Free Republic

Why February Could Matter FEB 1, 2012 • BY WILLIAM KRISTOL I wonder if three features of the race as it stands today aren't being a bit neglected: 1. Turnout: The Romney-Gingrich slugfest in Florida appears to have produced slightly fewer than 1.7 million voters in this year's primary. That's down by about 12 percent from the 1.94 million who voted in 2008. Not a good sign for the GOP in this key swing state, especially following a flat GOP turnout in Iowa and only a slight uptick in New Hampshire (also swing states). Both of those states have open...

Debate Winner: Mitch Daniels JAN 23, 2012 BY WILLIAM KRISTOL I’ve got to think Monday night’s debate further swelled the groundswell of support for Mitch Daniels. The liveliest part of the debate was at the beginning, when Mitt went after Newt—and Republicans all over America watched with fascinated horror at the thought that these are the two GOP frontrunners. The only spectacle in American politics more off-putting than Newt Gingrich in self-righteous defense mode is Mitt Romney in self-righteous attack mode. I thought Mitt’s attacks were somewhat more dishonest than Newt’s defenses were disingenuous, but it was good to move...

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote that we do not know who the GOP presidential nominee will be: It could be Mitt Romney—though our warnings in this space a couple of weeks ago that his victory is by no means inevitable seem increasingly justified by the dynamics of the race. The nominee could be Newt Gingrich—whose rise in the polls has been spectacular, and whose skills and appeal are still widely underestimated by many elites, including conservative elites [....] It could be someone not yet in the race. If the Gingrich surge turns into a Newt bubble, and if...

Is the GOP co-opting the tea party movement, or are tea partiers taking down the establishment and sending the RINOs packing? A lengthy New York Times magazine article this week quoted several establishment Republicans crowing over what they see as the demise of the two-year-old tea party activism. Bill Kristol, the neoconservative editor of the Weekly Standard and a Fox News contributor, said the tea party peddles "an infantile form of conservatism."Veteran Republican strategist Scott Reed took the disdain one step further, saying the GOP is steadily co-opting the grass-roots movement. "That’s the secret to politics: trying to control a...

Weekly Standard editor William Kristol still holds out hope that Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) will be on a national presidential ticket in 2012. "Ryan-Rubio or Rubio-Ryan would be a very strong ticket," Kristol said on "Fox News Sunday." "It should be Ryan-Rubio, but if Paul Ryan is a little hesitant to seize the moment, I think Marco Rubio will have to do it and make Paul Ryan his vice president" Any chance that happens, asked Fox host Bret Baier. "Yes," Kristol answered. "I think Republican primary voters would welcome a Ryan-Rubio ticket"

Baby Talk Bill Kristol I was struck by these sentences in President Obama’s speech: "Now, what makes today’s stalemate so dangerous is that it has been tied to something known as the debt ceiling – a term that most people outside of Washington have probably never heard of before. Understand – raising the debt ceiling does not allow Congress to spend more money. It simply gives our country the ability to pay the bills that Congress has already racked up." Consider the condescension implicit in the president’s statement—“a term that most people outside of Washington have probably never heard of...

Sarah Palin has parted ways with the neoconservative foreign policy advisers who had been writing speeches and advising her on policy since she joined the McCain campaign. An aide to Palin, Tim Crawford, confirmed that Orion Strategies' Randy Scheunemann and Michael Goldfarb are no longer working for her PAC. They parted, both sides said on good terms. "Randy flat out said, 'We can't give you the time,'" Crawford said. (snip) Crawford said they've been replaced by Peter Schweizer, a writer and fellow at the Hoover Institution who blogs regularly at Andrew Breitbart's Big Peace. The personnel shift carries an ideological...

Bill Kristol posts that he now believes that Mitch Daniels, Mike Huckabee and Michelle Bachmann will indeed all declare. The National Journal simultaneously reports that a Newt Gingrich declaration is imminent. Haley Barbour is definitely out. Marco Rubio is definitely out. Mitt Romney is clearly in. Tim Pawlenty is clearly in. Trump incredibly also seems inbound. Chris Christie, Sarah Palin, and Paul Ryan remain wild cards. Here’s one way to analyze what happens next. I sort the Republican candidates into three piles: CANDIDATES WHO COULD WIN THE NOMINATION Christie Pawlenty Ryan Romney (Bachmann is too obviously crazy. Daniels will be...

