Thinking About Bill
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.
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Thank God for Bill Kristol. Could you imagine if the far-right elevated someone COMPETENT to the status he enjoys?
That's exactly why I'm hoping Sarah Palin becomes leader of the GOP. They'll be in the desert for generations!
Bill Kristol? I love him too. Especially his predictive powers. Please see this link from 2006. Scroll down to the bottom, to his last comment where he talks about Obama and Clinton:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/12/edward_kennedy_frederick_smith.html
Nice get, luke150. Here's what Kristol said on Dec. 17, 2006:
"Barack Obama is not going to beat Hillary Clinton in a single democratic primary. I'll predict that right now."
Takes talent to be that wrong.
Palin was Kristol's tool. He and the other right wing cabalists knew she was not qualified, but after eight years and feeling the pendulum swing away from them, better to throw up a candidate so unqualified that it will only serve to fan the flames of diviseness, consume people's attention like a car wreck and strike a match to their whole evil construct. It was the perfect prank to pull on the world. Because it wasn't about this election. It was about next time and the chance to rebuild. Even they would admit they were out of gas. Their candidates were the mirror image of ours. Darkness to our light. Cynicism to our hope. A spit in the eye of our democracy.
Uhhhhmm.......I don't think Bill Kristol belongs to a tool-using species. ;-D
Very well written response and so artfully done.
Brilliant !!!
I'll by one right-wing meme: this is a marketplace of ideas.
If that's the case, then people should stop buying crap sandwiches from crap sandwich dealers. I understand that it may be somewhat harder to detect someone spewing idiocy if it's idiocy that I want to hear, but either way, it's still got to be obvious that these people are simply wrong about everything. Whether they're lying or stupid is besides the point.
Perfect penance for the pseudo-brilliant man who also said that the Sunni & Shia conflict in Iraq was a myth.
You are a GENIUS!!
Try reading Debra Saunders in the SF Chronicle if Bill's booted. She's got the writing skill of a 5th grader with the intellectual heft of W.
Ryan Tate at Gawker said it best: " Bill Kristol doesn't just drink the Republican Kool-Aid; he's the giant punchbowl crashing through the wall."
Oh, yeahhh!
Perfect, Nora! Pitch perfect. I think you should consummate this affair by writing a book (screenplay) about this fool.
Well well said. Only I had the opposite reaction. I had to stop reading the Times for awhile. Not because Bill Kristol is wrong about everything and perversely proud of it (and apparently unaware of it too), but because it showed an inherent weakness in the Times that they would identify Bill Kristol as a writer worthy of the other writers at the Times. The Times' ploy to hire Kristol in hopes of growing their subscriber 'base' backfired, kinda like how Sarah Palin was supposed to add women to McCain's base. Neither worked out and both McCain and the Times lost credibility in the process.
I could not agree more. This reminds us of all the lunatics that start wars, or put bombs, or dump toxic wastes on Third world landscapes, or enact legislation that creates misery, without understanding the awful consequences of their acts.
His pathetic little magazine is such a crazy New Age rag! Not one foot on the ground. Ever. And in the NYT it is even worse...
Oh, me, but this was funny.
I've often wondered how Bill Kristol manages to write that drek, watch himself simper through those painful tv appearances, have his ass handed to him by smarter, better people almost hourly, and still wake up every morning and do it all again. He's a testimony to ego-strength, self-love and pride. What wonderful parents he must have had!
Feh.
David Frum and Billie boy have the same smug snears, they must know what part of hell they are going to.
Bill is a tool, and I mean that with the respect it deserves. The woman did not know the simple things you learn in Jr High, for Gods sake. I think from now on it would be a good idea to include in the vetting process the board game "are you smarter than a 5th grader' If you can't win that you can not run for president or vp.
Maybe Bill was thinking this.... that McCain would win, that the Lord would take him and Palin would become president. He and his fellow neo-cons would rush to the aid of their low-wattage darling, to "help" her to run the country. When you're losing one puppet, it makes sense to cast about for a replacement.
Nora Ephron, I'm a gay twentysomething male, and I'm in love with you too.
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