of the aides tells CNN that campaign manager Rick Davis fired Scheunemann after determining that he had been in direct contact with journalists spreading "disinformation" about campaign aides, including Nicolle Wallace and other officials.

The New York Times adds that the McCain campaign pegged Bill Kristol as the most likely recipient of Scheunemann's attacks against fellow McCain staffers:

Whatever the permutations, the advisers said they strongly believed that Mr. Scheunemann was disclosing, as one put it, "a constant stream of poison" to William Kristol, the editor of the conservative Weekly Standard and a columnist for The New York Times.

Mr. Kristol, who wrote a column on Oct. 13 calling on Mr. McCain to fire his campaign because it was "close to being out-and-out dysfunctional," said in a telephone interview on Wednesday that the campaign advisers were paranoid. Mr. Kristol has been a strong supporter of Ms. Palin.

"I wasn't writing poison," Mr. Kristol said. He added that "Randy Scheunemann is a friend of mine and I think he did a good job. I talked to him, but I talked to a lot of people at the campaign."

Scheunemann himself disputes that he was fired. Fellow aide Michael Goldfarb tries to back him up, and doesn't really succeed:

However, Goldfarb did concede that Scheunemann's campaign e-mail was cut off, and his blackberry was taken away late Friday. Goldfarb admits that senior McCain aides were mad at Scheunemann, and wanted to fire him, but he insists they stopped short of that, and instead simply turned off his campaign communication.

Jan Herman: The Morning After

2008-11-05T15:54:30Z

Now that America has elected a black fist bumper to the presidency, take a look at the newspaper he has in his hand. Take a close look. The photo, shot during the election campaign, shows him carrying the Wall Street Journal.

As everybody knows, the Journal's editorial page falls somewhere between Barry Goldwater and Attila the Hun. It is even further to the right than Bill Kristol, the doofus whose unreadable, once-a-week column was added to the opinion pages of the New York Times to "balance" its so-called liberals.

Nevertheless, it is the Journal in a column this morning by the eminently readable Thomas Frank -- a once-a-week addition to the Journal's opinion pages to balance all the resident right-wingers -- that puts Barack Obama's election victory in the proper perspective.

What grabs Frank's attention is not so much the new tactics that Obama brought to the campaign -- all that Internet reach, for instance, which made possible his humongous fund-raising in small donations. It's what he and the Democrats did that was old. Frank writes that "2008 made retro politics cool again." And he's not talking about the old-style "ground game" of get-out-the-vote volunteers, either.

"In place of a showdown between a folksy 'middle America' and a snobbish 'liberal elite,' Democrats needed to offer the real deal -- the conflict between a public that craves fairness and an economic system that enables the predatory...

Watching the Dow get hacked down, seeing the investment banking industry collapse, hearing about the lavish rewards won by the corporate officers who brought this ruin down on us -- all these things combined to make a certain Depressionesque fury the unavoidable flavor of the year. When your mortgage is under water and your neighbors are being laid off, the need to take up the sword against arrogant stem-cell scientists becomes considerably less urgent."

Equally important, it's also what the BananaRepublicans did that was old, which led to their massive defeat. "The Republican response, of course, was to double down on the righteous rhetoric of red-state grievance and spin the wheel one more time," Frank notes.

So make no mistake: Despite a peculiar headline doubtless written by a diehard right-wing opinion-page editor -- "Conservatism Isn't Finished" -- which distorts the column's essential point, Frank attributes the Gasbag's loss to his BananaRepublican themes, out-of-touch arrogance, and over-the-top contradictions.

For those who can't access Frank's column, here's an excerpt:

"John McCain's campaign was not just another culture-war offensive; it was a flamboyant pantomime, grotesquely exaggerated in each of its parts, and, ultimately, separated from the life of the everyday Americans it claimed so extravagantly to revere. It was 'overripe,' to borrow the term Johan Huizinga used to describe late Medieval culture. The campaign's vision of America was like a Norman Rockwell painting in which all the figures wear flag pins and weep swollen, steaming tears for their betrayed homeland.

What previous Republican campaigns had whispered, this one screamed. What had been contained to the movement's feverish fringes moved to center stage.