Enter Mitch, Michele, and Mike The GOP presidential race begins to get interesting. 6:07 PM, May 1, 2011 • By WILLIAM KRISTOL Mitch Daniels is likely, I’m told, to announce his candidacy for the GOP presidential nomination in the next couple of weeks. Michele Bachmann will, I think, enter the race in June. And it now looks as if Mike Huckabee is also going to run. Saturday evening, while tout Washington was “enjoying” the White House Correspondents Dinner—and while some of us, I might add, were truly enjoying the lovely wedding of Mary Katharine Ham and Jake Brewer—Mike Huckabee was...

President Obama’s unapologetic, freedom-agenda-embracing, not-shrinking-from-the-use-of-force speech. I knew pretty early on during tonight’s speech that President Obama had rejoined—or joined—the historical American foreign policy mainstream. It was when he mentioned Charlotte (the city, not the spider): At this point, the United States and the world faced a choice. Gaddafi declared that he would show “no mercy” to his own people. He compared them to rats, and threatened to go door to door to inflict punishment. In the past, we had seen him hang civilians in the streets, and kill over a thousand people in a single day. Now, we saw...

It’s not war but a “time-limited, scope-limited military action.” The United States has been in the lead, but will be stepping back, ASAP, in favor of command (supposedly) by a squabbling coalition of the not-so-willing. The objective of the “kinetic military action”—which is going to last days, not weeks, unless it does last weeks—isn’t regime change in Libya. Our broader objective, however, is to topple Muammar Qaddafi. The commander in chief, meanwhile, is floating above the fray, hovering over his divided administration and his muddled policy. And yet we’ll probably succeed. The Obama administration deserves much of the criticism it’s...

Today’s moronic quote of the day belongs to Weekly Standard (Weakly Standard?) editor Bill Kristol, and it wasn’t even close. Via CBS News (emphasis mine): “I have a high regard for Sarah Palin, but I will say I’ve been disappointed since she resigned as governor,” he said. “I thought she had a real chance to take the lead on a few policy issues, do a little more in terms of framing the policy agenda. I don’t think she’s done that." So, according to this beltway genius, she hasn’t taken the lead on ”policy issues” or helped with “framing the policy...

Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol was among Sarah Palin's earliest Washington admirers, and helped bring her to the national stage, but he said this week that while he still admires her, he questions her choices and doesn't think she should be the Republican nominee for president.

The night they drove old Hosni down — and all the neo-cons were singing. Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol was the kapellmeister. Prior to the exit of Beast Mubarak, Kristol (in yet another of his Olympian pronouncements), thundered: “The United States must support the Egyptian awakening, and has a paramount moral and strategic interest in real democracy in Egypt and freedom for the Egyptian people. The question is how the U.S. government can do its best to help the awakening turn out well.”How do we know neo-cons aren’t really conservatives? Conservatives are realists. They confront reality without ideological blinders. They...

<p>Bill Kristol, the influential Weekly Standard editor, is a famously opportunistic pundit. So it's very bad news for Sarah Palin that even Kristol appears to have given up on a Palin presidential campaign this year.</p> <p>Kristol went out of his way on MSNBC this morning to express disappointment with Palin, a striking shift for a man who has been Palin's most prominent champion in the press since he met her on a cruise in Alaska in 2007.</p>

Right rejects left’s charges on PalinBy Shane D’Aprile and Sean J. Miller 01/10/11 08:51 PM ET Prominent conservatives like Bill Kristol, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh are defending Sarah Palin, who was subjected to criticism from liberal bloggers after Saturday’s shootings in Arizona. The bloggers suggested Palin’s use of inflammatory rhetoric during the 2010 campaign helped create a climate conducive to the type of violence that shook the nation over the weekend. Several sought to link Palin’s use of a crosshairs symbol on her website and Facebook page to the Tucson shooting that killed six people and left Rep. Gabrielle...

An embattled former Obama administration appointee -- who was part of a group of attorneys accused of being terrorist sympathizers for defending "enemy combatants" -- has been hired for a post at the US Attorney's Office in Brooklyn, officials confirmed today. Tali Farhadian was one of several private attorneys who created a rift between Republicans last spring when the Obama Administration assigned them to posts within the Justice Department. Although Farhadian was handling unrelated matters in Attorney General Eric Holder's office, a political watchdog group accused Obama of overloading the agency with officials sympathetic to enemy combatants. Their appointments even...

Bill Kristol, the Fox News analyst and Weekly Standard editor, made a couple of predictions on Fox News Sunday about the GOP presidential race: “Can I go out on a limb, since everyone else is scared to say — actually make any predictions. I predict Palin will not run. I have no knowledge at all; I just have the hunch that she ultimately will not run. I think Newt Gingrich is underestimated. Newt is going to run and Newt will be formidable. People can talk about the baggage, but lots of candidates have had lots of baggage, and people think...

