It's like a dream come true. The Republican Party once again is taking advice from the pundit who is never right about anything. Ever.
In fact, in a field where incompetence, inanity, ignorance and being consistently, flat-out wrong about things is often rewarded with increasing prominence and influence (e.g., Thomas Friedman, David Brooks, Peter Beinart, George Will, the late David Broder), Bill Kristol stands out as being wrong not some of the time, not most of the time, but all of the time.
This goes way back for Bill. In 1990, Bill was serving as chief of staff to the much-maligned, and eternally clueless, Vice President Dan Quayle. Jacob Weisberg, in a 1990 piece for The New Republic, dubbed Kristol, "Dan Quayle's brain." Succinct, ironic and uproariously funny. Weisberg included this early example of just how wrong Bill could be:
Kristol thinks that word of Quayle’s competence is bound to spread once it has solidified within the White House. ‘The key thing in the first year was to establish himself as an important player within the administration and on the Hill,’ says Kristol. ‘The second-level audience it was important to pay a lot of attention to was the Republican Party. The third circle is the public.’
Yeah,
that was gonna' happen...
Kristol's amazingly consistent wrong-headedness has raised him to the pantheon of political punditry. Bill Kristol's long and storied history of being amazingly, gloriously wrong about absolutely everything includes these recent gems:
- As a prominent member of PNAC, he promoted the invasion of Iraq for years and then cheerleaded the war's escalation, eventually berating Barack Obama for pulling U.S. forcres out of Iraq "prematurely."
- Pushed John McCain to choose Sarah Palin as his running mate.
- Pushed Romney to choose Paul Ryan as his running mate.
One might wonder, in fact, if Kristol was a double agent, working clandestinely for the Democrats. As Politico notes:
However disparate, Sarah Palin and Iraq now stand, respectively, as the GOP’s riskiest and most controversial (and, arguably, in the case of the war, disastrous) political and policy bets of the of the past decade. And both are inextricably linked to Kristol, who continues to exert tremendous influence from the comfort of television studios and the editors’ chair.
And, like damn near all self-involved, ego-inflated pundits, Kristol doesn't admit that he is always wrong about everything. In fact, like most of the bloviating pundit class, he thinks he's rarely, if ever, wrong about
anything:
“I guess what I’d say is that, I think, on the whole, my batting average isn’t bad,” he said.
Oh, Bill, please keep telling yourself that! And Tom Friedman was right about Iraq, too! It's gonna' turn around in six months! Or six months. Or six months...
But, of course, Kristol bootlicker and Weekly Standard employee, Michael Goldfarb, says Bill is a Super Pundit! He doesn't just bloviate! He's all about action!
“Bill is different than a George Will, who writes about what it means to be conservative, or a Charles Krauthammer, who lays out the coherent conservative criticism of the Obama administration,” Goldfarb said. “Bill writes about what ought to be done and then he follows it up with meetings and phone calls. … He really tries to make things happen.”
Iraq, Palin, Ryan... Please, Bill, keep being a
Man of Action*!
Bill was even kind of enough to supply the Obama campaign and Democrats with a ready-made quote for upcoming commercials:
Kristol’s support for Ryan’s pick centered around the Ryan budget plan, which Kristol calls “the official Republican governing roadmap.” By selecting Ryan, he and Hayes argued, Romney would send a signal that he was willing to embrace that agenda.
In a world of asinine know-it-alls, Kristol stands out for his sheer cluelessness and dumbfuckery:
“Romney, and Republicans, will be running on the Romney-Ryan plan no matter what,” Kristol and Hayes wrote on Thursday. “Having Paul Ryan on the ticket may well make it easier to defend the plan convincingly. Ryan’s pretty good at that. And it’s hard to see how Ryan on the ticket could hurt.”
Yes, Bill, it's hard to see. Especially when your head is so far up your ass.
But leave it to a hack at Politico (in this case, Dylan Byers) to throw ol' Bill a bone:
Kristol, who has done a great deal of pot-stirring this cycle, also got a quite a few bets wrong. Over the last year, he’s floated the idea — and in some cases predicted — that Rudy Giuliani, Chris Christie, Mitch Daniels, Marco Rubio and Ryan himself would all enter the Republican presidential primary.
"Quite a few bets?" Try "
every bet," Dylan.
That said, the closing paragraph of the story is sure to warm the hearts of Democrats everywhere. The man who is wrong about absolutely everything makes the following prediction that includes three completely preposterous claims:
“I think Ryan makes Romney a better candidate,” he told POLITICO. “After the Romney-Ryan ticket wins, I’m looking forward to retiring from the VP-picking business.”
Amazing! Three "head-up-the-ass" inanities in one very brief quote:
1. Romney is now a better candidate. Wrong. Romney is still the same shitty, clueless candidate he was before the Ryan pick.
2. A Romney-Ryan win? Start booking your plans to the Obama inauguration festivities.
3. Kristol will retire from the "VP-picking business." We can only hope and pray that Bill will be around for decades to come to help Republican presidential nominees pick VP candidates.
Bill, here's to hoping you enjoy a long and healthy life. And may your influence never wane!
*Bill Kristol, Man of Action™ action figure sold separately.