Traditional Republican talk about the heartland became Sarah Palin's 'real America,' with other campaign officials speculating about precisely where the realness started and stopped. Conventional appeals to the working class became 'Joe the Plumber' and a cast of supporting hardhat caricatures. An unremarkable Obama reference to progressive taxation became "socialism," there was conjecture by Rep. Michele Bachmann, Republican of Minnesota, about his "anti-American views," and one almost longed for the naïve stages of the campaign, when the Democrat's elitism would be established by sly references to arugula.

Media bias has been a favorite theme of the right for decades, of course. But apart from Spiro Agnew, this aspect of conservatism was mainly the province of the movement, not the leadership. The McCain campaign, which owed more to the media than any Republican effort in years, brought it back into the mainstream with relish. The amazing Mrs. Palin even persuaded herself that the press was violating her First Amendment rights when it criticized her, and Republican audiences rediscovered the joy of booing the media."

Full disclosure. I voted for Ralph. And I don't mind booing the corporate media myself, but for its right-wing bias.

Read more reaction from HuffPost bloggers to Barack Obama's victory in the 2008 presidential election

Nora Ephron: Thinking About Bill

2008-11-04T11:14:03Z

As I listened to Sarah Palin's recent phone call with "Nicolas Sarkozy," I couldn't help thinking about Bill Kristol.

I think about Bill Kristol far too much. I almost never used to. Before he began writing his Monday column in the New York Times, I rarely saw him on television. Whenever I did, I was mostly mesmerized by his uncanny resemblance to Bob Woodward (whom he no longer resembles) and his incredibly self-satisfied, smug, smirky demeanor. It was my theory that his need to please the Republican White House -- a need that seemed to trump his alleged intellect and even the factual evidence on hand -- must stem from some unresolved issues with his father, the famous Irving Kristol, one of the first neo-conservatives. But I didn't dwell on it, because I saw so little of him. And in any case, I truly couldn't stand him. I just couldn't stand him.

I don't enjoy being in this position. I much prefer to be perversely fond of people others find problematic. I am crazy about Pat Buchanan, for example, and I have fantasies of following him around for a day in order to find out what it's like to never ever be off the air. I am utterly entranced by Keith Olbermann, and I watch his show in much the same way others go to hockey games. Don't get me started on Chris Matthews: I am practically in love with the guy. But it seemed impossible to find a way to like Bill: he was just too irritating.

And then, unaccountably, amazingly, astonishingly, he was hired by the New York Times to write a once-a-week column. You cannot imagine the thrill of horror that passed through New York on hearing the news. The Times already had a conservative columnist (of whom I was already perversely fond), and one conservative columnist was quite enough, thank you. Then Kristol's column began. I read it religiously every Monday. And slowly but surely, I became infatuated with him. How could I not? The man could not write his way out of a paper bag. His column was simply awful. Reading it was like watching someone dance on the head of a pin: his need to prove to his base that he hadn't gone over to the other side was so strong, his need to please his constituency was so moving, that I began to wish he would quit his job as editor of the Weekly Standard and become a Times columnist full-time. It was certainly not going to inconvenience him: the column couldn't have been taking him more than about twenty minutes to write. And it was great having him there, visible, so people like me could see what people like him were like. He was wrong about everything. It was such a comfort.

In recent months, I have thought about Bill more and more. Every time someone turned over a rock, he crawled out from under it. In Jane Mayer's recent New Yorker piece on Sarah Palin, for instance, he turned out to be the man who'd discovered Palin, during a cruise of Alaska, and brought the news of her potential stardom back to the New World. And of course he was one of the reasons why we'd gone to war in Iraq. Iraq. Sarah Palin. The man was uncanny. Last week I watched him on Jon Stewart, insisting that McCain might yet pull an upset. "It's not a psychodrama," he said. "It's only an election."

People like me sometimes wonder what it would be like to be involved in mistakes that end up killing people; we wonder about sleepless nights and remorse and guilt. Bill Kristol exists to remind us that these are pathetic liberal fantasies, and that some people are never sorry. Only last week I saw Kristol on television continuing to defend Sarah Palin: she was a bright woman, he was saying, who'd simply been mismanaged by the McCain campaign.

Which brings me back to Sarah Palin's radio phone call with the Canadian comedian who pranked her into thinking he was Nicolas Sarkozy. As I listened to it, increasingly horrified, I couldn't help thinking about Bill Kristol and hoping that somehow, he would have to spend eternity locked in a room listening to a continuous tape of it.

There are rumors that the New York Times is not going to renew his contract. I just pray they're not true.

