Billy K

I wonder how smart conservatives feel about Bill Kristol's NYT columns. I imagine them to read him with the same cringing embarrassment I felt when I saw the second will.i.am video (refuse to link). His columns have been Limbaugh boilerplate from the get-go, and you know he's smarter than that, so why does he do it? (Perhaps it's all too human. We are accustomed, after all, to asking whither Spitzer, and whither one time M.I.T. chemical engineering PhD candidate Dolph Lundgren.)

All this is to say Kristol, at least in the Times, has become a bit of a paper tiger, better for marginalization than response. Cue response! Today's column is notable in its badness. It's about "bitter," and I'm responding to it only because it's an attempt to reforge an unholy alliance that I thought/hoped laid in shambles - that between social conservatives and military or corporate ones. You know, the one where, in exchange for gay baiting and talk of prayer in school, poor rural whites agree to be against the "death tax." Surely one of the great political accomplishments of our time, but also one that started to unravel as McCain, Romney, and Huckabee all tugged on it in different directions.

As a rich, genteel neo-con, Kristol takes what can only be vicarious umbrage to "bitter," and the column is bad because it's so nakedly and hamhandedly manipulative. He characterizes Obama's comments, which I suspect were aiming to attack the political exploitation of guns and religion - and totally, totally didn't get there - as attacks on guns and religion themselves (which I certainly didn't think they were, although I'm hopelessly biased). The point is, it's greatly in Kristol's interest to construe the comments as attacks on guns and religion, i.e. to politically exploit guns and religion, because otherwise it's super hard to get support for fundamentally unpopular policies, like invading more countries. So that's what he does. And just to make absolutely sure we don't take the column seriously, the first third of it - a third! - is good ol' fashioned red-baiting, and it closes with an insanely irrelevant theory that if Obama were a war hero, it would in some way excuse or mitigate Kristol's version of the comments.

I kind of agree with Dan that liberals are elitists. But by Dan's definition (if you say "if you'd just listen for once"... you might be an elitist!), almost all advocacy is elitist. Elitism seems to have more to do with the twin senses of superiority and contempt. But again - advocacy and rhetoric on both sides seem to do this. The contempt certainly goes both ways, and in fact, you get in a lot of trouble if you say people "cling to religion," whereas you can say horrible things about San Francisco with impunity. Ultimately, the only elites who get their way are economic elites, because they're quiet about themselves and loud about guns and religion.