Reading William Kristol’s latest screed in the Weekly Standard, one is tempted to pause and double-check the source. Is the content from a random right-wing blog, some nutty talk-radio show, or a leading DC establishment player in one of the most widely-read conservative political magazines in the country?
I naively thought I could no longer be surprised by Kristol’s columns, but his latest gem pushes the envelope to new depths. Did you know, for example, that American liberals were not only responsible for Khmer Rouge’s crimes, but our withdrawal from Vietnam also created the conditions for the Islamist revolution in Iran in 1979?
Kristol concludes:
[A]ll honor to George W. Bush for following in Reagan’s footsteps, grasping the nettle, and confronting the real lessons and consequences of Vietnam. The liberal media and the PC academics are horrified. All the better.
As the left shudders, Bush leads.
There isn’t even an argument to refute here; it’s just childish cheerleading and empty sloganeering.
A couple of months ago, Kevin Drum noted, “The Bill Kristol phenomenon is a stellar example of what a nice suit and a sober tone of voice can do for you…. [H]e’s smart enough to talk in more soothing tones. As a result, he gets columns in Time magazine, edits his own widely-read magazine, and shows up constantly on television.”
But with columns like these, Kristol’s penchant for “soothing tones” is gone. He’s just a sycophant, blithely touting a dangerous policy that doesn’t work, and bashing those who dare to disagree.
Does Kristol actually believe his own fluff? I’m inclined to think so, but as Jonathan Chait explained this week, it may not matter: “Kristol’s good standing in the Washington establishment depends on the wink-and-nod awareness that he’s too smart to believe his own agitprop. Perhaps so. But, in the end, a fake thug is not much better than the real thing.”
We learned this week that former Sen. Sam Nunn, a conservative Democrat from Georgia who voluntarily left politics more than a decade ago, is considering teaming up with Unity08 as a way of returning to the national stage. “My own thinking is, it may be a time for the country to say, ‘Timeout. The two-party system has served us well, historically, but it’s not serving us now,'” Nunn said.
OK, so what would this third party offer the voters? TNR’s Britt Peterson sat down with the long-time Washington insiders behind the project to hear their pitch about the problems with Washington insiders. Their vision for a party is surprisingly thin.
Anyone looking for larger ideas than a return to civility won’t get much from Unity ’08, however. In our conversation, [Douglas Bailey, a former media advisor to Gerald Ford] and [Gerald Rafshoon, a former media advisor to Jimmy Carter] wouldn’t take any policy stands, deflecting questions until after a candidate has been chosen in a “Virtual Convention” slated for next summer. “We’re not interested in spelling out or even having the delegates spell out a precise platform, where, by God, you must meet these tests or we don’t want you to run,” Bailey tells me. “That doesn’t make much sense.” Doing so, he says, would repel candidates, not attract them. Rafshoon, too, focuses on process and ethics, rather than issues. “Campaigns are run on the negatives,” he tells me. “That’s the promise they make to the people: ‘He’s no good, vote for me!'”
But the issues they do discuss don’t even seem that compatible. Bailey mentions three times the only Unity ’08 issue that’s historically a Republican idée fixe: entitlements and the deficit. “Has there been an effort by a single candidate in either party to talk seriously about the deficit and entitlements?” he asks me. On the other side of the table, Rafshoon does seem sympathetic to the idea of a candidate focusing on the deficit (he mentions in passing that one of Ross Perot’s successes was to help set Clinton’s budget-balancing agenda). But balance this issue with Unity ’08’s other, admittedly spare, stated concerns, and the whole thing begins to look a little contradictory: cutting down on entitlements while also expanding health care, reducing income inequality, and cleaning up the environment? How well can a platform built on flimsy, mismatched legs stand?
Actually, it can’t.
