Thursday, February 26, 2009

Now Bill Kristol can be wrong somewhere else!

Let's take a little break from the 25 Random Lies About Me project (more to come) so I can return to one of my favorite subjects: the remarkable way Bill Kristol manages to always be wrong.

So Kristol got canned at the NYTimes and is now writing a less frequent column for the Washington Post. Look, I understand that papers want to find somebody to be their conservative voice, but George Will, Charles Krauthhammer, and David Brooks all do the job just fine without reading like... well, like Bill Kristol. And if people want a Neo-Con, they can read Christopher Hitchens. Bill Kristol is a Bush water carrier, and Bush has left for Texas, so he's a man without a platform.

Nowhere is this more evident than in his advice to Republicans today in the Post. He concedes that Republicans "need fresh thinking in a host of areas of domestic policy, thinking that builds on previous conservative achievements but that deals with the new economic and social realities." But he offers no ideas himself. Instead, he says they will have to be politically agile to make up for their lack of ideas. Then he offers his political strategy:

"Obstruct and delay."

"Obstruct and delay"? That's Kristol's idea for a Republican strategy?

A Republican friend of mine was telling me just the other day that Obama would lose in 2012 if the economy hasn't recovered. But we both agreed that the only way he could weather that is if the Republicans did nothing but obstruct and delay, thus earning the ire of every person who could possibly benefit from this government program or that one. And let's face it, we could all see a windfall from some government program. Obstructionism will hurt my friend, the conservative police officer just as it will hurt me, the liberal school teacher. It will hurt the assembly-line worker just as it hurts the CEO. When Republicans obstruct and delay, they take the burden off the Dems, who would have to be choosing winners and losers, and make themselves responsible for every loser. This is a political strategy bereft of both intellectual heft and political savvy.

Way to go again, Bill!

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