Know Your Right Wingers
William Kristol
SOURCE: August Pollak
If you want to stare into the face of neoconservatism embodied, click here. His name is William “Bill” Kristol, and he is a neoconservative mastermind. He has founded and edited one of the premier conservative journals in America, The Weekly Standard; chaired the advocacy group Project for the Republican Future, been chief of staff to Dan Quayle, and he is a founder of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a highly influential neocon think tank. He’s influential, all right: Much of the blooper reel of Bush’s presidency can be traced back to the words and ideas of Kristol.
Son of the neocon “godfather” Irving Kristol, Bill got his start at Harvard, where he graduated magna cum laude. He followed this up with a Ph.D in Political Science. After finishing school Kristol taught at Penn, as well as the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He later became chief of staff for Reagan’s Secretary of Education William Bennett and then chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle under the first President Bush.
While working for the young VP, Kristol earned the unenviable title of “Quayle’s brain.” He held this post until the Bush/Quayle ticket was defeated for re-election.
From there, Kristol began his sprint to the pundit hall of fame. He was chairman of the Project for the Republican Future from 1993-94, when the group played an important role in the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 and the battle over the Clinton health care plan. Kristol advised that the Republicans work to “kill” the health care reform. Not reform, not amend, not debate. Kill. His reasoning was that if the Democrats succeeded in producing the reform then it would drive middle-class support to the Democrats.
After sending universal health coverage to the dusty pages of Congressional Record obscurity, Kristol moved on to his next big project: the launch of The Weekly Standard. He began the paper with John Podhoretz, another prominent second-generation neocon, with financing from none other than Rupert Murdoch, the patriarch of Fox News. Since its inception, The Weekly Standard has been a spring of conservative ideas and positions. Kristol remains the publisher and editor today.
Kristol has used that platform to push a variety of intensely hawkish positions on the Middle East, regardless of the consequences (which, according to him, are always positive anyway.) For example, in April, 2003 Kristol declared, triumphantly (and ominously):
We committed ourselves to reshaping the Middle East, so the region would no longer be a hotbed of terrorism, extremism, anti-Americanism, and weapons of mass destruction. The first two battles of this new era are now over. The battles of Afghanistan and Iraq have been won decisively and honorably. But these are only two battles. We are only at the end of the beginning in the war on terror and terrorist states.
Alas, the facts on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq have not borne him out when it comes to the “decisive” victory.
When it comes to politics and policy, though, Kristol is not a one-trick neocon pony only capable of discussing foreign policy. He is a staunch defender of conservative fiscal policies intended to preserve inequality. Said Kristol to the Washington Post in 1996, "Someone needs to stand up and defend the Establishment… After all, we conservatives are on the side of the lords and barons." Well at least he’s honest about where he stands on economic policy.
The same cannot be said, however, about Kristol’s honesty when it comes to a minor subject likethe origins of human life. When asked by The New Republic whether he believes in evolution and how it should be taught in public schools, Kristol ducked and weaved like Muhammad Ali (and also raised questions about his commitment to parenting), saying, “I’m not a scientist. ... It’s like me asking you whether you believe in the Big Bang…I managed to have my children go through the Fairfax, Virginia, schools without ever looking at one of their science textbooks.”
Do not, though, think that Kristol is simply a parrot for Bush’s philosophies. Kristol doesn’t pull his punches when he’s angry. The two most prominent examples are Harriet Miers and Donald Rumsfeld.
When Bush nominated Miers to the Supreme Court, Kristol put his alliteration abilities to the test. Said Kristol of Bush’s choice: “I’m disappointed, depressed, and demoralized.” Of course, following a (conservative) media circus and Miers’s subsequent withdrewal, Kristol was probably feeling rather delighted, dandy, and divine. He criticized Rumsfeld for not having enough troops ready. In a “Lincolnish” interview on the Colbert Report, he stated that he’d be in favor of a military draft.
President Bush has borrowed heavily from Kristol’s pet project, PNAC, on matters of foreign affairs. In fact, PNAC was so ahead of the game on Iraq that he sent a letter to President Clinton urging regime change in 1998. Unfortunately for America, Kristol’s new century seems about six years too long already. His most recent book, co-authored with Lawrence Kaplan, is The War over Iraq: America’s Mission and Saddam’s Tyranny. It was a New York Times bestseller. On top of those royalties, some estimates put the money Kristol is making at speaking engagements at around one hundred to two hundred thousand dollars a year.
This neocon of neocons continues to push his blood-soaked ideas through the national political conversation. Most recently he has been arguing for military strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities—a recommendation that even earned him the scorn of conservative stalwart George Will. Some of his more disturbing quotes can be found here complements of Media Matters.
He’s not elected, so he can’t be voted out of office. He’s not appointed, so he can’t leave as a consequence of an election. He is, as Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post put it, “part of Washington’s circulatory system.” In his case, and so many others of his ideological wing nut wing-men, DC is very much in need of a transfusion.
Bill Kristol has had quite the holiday season. He ushered the New Year with a clarion call for journalist integrity, on The Daily Show with John Stewart, and by picking up yet another punditry prize, being awarded a regular column at Time Magazine.
It seems being wrong is always right on the right-wing punditry circuit.
Undoubtedly Kristol will use his new home at Time to spread ridiculous policy prescriptions and misrepresent alternative viewpoints. At least Kristol has downshifted his warmongering: cooling calls for air strikes against Iran, settling to cheerlead for more U.S. troops in Iraq.
Kristol’s Iraq ruminations:
2/20/2003: "He’s [Saddam Hussein] got weapons of mass destruction. At some point he will use them or give them to a terrorist group to use…Look, if we free the people of Iraq we will be respected in the Arab world….France and Germany don’t have the courage to face up to the situation. That’s too bad. Most of Europe is with us. And I think we will be respected around the world for helping the people of Iraq to be liberated."
04/26/2004: We need to fix the situation. It would of course have been better to have planned for higher force levels from the beginning, rather than to have to scramble now, calling forces back from well-earned leaves and disrupting rotations. Had the proper number of forces been in place in Iraq from the beginning, some of the recent violence might have been deterred, or suppressed more speedily.
04/03/2006: Iraq is at a critical turning point, and U.S. forces are essential to helping the Iraqis get past it…If U.S. force levels are (at least) kept steady while reliable Iraqi forces continue to increase—and the U.S. Army and Marines continue to join with the Iraqis in aggressively fighting the insurgents—the overall level of force that can be brought to bear against the insurgency, and in support of a political process that can hold the country together, will increase. And victory will then be achievable.
9/12/2006: We are at a crucial moment in Iraq. Supporters of the war, like us, have in the past differed over tactics. But at this urgent pass, there can be no doubt that we need to stop the downward slide in Iraq by securing Baghdad….We need substantially more troops in Iraq. Sending them would be a courageous act of presidential leadership appropriate to the crisis we face.
11/27/2006: We must change our strategy to reflect the new reality, and we must send the military resources needed to achieve that strategy. If we do not, it is likely that we will fail in Iraq.
12/24/2006: "There’s no point having a short term surge, especially if it’s proclaimed ahead of time that it’s just short term. Then [the enemy] goes into hiding for 3 or 6 months. We pull back and we’re back in the same situation…What is needed is a sustained and large surge.”
Illustration: August J. Pollak
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