<p>Williams: "There's nobody out there except for Sarah Palin who could absolutely dominate the stage and she can't stand on the intellectual stage with Obama"</p>

Benyamin Korn's op-ed response to my recent blog on polls suggesting former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is lagging with more educated voters is something rare in political discourse these days – which is to say, civil. He made his points, he didn't hurl invectives, he wasn't nasty. But he was also wrong on a few counts, it seems to me. This was the main gist of his argument: “Pundits made similar assumptions about Ronald Reagan when he was a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 1980. Reagan also had considerable appeal among the less educated and the less affluent;...

That’s what the FBI was asking itself in 1988. That year is not a typo. Gawker has scans of the FBI documents showing that the reputed Godfather of neo-conservatism was a person of interest in an ongoing investigation into a potential Soviet spy. The FBI heavily redacted the documents—citing national security in many instances—so it’s difficult to make out exactly what happened. But it seems fairly clear that, sometime around May of 1988, the FBI’s counterintelligence division came to possess a notebook or address book belonging to a suspected Soviet agent. And Irving Kristol’s name was in it. That launched...

Sarah Palin yesterday accused Julian Assange of a "treasonous" act, and urged the US to "use all necessary means" to hunt him down like an al-Qaeda terrorist. Sounds an awful lot like calling for Assange to be taken out, notes Peter Grier at the Christian Science Monitor. Palin is also pushing a link on her Facebook page to William Kristol's position that the CIA "neutralize" the WikiLeaks founder. Assange hasn't yet been charged with a crime linked to the leaks, notes Grier. In any case, the US can't charge him with "treason" because treason only occurs when a citizen turns...

Take a look at the pin Sarah Palin wore during a rally over the weekend for Republican Senate candidate John Raese in Charleston, West Virginia:

Where was Sarah Palin last Friday night, before coming to Washington to speak at the Glenn Beck gathering Saturday? She was a guest speaker at a Jewish "Shabbaton"—a Sabbath gathering for prayer, meals, songs, study and conversation—in Hershey, PA. Benyamin Korn's account of it in the New York Sun is a must read. Here are a few highlights: By evening, the halls of the Hershey Lodge were filled with the aroma of chulent, the traditional Sabbath stew....My colleague Sheya, director of PalinTV, presented Mrs. Palin with the ArtScroll edition of Perek Shira, a commentary on the song of celebration sung...

President Obama opposed the war in Iraq. He still thinks it was a mistake. It's therefore unrealistic for supporters of the war to expect the president to give the speech John McCain would have given, or to expect President Obama to put the war in the context we would put it in. He simply doesn't believe the war in Iraq was a necessary part of a broader effort to fight terror, to change the Middle East, etc. Given that (erroneous) view of his, I thought his speech was on the whole commendable, and even at times impressive.

Bill Kristol: Republicans Should ‘Just Shut Up’ About Charlie Rangelby Glynnis MacNicol | 1:02 pm, August 1st, 2010 I’m not entirely sure this is the sort of support Charlie Rangel is ideally hoping for, but one imagines that after the President not-so-gently makes it clear he would like you to quietly exit stage left, this may be the best you can expect. On Fox News Sunday today Bill Kristol declared that the Republicans should leave Charlie Rangel alone. I think Republicans would be foolish [to go on about Rangel]. They should just shut up. There’s a bipartisan effort, let the...

With just four months before the mid-term elections, there are few foreseeable mistakes that could derail the expected Republican resurgence. RNC Chairman Michael Steele is one of them. Proving that yet again - Mr. Steele's latest captured-on-video comments about the war in Afghanistan.

A Letter to Michael Steele BY William Kristol July 2, 2010 12:12 PM Dear Michael, You are, I know, a patriot. So I ask you to consider, over this July 4 weekend, doing an act of service for the country you love: Resign as chairman of the Republican party. Your tenure has of course been marked by gaffes and embarrassments, but I for one have never paid much attention to them, and have never thought they would matter much to the success of the causes and principles we share. But now you have said, about the war in Afghanistan, speaking...

CNN published a story at 9:25 a.m. this morning titled "Haley's path to Christianity leaves some evangelicals uneasy." The story informs readers that Nikki Haley, who was raised a Sikh and converted to Christianity, "still attends Sikh services occasionally with her parents and extended family." It’s clearly a trouble-making attempt to gin up controversy among Republicans where there has been almost none, and so was able to find a couple pastors who question whether Haley, the frontrunner in next Tuesday's South Carolina gubernatorial primary runoff, is really a Christian. At 9:38 a.m., the CNN story was emailed to a colleague...

