Never has a political pundit been as consistently wrong in the positions taken and the predictions made as has Bill Kristol over the past seven years.
He has been Cheerleader-in-Chief for the fiasco in Iraq. He displays not an ounce of concern about the long-term damage inflicted on the reputation of United States around the world, or about the corrosive effect on our military readiness to respond effectively to future crises. Why does anyone take him seriously anymore?
In today's New York Times, he offers this tangential fantasy to fit his delusional thought system:
Having controlled the executive branch for 28 of the last 40 years, Republicans tend to think of themselves as the governing party — with some of the arrogance and narrowness that implies, but also with a sense of real-world responsibility. Many Democrats, on the other hand, no long[er] even try to imagine what action and responsibility are like. They do, however, enjoy the support of many refined people who snigger at the sometimes inept and ungraceful ways of the Republicans. (And, if I may say so, the quality of thought of the Democrats’ academic and media supporters — a permanent and, as it were, pensioned opposition — seems to me to have deteriorated as Orwell would have predicted.).... To govern is to choose, a Democrat of an earlier generation, John F. Kennedy, famously remarked. Is this generation of Democrats capable of governing?
It is difficult to address such jaw-dropping propaganda with a straight face. A Republican president, with the aide of a Republican-controlled Congress from 2001 to 2006, created and then sustained the biggest foreign policy disaster in American history. They have presided over record-breaking inequality in wealth during that time, and they apparently have not noticed the grinding financial burden that is wearing away the middle class in America.
Republicans can't govern because they are blinded by ideology. They spend taxpayer money as if they had a trillion dollar credit card, but cut taxes endlessly and offer no realistic plan to pay the bill. This is the height of irresponsibility. Without the bludgeon of fear, magnified exponentially by the endless repetition of the Rovian mantra, "9/11, 9/11, 9/11, 9/11," Bush would not be in the White House today.
We will see soon enough how Democrats govern. As James Carville says, "Which don't you like, the peace or the prosperity?"