Bill Kristol apparently thinks Obama's Wednesday night speech should have announced the imminent bombing of Iran. Which is something this unrepentant neo-conservative has been promoting for quite some time now. He writes in the Washington Post:
So President Obama invited himself into our living rooms tonight...why? Not to address questions of war and peace -- even though we are fighting two wars overseas, and even though an avowed enemy and terror sponsor is rushing towards nuclear weapons. Not to address the economy -- even though unemployment continues to rise, the deficit is at an all-time high, and we face a truly worrisome debt burden in the years ahead. And not to rally the nation in the face of some other crisis.
But isn’t health care a crisis? No.
Indeed, the president acknowledged it isn’t: "But we did not come here just to clean up crises. We came to build a future. So tonight, I return to speak to all of you about an issue that is central to that future -- and that is the issue of health care." In other words, health care -- unlike, say, the financial system a few months ago -- is not in a state of crisis. ...
The real "public option" is to scrap the current grandiose plans and to start over. There is no health care crisis, and doing no harm is far preferable to doing real damage to a good health care system.
In other words, Kristol offered a more sophisticated version of "You lie."
As CA Berkeley WV points out in the comments, Kristol is just recycling what he wrote in a memorandum to Republican leaders in December 1993:
Any Republican urge to negotiate a "least bad" compromise with the Democrats, and thereby gain momentary public credit for helping the president "do something" about health care, should also be resisted. Passage of the Clinton health care plan, in any form, would guarantee and likely make permanent an unprecedented federal intrusion into and disruption of the American economy--and the establishment of the largest federal entitlement program since Social Security. Its success would signal a rebirth of centralized welfare-state policy at the very moment we have begun rolling back that idea in other areas. And, not least, it would destroy the present breadth and quality of the American health care system, still the world's finest. On grounds of national policy alone, the plan should not be amended; it should be erased.
But the Clinton proposal is also a serious political threat to the Republican Party. Republicans must therefore clearly understand the political strategy implicit in the Clinton plan--and then adopt an aggressive and uncompromising counterstrategy designed to delegitimize the proposal and defeat its partisan purpose.
Sixteen years later and, for Bill Kristol, the strategy is the same.