Bill Kristol is wrong

And you ask, why is Bill Kristol wrong?

It is one thing to assume (at least, for the sake of argument) that a liberal like Obama desires what is good for America. It is another thing to assume that a liberal actually knows what is good for America, or that, knowing what is good, he will actually pursue the good competently and persistently. The history of liberalism disproves any such assumption. . . .

Stop Obama: Because He’s Not Grover Cleveland. If conservatives need a slogan, I say that will do.

Bradley Prizes: ‘Standing Room Only’!

NTCNews reports:

A standing-room only crowd is expected Wednesday night at the Kennedy Center for the sixth annual Bradley Prizes ceremony.Weekly Standard editor and Fox News contributor Bill Kristol will receive one of the $250,000 prizes awarded by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation . . . .

Read the whole thing. Guess I’ll be expected to wear a bowtie to this little soiree. Hanging out with George Will, Michael Barone and all that crowd, eating free food, yadda yadda. Man, life is tough for a blogger . . .

Damon vs. Kristol?

Big Hollywood provocateur/entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart stirs up an intellectual grudge match between Bill Kristol and Matt Damon, who told the Miami Herald:

“He’s an idiot — he wrote that we should be grateful to George Bush because he won the Iraq war. We! Won! The! War!”

Breitbart says:

On Sunday afternoon . . . Bill Kristol — in an email exchange with Big Hollywood — agreed to debate Matt Damon on his Hollywood home turf  . . .

Hey, Andrew, how about doing it at the Reagan Ranch Center in Santa Barbara? I’m sure YAF would be up for it, and they could bus in lots of College Republican girls who would certainly love to see that sexy hunk Bill Kristol debate what’s-his-name. (Chicks dig neocons. Go figure.)

Breitbart throws some chum in the shark pool by reminding us that what’s-his-name dissed Sarah Palin:

It’s like a really bad Disney movie, ‘The Hockey Mom.’ Oh, I’m just a hockey mom from Alaska, and she’s president. She’s facing down Vladimir Putin and using the folksy stuff she learned at the hockey rink. It’s absurd.”

But the weenie won’t accept the debate invitation. When it comes to forensic combat, he’s a chickenhawk.

(Thanks to Smitty for the tip!)

UPDATE: Allahpundit:

Who has more to lose? It’s received wisdom on the left that Kristol’s the ne plus ultra of conservative idiocy, as today’s theatrical nutroots overreaction to his leaving the NYT demonstrates. If Damon — whose every interview on politics mentions his Harvard pedigree for extra gravitas — goes toe to toe with him and loses, his lefty intellectual cred will be smashed.

He’s a chickenhawk, I tell you!

NYT cans Kristol, keeps Brooks

Wlady Pleszczynski:

At the end of his weekly New York Times column today comes this cold announcement: “This is William Kristol’s last column.” That completes the rout of Nov. 4, 2008. There’ll be dancing in the liberal streets. . . .
Dinner with Barack Obama didn’t save Kristol at the Times, but it did give him the last word.

Damn. Why didn’t they fire David Brooks instead?

Good-bye, opposition

RE-BUMPED: Peggy Noonan was there and, as Rae said, Peggy must have been “as giddy as a schoolgirl.”

Speaking of schoolgirl giddiness, today Obama met with liberal commentators including Andrew Sullivan.

BUMPED: Rush was NOT at this dinner.

PREVIOUSLY: George Freaking Will plays host to Obama, with Bill Kristol and David Brooks and perhaps even Rush Limbaugh (!) on the VIP invitation list.

Betrayed! The stab in the back! The neocon cabal!

UPDATE: Apparently, Michelle Malkin’s invitation got lost in the mail.

UPDATE II: Charles Krauthammer sells out.

UPDATE III: They’ve won a medal!

Will NY Times drop Bill Kristol?

George Packer makes the case that the New York Times shouldn’t renew Kristol’s contract, noting a slew of misguided predictions including “all but predicting a McCain victory [in April], sort of predicting that McCain would oppose the bailout, praising McCain’s ‘suspension’ of his campaign as a smart move,” etc.

Despite such errors, I think the Times should keep Kristol and instead drop David Brooks — from a C-130 over Jalalabad.

Gallup: Obama 55%, McCain 44%

I’m thinking the popular vote margin will be less than that, but what’s the difference? If it’s 53%-47% . . . so what? You realize that any majority would make Barack Obama the first Democratic presidential candidate to get a majority of the popular vote since Jimmy Carter in 1976?

Note to GOP: Bald guys don’t win elections.

UPDATE: Bill the Pundit blows what tiny tatters of credibility he had remaining:

What if the polls, for various reasons, are overstating Obama’s support by a couple points? And what if the late deciders break overwhelmingly against Obama, as they did in the Democratic primaries? McCain could then thread the Electoral College needle.
McCain would have to win every state where he now leads or is effectively even in the polls (including North Carolina, Indiana and Missouri). He’d have to take Florida and Ohio, where he’s about four points down but where operatives on the ground give him a pretty good shot. That gets him to 247 of the 270 votes needed.
McCain’s path to victory is then to snatch Pennsylvania (which gets him to 268), and win either Virginia, Colorado, Nevada or New Mexico (states where he trails by about four to seven points) — or New Hampshire, where he’s 10 points behind but twice won dramatic primary victories.
As for Pennsylvania, two recent polls have McCain closing to within four points. Pennsylvania is the state whose small-town residents were famously patronized by Obama as “bitter.” One of Pennsylvania’s Democratic congressmen, John Murtha, recently accused many of his western Pennsylvania constituents of being racist.
Perhaps Pennsylvanians will want to send a little message to the Democratic Party. And that could tip the election to McCain.
It’s an inside straight. But I’ve seen gamblers draw them.

This isn’t an “inside straight,” Kristol, it’s fucking lunacy — a pipe dream, the hallucinatory vision of a True Believer. It will not happen. And it is utter cruelty for you to foster such false hope.

Kristol kibitzes

I get annoyed when Bill Kristol uses his New York Times column as a platform to offer unsolicited advice to the McCain campaign. If you want to be a campaign consultant, go be a campaign consultant, but don’t try to run a presidential campaign from the op-ed page.

Despite my annoyance at his campaign kibitzing, Kristol actually has some good stuff today:

The core case against Obama is pretty simple: he’s too liberal. A few months ago I asked one of McCain’s aides what aspect of Obama’s liberalism they thought they could most effectively exploit. He looked at me as if I were a simpleton, and patiently explained that talking about “conservatism” and “liberalism” was so old-fashioned.

This echoes my own observation that McCain has never been good at partisan politics. As hawkish as he is on foreign policy, McCain advocates unilateral disarmament in politics, and would prefer to run a post-partisan, post-ideological campaign. (Steve Schmidt surely finds himself frustrated by this tendency.) Kristol sees an opening:

[T]he fact is the only Democrats to win the presidency in the past 40 years — Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton — distanced themselves from liberal orthodoxy. Obama is, by contrast, a garden-variety liberal. He also has radical associates in his past.

From there, Kristol goes on to advise that Team Obama has created an opening for the McCain campaign to inject the Rev. Jeremiah Wright into the argument. And here, of course, is the problem: The best campaign attack is a surprise attack, and it’s kind of hard to catch liberals by surprise with an attack that’s already been outlined on the op-ed page of the New York Times.