Liz, have you ever read about Kristol's earlier support of McCain? Back in about 2000, Kristol and Marshall Wittmann started something called the Project for Conservative Reform (aka Kick Conservatives to the Curb Project). Seems like some of the same folks that ended up being involved in the Reform Institute (Houghton, at a minimum).
McCain may leave Republican Party to fight Bush in 2004
(snip)
The option is being discussed by McCain’s inner circle of advisers and some of his backers have begun setting up policy think-tanks and other groups to lay the ideological foundations for another third-party challenge in the Bull Moose style.How Bill Kristol ditched conservatism. Great EscapeThe Project for Conservative Reform at the Hudson Institute has assembled a group of what it calls Mooseketeers, while keeping up a steady stream of criticism aimed at Mr Bush for his reliance on corporate cash.
Having lost control of the Senate after the defection of Senator James Jeffords earlier this year, the White House is sensitive to the threat that the Arizona senator could also leave the party. Any such move would almost certainly deny Mr Bush a second term by splitting the Republican vote.
Mr Bush is also facing mounting pressure from moderates within his party who, like Mr McCain, are at odds with the tough conservative line taken by the Republican leadership.
“We are making life tougher for the leadership,” Amory Houghton, one of the most prominent Republican moderates in the House of Representatives, said.
Mr McCain campaigned energetically for House Republicans during the election and some are coming to see him as their natural leader.
“In the past, the House Republican moderates were the most docile group in town,” Marshall Whittmann, a McCain adviser and the director of the project for Conservative Reform, said. “That’s changing.”
Alienated from the GOP leadership--and convinced by the 1996 elections that its libertarian politics couldn't win-- [Bill] Kristol and [David] Brooks unveiled national-greatness conservatism. There was only one problem: No one, perhaps not even Kristol and Brooks, had a clear idea of what the phrase meant.... As Wittmann has written on his website, conservativereform.org, "[C]onservatism need not be defined by K Street. As we pursue tax cuts, it seems reasonable to focus on middle-class relief such as cutting the payroll tax." Says Kristol, "I don't have any problems with the safety net." Which raises a question. If national-greatness conservatism scorns the Christian right, jettisons the struggle to shrink government, and champions an idealistic foreign policy more likely to be supported by The New York Times than Dick Armey, in what meaningful, contemporary sense is it conservatism at all?
If you haven't seen much of this heresy in the pages of The Weekly Standard, that's because on domestic policy Kristol and Brooks have become a minority in their own office. Unable to turn the Standard into a vehicle for their movement, they've essentially stopped writing about economics and social policy. Ironically, as its top editors have inaugurated one of the most interesting Beltway debates in years, the magazine has grown less interesting. Instead, Kristol and Wittmann have started a think tank called the Project for Conservative Reform, run out of the Hudson Institute, with the sole purpose of developing position papers for their movement. And Brooks's next book will aim to infuse national-greatness conservatism with some needed marrow.
How, indeed, can this be called conservatism.
These elite plutocrats are disgusting---you'd think they'd be content w/ the power they now have. Not by a longshot. They will not rest until they wrest control of every political system and agency, and destroy the entire American political process, as we know it, in the bargain.
They spring from the Everything-For-Us-Nothing-For-You wing of American politics.
No question, these types have their claws into lotsa politicians---they operate in secret, insinuating themselves into the political process advancing their super-secret agendas. Only a select few are in on it--we peons are left in the dark.
The elitist contempt they show for conservatism and all we represent will not go unchallenged. They can kick conservatives all they want---we are not going anywhere. This is our party and we're sticking with it.
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(Man, the clan is cutting and pasting this post like crazy. O-o-o-o, I'm so askerd. ROTFLOL.)