thoughts from a brokenSoldier

I know this is a bit dated, but this article is one that I have been saving to write about, for reasons that will soon be obvious.  At the end of last month, I ran across a column written by neo-con and partisan hack Bill Kristol that betrayed the true desires of the neoconservative movement in this election cycle, though I am sure that was not his intent.  This op-ed was in the New York Times on July 28th, and was an attempt at humor - which failed - mixed with his commentary on the prospects of the upcoming Presidential election.

Bill Kristol - Be Afraid. Please.

In this op-ed, Kristol begins with an attempt to be funny, but the joke is quite nonsensical.

Early Friday, I went to the Real Clear Politics Web site, as I do every morning, for my fix of political news and commentary. I perked up when I saw the third entry on the list of that day’s notable articles — “No. 44 Has Spoken.”

“Hank Aaron has spoken? Wow,” I thought as I clicked through.

He goes on to explain that it was instead an article by a German Magazine, Der Spiegel, that was a commentary hailing Barack Obama as the likely 44th President of the United States.  After he finishes his petulant attempt at being funny, he goes on to explain why this should be utterly frightening to Americans, and how the article was somehow an affront to all Americans in that it assumed to predict the outcome of the election before one vote has even been cast.

First, let’s look at his try at humor.  He somehow thought that his daily stop for news, Real Clear Politics, had written an article about Hank Aaron.  Sidestepping the "no shit" reaction I had at Kristol revealing that he gets his news from RCP, I decided to look on RCP and see how many times Hank Aaron, and even baseball, had been written about on that site.  The links below are what I found, with baseball listed first, and Jackie Robinson second.  Upon searching for baseball, I found four pages worth of results, most of which only mentioned the word baseball in the context of political commentary. A few actually centered around baseball, but only to deal with steroids, the Mitchell Report, the use of instant replay, and commentary on how the sport is changing.  When I searched for Hank Aaron, I found - squat.  There was not one profile, interview or bio that would sugest RCP had ever broached the subject of the man who broke the most storied record in baseball.

Real Clear Politics search - baseball

Real Clear Politics search - Hank Aaron

What really happened, I surmise, is that Kristol read this article, thought about it for a minute, and found a way to try to lampoon the title of the German article.  Because if he actually thought RCP was hosting an article - which he himself describes as being third billing on their home page - about the words of Mr. Aaron, he is even more deluded that I originally thought him to be.  And as for his feigned indignance towards anyone being presumptuous enough to predict the outcome of an election prior to voting, Kristol is most definitely the proverbial pot calling the kettle black - as can be seen here, where he, in 2006, predicts that Obama will not best Hilary Clinton in a single primary contest.

Barack Obama is not going to beat Hillary Clinton in a single democratic primary. I’ll predict that right now.

It seems that Mr. Kristol is just as helpless in predicting future events as our own current administration - and John McCain, for that matter.

From 3/18/03, Fox, "O’Reilly Factor"

O’Reilly: "All right, Senator, if you were president, what would you have done differently in the run-up to this war?"

McCain: "Nothing."

O’Reilly: "Nothing?"

McCain: "The president has handled this, in my view, skillfully."

From 3/24/03, MSNBC, "Hardball"

"There’s no doubt in my mind that once these people are gone that we will be welcomed as liberators."

Kristol goes on to say that the propsect of an Obama presidency should scare us, because along with his election, the Democrats are trying to attain a veto-proof majority in Congress, which to Kristol - someone that has profited obscenely from the neo-con manipulation of our national government for the better part of the last decade - is instead an "unchecked Democratic majority."  He ignores the fact that Bush II has wielded the veto pen and his executive order abilities to unabashedly further his and his party’s narrow partisan agendas during his two terms, and somehow comes to the conclusion that - even in the face of the damage that has already been done by the Bush administration to our military, our Constitution, our Department of Justice, and countless other facets of our national government and identity - somehow a change to the rival party will be disastrous.  Someone needs to remind Bill that his guys had their shot at power, and they have royally fucked things up.

He then goes on to point out that voters should not choose Obama, because he has been a member of the majority party in the Congress that has caused all the problems of the years recently passed:

"And McCain will then assert that if you don’t like the Congress in which Senator Obama serves in the majority right now, you really should be alarmed about a President Obama rubber-stamping the deeds of a Democratic Congress next year. A President McCain, on the other hand, could check Congressional appetites — as well as work across the aisle with a Democratic Congress in a bipartisan spirit where appropriate."

What he misses is that while Obama has been in the majority party for two whole years, McCain has been a member of that same Congress for the last quarter of a century, including more than a few years in which he has been a member of the majority party.  How he deduces that McCain is less of an entrenched member of the establishment than Obama is beyond me.  And his statement that McCain should be President simply because the Congress has a Democratic majority is a thinly-veiled plea for mercy from the electorate.  He doesn’t want his beloved party to lose everything come November, and he’s resorting to vacuous logic to try and keep some of the influence he has wielded over the past eight years.

And that gets back to the title of this post concerning the Freudian slip that was his article’s title.  He wants us to be afraid.  He says we should be afraid of an Obama Presidency, but all it comes across to me as is a whining plea for we voters to let fear motivate our electoral decision.  And what else has his neo-con movement been so good at in the past eight years besides using fear as leverage over the population?  He must think he is talking to a voting population that is still in the dark as to the motivations and methods of his cronies. (Admittedly a lot of voters still are, but I’d put money on the fact that a great deal of NYT readers do not fall into that category these days.

To Bill Kristol - We are not afraid.  And even if we were, if the past two terms have shown us anything, it is that you and your ilk are definitely not the ones we should be taking cues from when it comes to what we should be wary of when considering our choices for President.  Isn’t it about time for the NY Times to fire this idiot?