At issue, the Arizona immigration bill that allows police, with “reasonable suspicion” to check ID’s of people it suspects as being the country illegally. There is little question Arizona’s hand has been forced on this bill. Crime, reportedly has risen dramatically, not to mention the strain on health care services being provided by hospitals that can ill afford the added expense.

Barack's Bravado And a foolish metaphor. William Kristol March 25, 2010 4 In Iowa City today, President Obama mocked Republicans' efforts to repeal his new health care law. He dared them to "Go for it," and asserted, "I welcome that fight. Because I don't believe the American people are going to put the insurance industry back in the driver's seat." The insurance industry is a diverting talking point, but it’s not going to work. Republicans simply have to say: Barack Obama’s legislation would put the government in the driver’s seat of a giant, poorly-constructed bus in which we’re simply helpless...

When Glenn Beck, Charles Krauthammer and Bill Kristol each from their respective Fox News perches branded Dutch political phenom Geert Wilders as beyond the political pale, it was shocking and outrageously so, and for several reasons. One. I’ve grown used to Fox News and all other media ignoring not just the Wilders story but also the cultural story of the century, altogether – namely, the Islamization of Europe, something Wilders, a great admirer of Ronald Reagan and a committed supporter Israel, is dedicated to ...(cont'd @ http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/1314/Foxs-

Will Obama Repudiate Smear Campaign? Silence is complicity. BY WILLIAM KRISTOL January 16, 2010 So the Massachusetts Democratic Party is alleging, in a mailer, that "1,736 women were raped in Massachusetts in 2008. Scott Brown wants hospitals to turn them all away." This is as ridiculous as it is offensive. And it is, of course, a lie. In fact, according to the Boston Globe: "The 2005 amendment that Brown sponsored in the state Senate would have allowed a physician, nurse, or any other employee to deny rape victims an emergency contraceptive if it 'conflicts with a sincerely held religious belief.'...

I’m told reliably: 1. Internal Democratic polls have the race close, with a small and fading Coakley (Dem) lead. 2. One Republican poll, and one poll for an independent group, now actually have Brown (Rep) up by a few points. 3. The Democrats are pouring everything in—one report is that the buy behind this DSCC ad against Brown is close to a million dollars. The Democratic campaign now consists to a remarkable degree simply of screaming that Brown equals Bush/Republican/right-wing. It could work—or has Brown done a good enough job of introducing himself to Mass. voters that most will shrug...

Unbelievable! Kristol just said his sources have internal polling showing Brown pulling within 6 and slightly ahead among those most likely to vote.

Still: By mid-2010, Obama will have more than doubled the number of American troops in Afghanistan since he became president; he will have empowered his general, Stanley McChrystal, to fight the war pretty much as he thinks necessary to in order to win; and he will have retroactively, as it were, acknowledged that he and his party were wrong about the Iraq surge in 2007 -- after all, the rationale for this surge is identical to Bush’s, and the hope is for a similar success. He will also have embraced the use of military force as a key instrument of...

President Obama chose not to travel to Germany for the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Instead, he graced the occasion with a video address. He didn't have time in his two-and-a-half minutes to mention Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher or Pope John Paul II. But somehow he did find time to mention .  . Barack Obama: Few would have foreseen on that day that a united Germany would be led by a woman from Brandenburg or that their American ally would be led by a man of African descent. But human destiny is what human beings make...

Thanks for watching the show! Watch Panel Plus for November 15, 2009 with Bill Kristol, Mara Liasson, Liz Cheney and Juan Williams for more of the panel's discussion about the 9/11 terror trials.

The Pelosi Plan ... and the Swine Flu Democrats.by William Kristol 11/09/2009, Volume 015, Issue 08 In 1993, a newly elected Democratic president and a Democratic Congress pushed through a tax increase on a party-line vote. The next year Democrats lost control of Congress, with House Speaker Tom Foley defeated in his reelection bid and the Senate seat of retiring majority leader George Mitchell going Republican. In 1995, the newly elected Republican Congress tried to reduce the rate of growth of Medicare. The proposal was pilloried by the Clinton White House as drastic and unconscionable. The bill did not...

