Bill Kristol is a fucking maniac

Weekly Standard editor and Fox News pundit William Kristol has never seen an American-led war he didn’t like. His latest column for the Standard begins,

“And so, despite his doubts and dithering, President Obama is taking us to war in another Muslim country. Good for him.”

It is truly amazing to me that a neoconservative like Kristol can show his face at the grocery store without a trace of embarrassment, let alone offer his opinions—the exact same ones that helped lead America into a bloodbath in the Middle East—on the pressing foreign policy questions of the day. That he and other neoconservatives, such as John Bolton and Charles Krauthammer, are asked to impart their wisdom to national audiences is a true testament to the total absence of any form of meritocracy in the world of television punditry.

Kristol of course was a founder of the now defunct Project for a New American Century, which blatantly advocated unchallenged US global hegemony. Its statement of principles was signed by some familiar names: Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams, Jeb Bush, Dan Quayle, Steve Forbes, and other fanatical jingoists who never bothered to learn the time-tested lesson that maintaining a global military presence leaves a bad taste in a lot of mouths. In 1998, these geniuses sent a letter to President Clinton advocating that the US take out Saddam Hussein. With the arrival of George W. Bush in the White House and some planes at the World Trade Center, the stage was set for the longtime wetdream of invading a country with the second largest oil reserves in the world to become a reality. And it was made easier by the fact that several PNAC poltroons were top officials in the Bush administration.

But “invading” isn’t the right word here, says Kristol. Rather,

“Our ‘invasions’ have in fact been liberations. We have shed blood and expended treasure in Kuwait in 1991, in the Balkans later in the 1990s, and in Afghanistan and Iraq—in our own national interest, of course, but also to protect Muslim peoples and help them free themselves. Libya will be America’s fifth war of Muslim liberation.”

By “we have shed blood,” Kristol means people other than him have done that. Despite being of prime military age at the height of the Vietnam war, Kristol never served. Apparently regretful of missing that party, he now lives out his schoolboy fantasies of world domination by penning Op-Eds and journal articles explaining the necessity of taking out countries that pose no threat to the US. Undeterred by the disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Kristol has even set his sights on Iran.

It’s one thing to have the foreign policy views of a pubescent manchild with raging hormones, but you have to be seriously fucked in the head to say with any sincerity that the current bombing of Libya is “America’s fifth war of Muslim liberation.” Who but a middle schooler or maybe Sean Hannity would put it in those terms?

I say this because Kristol knows damn well what US foreign policy is and that it’s driven by realpolitik. He isn’t some mustachioed, NASCAR-watching, Bud-swilling trailer donkey who’s as ignorant about international relations as his mullet is long. He knows, for example, that the US is right now backing dictators who are oppressing Muslims in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Bahrain, Pakistan, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, and elsewhere. And in the past, the US supported despots in Iraq, Iran, Indonesia, Egypt, Tunisia, etc.

If the perseverance of Bill Kristol’s pundit career illustrates anything, it’s that it doesn’t matter how wrong you’ve been or how badly your policy prescriptions have been discredited. What’s important is that you fit neatly into the Left/Right paradigm of American political discourse. And if you’re more hawkish on foreign policy than most, all the better. No one ever lost his job advocating war in America.

I leave you with a clip of Bill Maher tearing into the neocons.

- Max