Read Election Day Liveblogs, Reaction and Analysis from HuffPost Bloggers

David Quigg: Dear Conservatives: Break Some Liberal Hearts. Vote Obama.

2008-11-03T14:50:48Z

No group in America would have more trouble adjusting to an Obama presidency than the Bush Liberals.

With the president's approval rating so deep in the tank, you might question whether there really is such a thing as a Bush Liberal. Let me explain.

This isn't about ideology or policy. This is about mindset -- a Bush mindset, a with-us-or-against-us mindset. These are folks whose version of the politics of hope is to hope that Barack Obama didn't really mean what he said in his 2004 Democratic convention speech, didn't really mean what he wrote in his books, and doesn't really mean all that he's preached during this grueling campaign about the need for healing, unity, bipartisanship, cooperation, and mutual respect. These Bush Liberals have fumed through eight long years of Bush-Cheney.

They. Want. Payback.

They want payback and they're simply not going to get it. Not with an Obama presidency.

Go ahead. Break their hearts. Vote for Obama on Tuesday.

If you want a glimpse of whose hearts exactly you'll be breaking, read through some of the comments that people posted online back in January when Obama told the Reno Gazette-Journal editorial board that Ronald Reagan "changed the trajectory of America" by rallying voters who'd rejected the "excesses of the 1960s and 1970s" and had decided "government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating."

Here's one of the online comments Obama's remarks triggered:

"I've been trying to tell people that Obama is way too much like Reagan for my comfort level. His supporters do not see this at all. I wouldn't even mind if I felt Obama really had the potential to realign American politics. But unlike Reagan, Obama is just trying to build an electoral coalition based on hope and optimism, without also using every opportunity to educate people about why conservatives and Republicans are the problem. In Obama's world, partisanship is the problem. He is way off base."

Now, that quote only goes so far. I'm not trying to peddle nonsense here. While there are an eye-popping array of people from the Reagan White House who have endorsed Obama, I'm not trying to trick anyone into believing that a vote for Obama is a vote for a third Reagan term. Obama's book, The Audacity of Hope, makes plain the areas in which he thinks Reagan's policies left many Americans worse off.

So if you're the type of conservative who thinks the lesson of Reagan is that trickle-down economics is a cure-all for every woe at every moment in American history, you shouldn't vote for Obama. He's not your guy. Never will be.

But you should be giving Obama a good, close look if you're the type of conservative who thinks the lesson of Reagan is that the U.S. government must deliver value to taxpayers and foster, as Obama put it, "that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship" that had gone missing during the Carter administration. Because those observations Obama made about Reagan back in January were not some unintended gaffe during his talk with that editorial board. He'd covered the same basic territory back in 2006 when he published The Audacity of Hope. He wrote there's a "good deal of truth" to Reagan's "central insight ... that the liberal welfare state had grown complacent and overly bureaucratic, with Democratic policy makers more obsessed with slicing the economic pie than with growing the pie."

Such words, obviously, are not what you want to read if you're a Bush Liberal, a with-us-or-against-us liberal. Specifically, it's not what you want to read if you're that blog commenter I quoted above who thinks Democratic politics should be about seizing "every opportunity to educate people about why conservatives and Republicans are the problem."

Confession time. There's some Bush Liberal in me. Going way back. Supposedly, I spent part of my Watergate-era toddlerhood stomping around my neighborhood, chanting "Put him behind bars!" about Nixon. During high school and college, I tossed around the word "fascist" with a shameful disregard for its real meaning or history.

Two things changed me.

1) As you'll see if you are ever bored enough to read my HuffPost bio, I went into a life-changing political hibernation when I became a newspaper reporter. It's not a job you can do honorably while clinging to your ideological biases. I cared deeply about doing the job honorably. My political biases just fell away. I came to prize candor above all else. For a reporter who cares about accuracy, sources who spin are basically useless; honest sources are priceless. The source I came to respect most happened to be a Republican. Now that I've quit journalism and had my political awareness shocked back to life by the incompetence and lawlessness of the Bush-Cheney years, I can see just how much my old Republican source and I differ in our political views. But he's running for reelection to statewide office right now and I just voted for him. Again.

