Ever cheerful Weekly Standard editor William Kristol wrote a column in Sunday's Washington Post that's drawn a lot of deserved ridicule, "Why Bush Will Be A Winner." Kristol, who got his start in the Beltway as Dan Quayle's "brain", has distinguished himself before with statements to the effect that "there is no history of sectarian strife in Iraq" and "Very few wars in American history were prepared better or more thoroughly than this one by this president."
But, despite being either totally delusional or utterly dishonest in his running commentary on Iraq and the Bush administration, Kristol was recently chosen by Time magazine as a featured columnist and he's an ever-welcome guest on TV chat shows and major op-ed pages. I welcome conservative critiques of current politics, but it's a sign of the utter shipwreck of today's "conservatism" that so many of the bright lights of the contemporary Right stand as an embarrassment to the legacy of Bill Buckley and Barry Goldwater at least as much as they simply annoy and frustrate liberals with their partisan hackery.
Yesterday the Washington Post gave The Nation's David Corn space to reply to Kristol's column. His "Why Bush Is A Loser" is an excellent - if depressing - read. Corn - a fellow who's almost as cheery as Kristol, even when stuck with the task of recounting bad news or taking crackpots to task - sums it up:
"The Bush-Cheney years have been marked by ineptitude, miscalculation, and scandal. A successful presidency? Bush will be lucky if he gets a public elementary school in his adopted hometown of Crawford, Tex., named after him. He has placed this country in a hole. Yet Kristol, with shovel in hand, points to that hole and says, Trust me -- we're about to strike oil!
"If it's true that history repeats first as tragedy and then as farce, Kristol has short-circuited the process and gone straight to parody. His Bush boosterism -- an act of self-justification -- would be amusing were it not for all the damage he has helped Bush to cause."
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