Third parties, if they hope to compete, have to offer voters some kind of policy positions. Unity08, on the other hand, is a policy-free gimmick. It’s a “party” that will “nominate” a bipartisan ticket in ’08, simply for the sake of bipartisanship. What does the party think about the war? It doesn’t have a position. Culture war issues? Nada. Trade? Domestic security? The environment? Nothing but a blank page.
The party, apparently, believes that politicians should be more “civil.” Leaders should be more open to “compromise.” There should be less negative campaigning and more solution-oriented discussions.
It all sounds perfectly pleasant, just so long as you over look how vacuous and incoherent the whole undertaking is. It may be inconvenient, but Americans have substantive policy disagreements. Those differences matter. If Unity08’s leaders and enthusiasts want to join in that debate, terrific; the more the merrier.
But running a presidential campaign that intentionally prefers process and politeness over substance and policy isn’t going to do anyone any favors.
Let the games begin! Candidates scramble to position themselves for runs at seats being vacated by retiring House Republicans in Arizona and Illinois. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Saturday Roundup.
One of the principal flaws in Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign is that he’s running, counter intuitively, on a platform based on subjects he knows nothing about — foreign policy and national security.
But just as importantly, Giuliani keeps undermining his own credibility on all policy issues by exaggerating to the point of comedy. He can’t just say he spent time at Ground Zero; he has to exaggerate to say he spent as much time (if not more) than the rescue, recovery, and cleanup workers who spent a year sifting through human remains and rubble. He can’t just say he’s interested in counter-terrorism; he has to exaggerate to say he’s been “studying Islamic terrorism for 30 years.” He can’t just say he’s committed to promoting adoption over abortion; he has to exaggerate his record as mayor. He can’t just he cut taxes in NYC; he has to exaggerate his record to include tax cuts he opposed (he even counted one cut twice). The guy can’t even release a list of congressional endorsements without exaggerating the numbers.
When it comes to Giuliani’s record on budget surpluses, it’s more of the same.
Rudolph W. Giuliani has been broadcasting radio advertisements in Iowa and other states far from the city he once led stating that as mayor of New York, he “turned a $2.3 billion deficit into a multibillion dollar surplus.”
The assertion, which Mr. Giuliani has repeated on the trail as he has promoted his fiscal conservatism, is somewhat misleading, independent fiscal monitors said. In fact, Mr. Giuliani left his successor, Michael R. Bloomberg, with a bigger deficit than the one Mr. Giuliani had to deal with when he arrived in 1994. And that deficit would have been large even if the city had not been attacked on Sept. 11, 2001.
“He inherited a gap, and he left a gap for his successor,” Ronnie Lowenstein, the director of the city’s Independent Budget Office, a nonpartisan agency that monitors the city budget, said of Mr. Giuliani. “The city was budgeting as though the good times were not going to end, but sooner or later they always do.”
In an amusing response, the Giuliani campaign told the NYT that the former mayor’s claims are technically true because he claims to have created a surplus, not that he was able to maintain one.
Reporters labeled Al Gore a “serial exaggerator” in 2000 on a whole lot less than this.
Last weekend, the NYT published an op-ed from seven infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division, who will soon be returning home frustrated and jaded. The piece, “The War as We Saw It,” was a sweeping condemnation of everything we’ve heard of late from the Kristol-McCain-Lieberman-O’Hanlon-Pollack crowd. For reasons that I still don’t understand, most news outlets treated the striking op-ed with a collective yawn.
Among those war supporters who deigned to respond to the piece, the most common refrain was that these seven troops are unusual in their discontent. Most of the men and women serving in Iraq, conservatives said, are committed to the still-vague mission and are filled with confidence.
There are ample reasons to believe otherwise.
In the dining hall of a U.S. Army post south of Baghdad, President Bush was on the wide-screen TV, giving a speech about the war in Iraq. The soldiers didn’t look up from their chicken and mashed potatoes.
As military and political leaders prepare to deliver a progress report on the conflict to Congress next month, many soldiers are increasingly disdainful of the happy talk that they say commanders on the ground and White House officials are using in their discussions about the war.