2) Barack Obama's message has changed me even more. It's one thing for me to look past ideology and vote for a former source because he demonstrated his integrity to me -- one-on-one, repeatedly, without fail. It's quite another thing to seek out conservative ideas and open myself to the possibility that they might have something useful to teach me. But that's something I do now. Because Obama's words have persuaded me that my kids' futures will be brightest if we can stop glaring at each other across ideological divides. It hasn't hurt, either, that I read Team of Rivals this spring and learned all about the dream-team cabinet Lincoln assembled from the political foes he beat out for the presidency.

There are flashes when I see so clearly how much I've changed. One such flash came Sunday when my phone lit up with an e-mail from a good friend. She'd forwarded something titled "Fair Warning," a satirical letter to America's red states, threatening a blue-state secession if "you manage to steal this election too." There's stuff like this: "We get Harvard. You get Ole Miss. We get 85% of venture capitalists. You get Alabama."

Now, the old-old me would have found "Fair Warning" hilarious. The post-journalism, Bush/Cheney-loathing, pre-Obama me would have taken some grim, vengeful comfort in passages such as "you ... will have to cope with 88% of obese Americans (and their projected healthcare costs)."

Suddenly, though, I'm the jerk who's become so allergic to words like those that I sit in my car in a supermarket parking lot, tapping out an instant response to my poor, unsuspecting friend. As politely as I can manage, I write that "this seems like an unhelpful moment to be quite so condescending." I go on to be all preachy about how we shouldn't look down our noses at Ole Miss. I cite a public-radio piece I heard about how the univeristy has transcended the ugly reputation it earned during the civil rights movement. I write about our "shared American-ness" and add "Obama's campaign grows out of the insight that we're stuck with each other and might as well try to make the most of it."

Who is this person who's taken over my body and commandeered my phone to send that e-mail? And why am I so much happier being him than I was being a Bush Liberal, a with-us-or-against-us liberal?

This is not unique to me. Not by a long shot. Many more people are looking toward the future than the past. That's no easy thing. Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal that Obama's "rise will serve as a practical rebuke to the past five years, which need rebuking." Yes, the Bush car wreck is spectacular. Dazzling in its carnage. Magnetic to our eyes. We're looking. Not staring. Looking. Because we're looking beyond it, too. Far beyond. As Noonan added, "(Obama's) victory would provide a fresh start in a nation in which a fresh start would come as a national relief."

This is what this moment offers. Conservatives -- true conservatives, who've watched Bush sully conservatism's name badly -- need to decide whether they want to help make this "fresh start" happen.

Sarah Palin should decide this for you. If you look at Sarah Palin and see a cure for Bush's non-conservative spending binge, non-conservative war of choice in Iraq, non-conservative dreams of sprinkling magic democracy dust all around the world, there's only one choice for you Tuesday. If you look at Sarah Palin and see the best possible future of your party, there's only one choice on Tuesday: Vote for McCain.

But if you see the future in Romney or Fiorina or Jindal or Whitman or Pawlenty or Petraeus or Condi Rice, you've got some serious thinking to do. Because this ticket is not your party's varsity squad. This is your JV. Palin is pure JV. McCain, whatever he once was, proved with his reckless, unvetted pick of Palin that he, too, is JV.

This is not a JV moment in American history. A JV administration will make things worse. Surely, you know deep down -- both in your brain and in your gut -- that this is true. We'll be right back here in four years with an angrier electorate even more desperate for change than it is today.

Conservatives wouldn't get to handpick the Democratic change agent who finally sweeps the JV team from the White House. Maybe that change agent would be Obama again. More likely, it would be someone who convinces Americans that Obama and all his pretty talk of hope and bipartisanship amounted to a naive recipe for defeat. Me, I'm betting the 2012 change agent would be a Bush Liberal.

So you can have your bipartisan, collaborative, team-of-rivals administration now. Or you can watch a with-us-or-against-us, winner-take-all, it's-payback-time president take the oath of office in 2013.

If it sounds like I'm trying to scare you, I am. But I wouldn't be doing it if I didn't believe it. It scares me, too.

We don't need a Bush Liberal in the White House any more than we need a third Bush term. We don't need payback. We don't need big pendulum swings in our politics. On issue after issue, we need to return to the sane center of American politics. We need durable progress, the progress that comes from building a broad coalition for change. Obama offers the best chance for durable progress in many years -- probably the best chance in my lifetime.

Obama has promised to give Americans the tools for unprecedented civic involvement. Real conservatives need to decide how much faith they have in the power of their own ideas. They need to decide whether unprecedented civic engagement sounds scary or whether it sounds like an unprecedented chance to win lifelong converts and forge a fresh, new conservative majority.

