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!

Thank you, Timothy Egan

Timothy Egan has written a wonderful column for the New York Times asking, cajoling, begging, and shaming publishers into refusing to publish books by the likes of Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin. Amen, amen. And yet...

Here's the problem, Mr. Egan: As a writer, you know that we need to focus on our audience. So, who's the audience of this piece? I have a few guesses.

Publishers don't want to hear it, and though they might need to, they're unlikely to be convinced to abandon lucrative sales in the name of good taste or fealty to the English language. Sure, they say they publish garbage so they can afford to publish real literature, and sure, that's often a justification to cash in, but considering their circumstances, can you blame them?

And your audience certainly isn't Joe the Plumber or Sarah Palin. No one, including Sarah Palin, knows what newspaper she reads. But anyone who's read some of her responses to questions and wondered how someone managed to convert oral blather to written drivel knows she doesn't read enough. And as for Joe the Plumber, could anything possibly convince this guy to avoid the spotlight for one second? If anything, you've done these two the favor of offering them some free press.

Which brings us to our third possible audience: The book buying public. We are most to blame for what publishers publish, just as we're most to blame for the rise of media freak-show acts like JTP and Palin. We're also to blame for the quality of the news we watch right before we go out and applaud politicians who criticize the media. We're responsible for the sex and violence in the movies we pay to see before dismissing Hollywood as too depraved. If we're really honest, we know we're responsible for the kid who hasn't seen his dad in five or six years because we threw him in a cell in Guantanimo and forgot about him. We're responsible for that errant bomb that landed in a school in Kabul or Baghdad, and we're also responsible for the correctly-aimed one we built and sold to somebody who sold it to somebody who sold it to somebody who dropped it on somebody else. Why start teaching Americans about personal responsibility when it comes to the crappy books we buy, and why stop there?

You see, Mr. Egan, my fourth guess is that your audience is really folks like me. I'm sitting here, working on the tenth... no, twelfth, no, fourteenth re-write of Chapter 12 of a novel no one will probably ever read, and when I take a break to catch up on some news I find your article. And there's the problem: You've written a very nice sermon to the choir, and worse, a choir filled with people who, categorically, don't matter. You are defending a bunch of nobodies, Mr. Egan.

It's almost as though you want to live in a world that listens to nobodies instead of paying attention to people like Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin.

With those kind of ideals, I can't believe you found a publisher.

Democrats are wrong and Republicans are stupid?

In the New York Times Campaign Stops blog, Douglas MacKinnon has a piece where he lays out an argument for why McCain could still win. Ignoring the polling numbers, MacKinnon relies on a sad fact about Democrats, which even Obama is quoted as saying in the piece: “Don’t underestimate the capacity of Democrats to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.”

MacKinnon thinks the Democrats could fail again by underestimating the Republicans. That's a fear I share. But he explains it as follows:

"Republicans think Democrats are wrong, but Democrats think Republicans are stupid, and that’s why Democrats lose."

I've wrestled with this, and felt my share of liberal guilt about dismissing a large swath of the American population as stupid. But this statement is reductive. Republicans don't just think Democrats are wrong. Despite the fact that I live in a small town, because of my political views people like Sarah Palin believe I live somewhere other than the "real America". Because I believe in those words John McCain put in air-quotes as he spat them out, "Women's Health", many Republicans find my beliefs tantamount to infanticide. Because my interpretation of my Christian faith demands that I take a strong position as a pacifist, many Republicans think I'm a coward, or, at the very least, that I don't support people like my brother-in-law, who is currently serving in Iraq. People can respectfully find one another to be wrong. It's hard to respectfully call someone an unpatriotic, cowardly baby-killer.