Bien-pensant conservative elites and establishment-friendly Republican big shots yearn for a more moderate, temperate and sophisticated Republican Party. It's not likely to happen. And probably just as well. This Story A good time to be a conservative Who's 'us' to the GOP? Time to reawaken young voters The Gallup poll released Monday shows the public's conservatism at a high-water mark. Some 40 percent of Americans call themselves conservative, compared with 36 percent who self-describe as moderates and 20 percent as liberals. The conservative number is as high as it's been in the two decades that Gallup has been asking the...

Irving Kristol, who died last month at age 89, inspired some highly mixed feelings in me. On the positive side, this renowned public intellectual was possessed of political realism, a firm anti-utopian grasp of the possible. Like Thomas Sowell and P.J. O’Rourke, though more understated, he had a superb gift for deflating the morally-charged conceits and histrionics of Left egalitarianism. On the negative side, he exhibited a shockingly narrow and vitriolic view of contemporary culture. That hatred, unfortunately, did much to sour his view of capitalism. And his widespread influence on this count has become painfully apparent. Arguably more than...

"Keep America Safe will make the case for an unapologetic approach to fighting terrorism around the world, for victory in the wars this country fights, for democracy and human rights, and for a strong American military that is needed in the dangerous world in which we live." (See their lead video, aimed squarely at Obama, 'Rhetoric vs. Reality')

Here is video of Bill Kristol on FOX News saying that it is "pathetic" that the White House thinks it is an "excruciating" decision whether to send more troops to Afghanistan. Kristol said "General McChrystal and General Petraeus think this is necessary, this should not be a difficult call." (Watch Video)

The intellectual leader of a movement of thinkers remained humble through his many influential works, and his spirit of creative skepticism will be his legacy. After the plain pine box is lowered into the grave, the mourners are asked to come forward -- immediate family first -- and shovel dirt onto the casket. Only when it is fully covered, only when all that can be seen is dust, is the ceremony complete Such is the Jewish way of burial. Its simplicity, austerity and unsentimentality would have appealed to Irving Kristol, who was buried by friends and family Tuesday. Equally fitting...

According to his obituary in the NY Times, Irving Kristol once felt intimidated among NY intellectuals when he found himself seated with Mary McCarthy on one side, Hannah Arendt on the other, and Diana Trilling across from him. This standard—of intellect, to say nothing of other allures—was very much relaxed by the time he found himself placed next to me at a dinner at the Lehrman Institute in Manhattan in the mid-1980s. Determined to upset his likely expectation of me—I having hung onto a version of Trotskyism many years after he had discarded it—I inquired politely about his time in...

... "Irving Kristol was an intellectual giant who played a major role in developing the anti-communist arguments that led to the defeat of the Soviet Union," former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told The Washington Times. ... ... Known as the godfather of neoconservatism, Mr. Kristol was a youthful radical who went from embracing communism in his 20s to attacking it publicly in his 30s. In subsequent years, he became an equally forceful advocate of free-market economics, including the supply-side tax cuts enacted during the Reagan administration and dismantling much of the so-called welfare state. Neoconservatism was a label originally bestowed...

The sickos over at Kos never cease to amaze me. Irving Kristol died today. He was a great writer and thinker and admired on both sides of the aisle--even my own liberal father loved his columns and books. Yet here I see a thread on DailyKos tonight where they are reveling in his death, and even hoping his wife (and Bill Kristol's Mom) Gertrude Himmelfarb would die soon too. Here are the lovely comments... Paging Bill O'Reilly. He's been silent on them for a while.

Irving Kristol, the political commentator who, as much as anyone, defined modern conservatism and helped revitalize the Republican Party in the late 1960s and early ’70s, setting the stage for the Reagan presidency and years of conservative dominance, died Friday in Arlington, Va. He was 89 and lived in Washington.

Irving Kristol, 89, a forceful essayist, editor and university professor who became the leading architect of neoconservatism, which he called a political and intellectual movement for disaffected ex-liberals like himself who had been "mugged by reality," died Friday at the Capital Hospice in Arlington. He spent much of his career in New York but had for the last two decades lived at the Watergate apartments in the District. He died of complications from lung cancer, said his son, William Kristol, the founder and editor of the conservative Weekly Standard magazine.

In his 60 Minutes interview to be aired tonight, President Obama apparently says, "I intend to be president for a while and once this bill passes, I own it....I'm the one who's going to be held responsible. So I have every incentive to get this right." No, Mr. President. It’s not about you. If legislation passes, you don’t own it. We all own it. Any health care bill will become part of the U.S. Code, not simply an item on the Obama White House web site. We will all feel its effects. We are all responsible for the future of...