At base, conservatives need to decide how invested they are in America and in conservatism. You need to decide whether -- ideologically speaking -- you're building a business you can pass on to your kids and grandkids or whether you're a huckster out to make a quick, fly-by-night buck.

If you're a fly-by-night huckster, your choice is clear: McCain-Palin.

I can't for the life of me figure out what the McCain-Palin mandate would be. That neither of them has a foreign-sounding name? That neither one of them "pals around with terrorists"? That neither one of them has ever been falsely rumored to be a Muslim? That neither of them (despite their non-conservative pander to buy up hundreds of billions of dollars in bad mortgages) has been smeared as a "socialist"? That Palin's extremist pastor got less news coverage than Obama's ex-pastor? This is perfect Rove-style, fly-by-night hucksterism: a meaningless temporary coalition held together with fear, bigotry, greed, and ignorance.

So we get malignantly out-of-context claims that Obama wants to bankrupt the coal industry. We get socialist bribes to voters during the same rallies that McCain and Palin smear Obama as a "socialist" who wants to be "redistributionist-in-chief." I think all this "redistribution" talk is, fundamentally, a smokescreen to keep conservatives from seeing how much they have in common with Obama's worldview. Obama spoke the seemingly toxic phrase "redistributive change" in passing back in 2001 while criticizing the 1960s civil rights movement for relying too much on an activist Supreme Court to improve the lives of African Americans. Sounds sort of conservative, doesn't it?

But it's hard to hear Obama's substance over the dim-witted din.

America deserves better. Conservatives deserve better. Conservatives deserve a presidential candidate who won't flee from deregulation when it becomes politically dicey. Conservatives deserve a presidential candidate who will stand up against the headwind of the mortgage crisis and explain that the market is doing what it does best: punishing the foolish and the careless and sending their assets down and down and down until someone prudent and sensible can purchase them and bring renewal. Conservatives deserve a presidential candidate who will argue that a $700 billion bailout is about the only thing that can keep financiers from learning the ruthless lesson the market is teaching. Instead, conservatives have McCain. Which is to say that conservatives have nobody.

The conservative thinker Andrew Sullivan wrote this today in a long, moving piece summarizing his endorsement of Obama:

"His fiscal policies are too liberal for me - I don't believe in raising taxes, I believe in cutting entitlements for the middle classes as the way to fiscal balance. I don't believe in 'progressive taxation', I support a flat tax. I don't want to give unions any more power. I'm sure there will be moments when a Democratic Congress will make me wince. But I also understand that money has to come from somewhere, and it will not come in any meaningful measure from freezing pork or the other transparent gimmicks advertized in advance by McCain. McCain is not serious on spending. But he is deadly serious in not touching taxes. So, on the core question of debt, on bringing America back to fiscal reason, Obama is still better than McCain."

Sullivan has also posted his top 10 reasons why conservatives should vote for Obama. Click here to consider them.

If you want to experience a sharp contrast between huckster conservatism and the sort of conservatism you can bequeath to your grandchildren, read William Kristol's empty-headed, disingenuous column in today's New York Times and then read this Sullivan piece.

Reclaim your movement. Start fresh. Collaborate with an Obama presidency when its proposals are sound. Raise hell when the proposals aren't prudent. Make America think. Trust in your ideas. If Obama succeeds in moving us past longstanding impasses, be there to recruit women whose votes are freed from a one-dimensional defense of abortion rights, gays who are freed from worrying they'll be barred from visiting the love of their life in the hospital, hard-working immigrants freed from being used as a perennial political pinata.

Build an ideological legacy you can leave to your children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. But first, reject the huckster conservatism on this year's ballot. Vote for Obama. Then start fresh.

Just don't expect the Bush Liberals to thank you anytime soon. Or ever.

Bill Kristol Knocks New York Times , Predicts McCain Win On "Daily Show" (VIDEO)

2008-10-31T08:35:59Z

Bill Kristol knocked his own paper, the New York Times, on "The Daily Show" last night, and repeated his prediction that John McCain will win the White House on Tuesday.

Jon Stewart joked with the error-prone Kristol, who he has mocked before, "You can't look at past performance as a predictor, otherwise you wouldn't be, obviously, still a pundit."

"You're reading The New York Times too much, Jon," Kristol told Stewart, only for Stewart to remind him that he works there. "Oh, it's a very fine newspaper — on one day of the week."