Meanwhile, I see Joe-Sixpack Republicans who have suffered through years of stagnant wages while the plutocrats have become wealthy beyond imagining holding fast to the illusion that their hard work will make them part of that top one percent of earners. These folks decry socialism not out of some ideological sense of fairness to Paris Hilton, but out of fear left over from the Red Scare, and out of a genuine ignorance about the state of economic inequality in our country. I hear the descendants of immigrants voice the same kind of xenophobic slurs that translate to the mantra of generations of bigoted Americans: "We're the last ones who should get in." I've watched anti-abortion or fiscally conservative single issue voters pull the lever for a party that has a proven track record of increasing the number of abortions during their watch and of increasing the size of government and the federal deficit every time they occupy the oval office. I've watched people who claim to believe in enlightened self-interest vote against their own self interests over and over again. I would love to find a gentler word than "stupid", but nothing comes to mind.

I am willing to acknowledge that the Republicans, until this election, have had a more formidable political machine. If that's the measure of respect, then I respect them more than I do the Democrats. But that's George W. Bush style respect; respect earned through fear. I hope that, after four years of an Obama administration, Americans can rediscover a different definition of respect, wherein people lay out arguments based on facts and well reasoned political philosophy rather than race-baiting, fear-mongering, and reductive labels. When we still disagree, which we will, we recognize each other as informed, thoughtful, patriotic citizens who believe in each other's goodness and shared hope for our country. I want to feel that kind of respect for Republicans, and receive it from them in turn, but I'm not there yet, and the Republicans I know aren't there either.

Is Bill Kristol ever right?

Jon Stewart once asked, "Oh Bill Kristol, are you ever right?" I'm reluctant to believe anyone can be consistently wrong; the whole even-a-broken-clock-is-right-twice-a-day theory. But William Kristol might be a clock that's just off by enough to be wrong all the time. Today, in his latest column for the NYTimes (a paper his own conservative friends consistently mock) he tries to take a populist tack, arguing that Americans are not stupid or uninformed. At first, he had me wondering if, for once, he was on to something. Considering Obama's poll numbers, for a moment I thought he might be vying for a position in the conservatives-attacking-conservatism movement we're going to hear a lot from over the next few years. Instead, he tried to make a case for Joe the (well, not really a) Plumber. Seriously, Bill, I think Jon Stewart may have you pegged.

I know the anger over Obama's clumsy "spread the wealth around" comment must have lit a fire under dyed-in-the-wool conservatives, but if Joe the Plumber really is one of the intelligent and informed electorate Kristol is talking about, then he could probably hear the fact that both candidates are talking plenty about spreading wealth around. At the last debate, Joe's debate, McCain, after deriding any spreading of wealth, and after proposing a spending freeze, talked at length about his $5000 tax credit for health coverage. That's spreading the wealth. If Americans are intelligent and informed, they know that. They also know that it won't cover the cost of most of their care now, let alone when they are old, so it amounts to spreading around the wealth, but doing so ineffectively. That's what Americans, the intelligent and educated ones, are sick of. We don't dislike the conservative's line on free market economics, even if we disagree and even when it proves intellectually bankrupt as it has these last few weeks, nearly as much as we dislike their penchant for consistent, ideologically driven mismanagement of government. Of course they think government is bad: they do their best to make it so every chance they get.

Kristol not only threw down with some Latin etymology, tracing the root of "Vulgar to "Vulgaris", but he even quoted Horace. I'm not sure if he was trying to show that conservatives are educated elites, or if he was trying to say the "common people" could appreciate this linguistics lesson, but either way it felt condescending and not particularly illuminating. Then, he put to rest any misconception that a nuanced study of history might inform his politics by writing: "Most of the recent mistakes of American public policy, and most of the contemporary delusions of American public life, haven’t come from an ignorant and excitable public. They’ve been produced by highly educated and sophisticated elites."

No, they've been produced by highly educated and sophisticated elites who were willing to work for George W. Bush, who is neither. But then, the term "Sophisticated" comes from the Greek sophos or sophia, meaning of "wise" or "wisdom", and I'll bet there are a lot of hacks who worked for Dubya who are now reconsidering the wisdom of that career move.

I'm not sure if Kristol was telling conservatives to stop looking down on the common people, or if he was telling us common folks that the elites aren't to be trusted as much as a plumber who isn't a plumber, but one thing is abundantly clear: We can trust the vulgar masses a lot more than we can trust Bill Kristol.