William Kristol: Public Enemy #1

And now, for a little bit of perfectly justified defamation.

In the past two weeks, as the House and Senate wrangle over resolutions condemning Bush's Iraq "surge," William Kristol has written two articles attacking Republicans who dare to question the surge. He rails, calling them cowards, deserters, anti-troops and anti-American.

The Weekly Standard, called the "neoconservative bible," is William Kristol's pet magazine. It's apparently not too popular with conservatives in general, because it loses $1 million a year. But its continued existence is guaranteed by a powerful non-market force - its money comes out of Rupert Murdoch's personal pocket.

The Weekly Standard is not like other conservative magazines. Instead of focusing on domestic issues - taxes, religion, race, etc. - like the National Review (which outsells the Standard 2-to-1 and survives on its own profits), the Weekly Standard focuses mostly on war and foreign policy. In particular, the Iraq war has been the magazine's pet project; as far back as 1998, Kristol sent a letter to President Clinton urging him to attack Iraq; the day after the 9/11 attacks, the Standard ran a column entitled "Why it Might Have Been Saddam." Since then, even as writers at the National Review have questioned and criticized the Iraq effort, the Weekly Standard hasn't wavered from its position - more money, more troops, and anyone who opposes the war is a traitor.

Bush, possibly wanting to be a "new kind of conservative," has famously eschewed his father's pragmatic advisors in favor of his own militaristic echo-chamber. That includes the Weekly Standard. Kristol's rag may lose millions, but it's well-known to be the magazine Bush reads and heeds. In fact, it's eye-popping how easily one can predict the Bush administration's next moves by reading the Weekly Standard. It was not until a week after the magazine called for Donald Rumsfeld to be fired that he was. After Kristol wrote a column blaming all the U.S.'s Mideast problems on Iran, Bush started making noises about attacking that country.

Now, Kristol has branched out to other forms of media. He's a regular commentator on Fox News (where he recently claimed that Barack Obama would have supported slavery in the 1850s). He helped write Bush's second inaugural speech, then praised the speech in his magazine and on TV. Although he was fired as a commentator on ABC, he's been making the rounds of other TV stations, urging America to shut up and not criticize the "surge" plan until it fails.

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann recently labeled Kristol the "Worst Person in the World." That's a bit of an exaggeration (and, in fact, it's a title that changes hands every week), but I'd call Kristol something similar:

Public Enemy #1.

No other modern thinker, pundit, or leader has had the wide-ranging impact Bill Kristol has had. No other single individual has pulled the conservative movement off its traditional path as Bill Kristol has done. Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh may rant on their talk shows, and armies of far-right "think tanks" may send mountains of suggestions to the White House, and writers like Jonah Goldberg may pen nasty broadsides against Democrats and moderate conservatives, but Bill Kristol does all of these things at once, and does them far more effectively than anyone else.

He's a modern-day Marx, a man who changes the political landscape all by himself. But he hasn't started his own movement as much as he's hijacked an existing one. Almost by himself, Kristol turned conservatism into neoconservatism. And when that happened, the Republican party changed from being a party that insists on winning wars to a party that reckelssly loses them. It completed its transition from fiscal responsibility to reckless deficit-spending profligacy. And it began to see democracy as a hallmark not of strength but of weakness, something to be curtailed at home but promoted in our enemies' nations. In short, William Kristol pushed the Republicans from conservatism toward fascism.

The Reagan Revolution is way over. We're in the middle of the Kristol Revolution. The former had its problems, but the latter is the problem. Kristol and his dangerous ideas must be stopped, and stopped now.