Kristol also predicted that McCain would "win huge," but that even if Barack Obama does pull it off, he ill be a "conventional" president."

Watch:

Previously: Jon Stewart: "Oh, Bill Kristol, Are You Ever Right?"

Jamie Stiehm: Sarah Palin: A Rude October Surprise Party on Halloween

2008-10-28T15:07:55Z

American women in our 40s, unite against Sarah Palin!

A specter's on the loose: the woman from Wasilla may be the way we are remembered and represented in the nation's history: a scary thought for Halloween.

We're not the only ones spooked and sobered. Suffragette spirits are stirring, whispering in the wind to say they did not march to the White House and get force-fed in jail so this one could rap-dance like a weird sister in Macbeth. Wearing her best new black costume on Saturday Night Live, Sarah Palin cast a midnight spell across the Lower 48.

The woman who would be Vice President is also loving every moment she spends onstage in the lights of the Lower 48. The Republican's quest to become a "first" has now broadened in scope, if she can emerge as a winner out of a wreckage of losers.

And what about her lack of book-learnin' ? She's like the member of your book club who swans in, utterly undaunted in conversation by the fact she has rarely read the book.

Truly the last time history played such a cruel joke for the jack-o'-lanterns was when Clarence Thomas was nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court seat held by the great civil rights lawyer and Justice Thurgood Marshall. The appointment was an affront, as Thomas is ideologically opposed to Marshall's legacy.

Palin is alarmingly ahistorical. She's said zero on the long struggle and road to citizenship women walked and marched. With the opening of doors at Ivy Leagues universities, the military and their academies, and then the professions, we in our generation became the first females to grow up thinking we could do pretty much as we pleased. But when we were born in the 1960s, the only woman Senator of note was Maine's Margaret Chase Smith.

Ask Palin what three major American heroines are depicted in one statue in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda. (Only three woman are portrayed in the Rotunda, the gallery of Founding Fathers and other leading men in the American story.)

Palin has not sent any thank you notes to history. She seems to think progress by our foremothers was all about Title IX -- funding for girls and women's athletics. Let it not be forgot she was a beauty queen and basketball star, highlights in a biography made of thin gruel.

Men, even Democratic men who are "my friends," tell me Sarah Palin has bewitched them with her coy winks and winsome country cousin ways. Her wind-chime pipes enchant listeners until they realize what a mean punch she packs.

Columnist Kathleen Parker wrote in the Washington Post that John McCain chose Palin after becoming smitten with her over an hour-long coffee klatch under a sycamore tree where he lives. Just the two of them. Palin is nothing if not persuasive in person, blessed with the political talents of charisma and confidence.

Ironically, McCain bet she'd bring him a wave of women supporters. More than half the electorate views her unfavorably, and men like her better than women. We're shocked, shocked.

My friends also say Palin will be leader of the Republican party as of Nov. 5th and clearly has her sights set on conquering Washington. Heck, she could take convicted felon Ted Steven's Senate seat in a heartbeat with a magic trick of appointing herself if he resigns. Then she could get seriously ready for her desire to be "in charge" of that august body. (Good luck with that; a loaded-for-bear Hillary Clinton will be right across the aisle.)

No, we surely haven't seen the last of this small-town governor who wants to "drill, baby, drill" in the pristine Arctic wilderness of her state of Alaska. Over the years, the U.S. Senate has held the line on protecting that precious environmental inheritance. But all we can do is wait until Mrs. Palin comes to Washington.

Even more to blame than McCain is the wily pundit, William Kristol, former adviser to Vice President Dan Quayle and a Washington denizen. "Conservative " is too good a word, given how much he likes radical game-changers. But this time he crossed a bridge into snowy and unknown terrain: Sarah Palin makes Dan Quayle look like Henry Kissinger.

On a cruise last year with like-minded men of the pen and their families, Kristol paid a call on the fetching governor of Alaska. The group was wined and dined in the mansion. He obfuscated his friendly ties in a recent New York Times Op-Ed column, only disclosing they had met before under "far more relaxed" circumstances. Jane Mayer reported the delicious scene in an excellent New Yorker article.

Kristol promoted Palin for the pick publicly and privately. Palin, he said this summer, is "my heartthrob."

Tell that to Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in thunder, lightening and rain. They will not suffer Sarah Palin gladly.

Jamie Stiehm is a political journalist in Washington.