And they’re becoming vocal about their frustration over longer deployments and a taxing mission that keeps many living in dangerous and uncomfortably austere conditions. Some say two wars are being fought here: the one the enlisted men see, and the one that senior officers and politicians want the world to see.
“I don’t see any progress. Just us getting killed,” said Spc. Yvenson Tertulien, one of those in the dining hall in Yousifiya, 10 miles south of Baghdad, as Bush’s speech aired last month. “I don’t want to be here anymore.”
The problem becomes even more painful when one considers that the Army’s suicide rate is now at its highest level in 23 years. What’s more, in a series of mental health surveys, released in May, 45% of troops ranked morale in their unit as low or very low, as compared to seven percent who ranked it high or very high.
The Guardian’s Ewen MacAskill had a good piece the other day about the president’s VFW speech, and included an anecdote in passing that caught my eye.
The speech was aimed primarily at what White House officials privately describe as the “defeatocrats”, the Democratic Congressmen trying to push Mr Bush into an early withdrawal.
In private, presidential aides walk around the White House referring to “defeatocrats”? Seriously? West Wing conversations now resemble Free Republic threads?
I vaguely recall a time in which the political establishment perceived Bush’s election as the return of the “grown ups.” It’s rather amusing, in retrospect.
By any reasonable measure, Sen. John Warner’s (R-Va.) call this week for a slight reduction in U.S. forces in Iraq was pretty weak tea. Warner “suggested” to the White House — he opposes any congressional mandates — that the president bring home 5,000 troops by Christmas. As withdrawal plans go, Warner’s recommendation was little more than a symbolic gesture — he’s talking about a 2% drawdown.
But that didn’t stop former Bush aide Bradley Blakeman, president and CEO of Freedom’s Watch (a far-right MoveOn.org knockoff), from blasting Warner last night on PBS. (Transcript, Video)
JUDY WOODRUFF: Does something like the announcement by Senator John Warner yesterday, the veteran Republican senator, urging the president to begin to pull troops out this fall, does that hurt your cause?
BRADLEY BLAKEMAN: Well, it hurts the cause of freedom and giving the Iraqis the opportunity to stand on their feet.
Blakeman went on to accuse war critics of using “scare tactics.” (Freedom Watch’s ads argue that we have to stay in Iraq because “they attacked us,” and insist withdrawal will lead to another 9/11.)
I’m curious; if Blakeman and other GOP attack dogs are going to blast Warner for “hurting the cause of freedom,” what are they going to do about Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. George Casey, the Army chief of staff, who are expected to urge the president to reduce the U.S. force in Iraq by almost half?
Let me guess; they’re enemies of freedom, too.
Mailbag …
Soooo tired of bloggers jumping on the bash Clinton bandwagon.
A loser…?
If you’d stop for a moment, you would be exposed to the reality that Clinton is dominating the debates, dominating the polls. On the ground here in California, she has in place a growing organization that I guarantee you will crush any opposition – Democratic primary, or general election against the Repugs.
It’s time the blogosphere, and people like you, began to clean up your act. Stop acting so reactively. And perhaps realize that your unique hits aren’t necessarily a measure of your credibility.
And there’s more …
I am one of your very early contributor and I kicked in a buck here and there whenever I can but you disgusted me today.
Calling Hillary Clinton a loser ? The woman has been through the RW grinder for years and she is still thriving. I understand your opposition to have another Clinton in the WH but you should have looked at your actions and words carefully.
From today on, your site is off my fav links and I will make sure that my friends will do the same.
You are pathetic and despicable.
Didn’t actually realize that I’d called anybody a loser. But I will try harder to censor inappropriate thoughts.
The other Democratic candidates are piling on Hillary Clinton over her remarks about the GOP benefitting from a hypothetical new terrorist attack. That and other news in today’s Happy Hour Roundup.