A tale of two moral compasses. The NY Times issued an editorial exhorting Bush to not "abuse" the pardon privilege:

With the Bush administration drawing to a close, it is presidential pardon season. Presidents have become increasingly shameless about issuing pardons to insulate political cronies from prosecution, even to protect themselves. We hope President Bush will not abuse the pardon power by putting his appointees, political supporters or friends above the law.

The Constitution gives the president sweeping authority to grant pardons. The founders intended for presidents to use this power as an “act of grace” or to promote the public welfare. It was never intended to be a get-out-of-jail-free card for people close to the president who stretched, bent or broke the law.

A nice, if a bit naive, sentiment. The editorial goes on to point out how past presidents have abused the privilege, so it's not without precedent to have Bush issue pardons to whom he wishes to repay for their political loyalty (Hi, Scooter!).

But it is svengaliesque William Kristol whose advice will much more likely be heeded by his PNAC buddies and disciples in the Executive Branch. He argues in his Weekly Standard that the right thing for Bush to do is to pardon any and all foot soldiers in his War on Terror™:

One last thing: Bush should consider pardoning--and should at least be vociferously praising--everyone who served in good faith in the war on terror, but whose deeds may now be susceptible to demagogic or politically inspired prosecution by some seeking to score political points. The lawyers can work out if such general or specific preemptive pardons are possible; it may be that the best Bush can or should do is to warn publicly against any such harassment or prosecution. But the idea is this: The CIA agents who waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and the NSA officials who listened in on phone calls from Pakistan, should not have to worry about legal bills or public defamation. In fact, Bush might want to give some of these public servants the Medal of Freedom at the same time he bestows the honor on Generals Petraeus and Odierno. They deserve it.

Unbelievable. This goes beyond immorality and straight into a complete lack of humanity. And let me for the record reiterate that Bill "Brave with other people's kids" Kristol has NEVER been right. Not once. Not when he cheerleaded the Iraq invasion and lied about the reasons. Not when he cheerleaded Sarah Palin and led the campaign to get her on the GOP ticket. Not once in his weekly appearances on Pravda, er...FoxNews has he ever given even the slightest semblance of being right. And now he goes against his employers at the NY Times (Jeez, what does it take to fire a bloodthirsty, warmongering amoral Republican flack? Obviously as much as it does in the US Senate) to suggest that those who have violated every principle that was supposed to be the American dream should get the farkin' Medal of Honor?

And sadly, the Villagers will look to this and not blink an eye.

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(h/t Heather)

Never one to give up the ghost on an epic failure (see his championing of Iraq, neocon principles, Sarah Palin,etc. for proof), Bill Kristol tells the Fox News panel that it's not impossible for McCain to win, though in a strange break into reality, he admits it's not likely.

Obama has many paths to victory, McCain only has probably one narrow path to victory. But you only need one narrow path. He wins every state in which he’s ahead or even, which gets him to 200 electoral votes. He then wins Ohio and Florida, where he’s now behind in most polls, but certainly within range. A lot of people on the ground think he has a pretty good chance of Ohio and Florida. That gets him to 247 electoral votes. He snatches Pennsylvania, that’s key, I think, which would get him to 268. One short. That would be a heartbreaker, to win Pennsylvania and lose the election 270 to 268. Pennsylvania, of course, it was the small town Pennsylvanians that are so bitter, according to Sen. Obama. I thin , I think seriously, he has a better chance in Pennsylvania that a Republican would normally have. Then he needs to pick up one state, Nevada, Colorado, Virginia—which a state poll showed closing to 3 points today—or conceivably, New Hampshire, which he’s way behind in the polls, but of course, McCain has won two primaries there. It would be a poetic ending for McCain to take Pennsylvania on the bitter, small town residents’ votes, take New Hampshire out of sort of loyalty to John McCain and win the 272 electoral votes. So that’s how he does it. I’ve got it worked out. I’m not sure the voters agree, but it’s not implausible. It’s not very likely, but…it’s possible.

For a more reality-based projection of the election, let's look at Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight:

Overall, our model shows McCain closing Obama's gap in the national popular vote to about 5.4 points. His win percentage has increased to 6.3 percent, from 3.8 percent last night.

However, several cautions about reading too much into these numbers:

Firstly, I have the model programmed to be EXTREMELY aggressive this time of year. There have been relatively few 'fresh' polls conducted within the past 24-48 hours -- most of these state polls were in the field late last week. As we get more data in today and tonight, the model could very well decide that the race is not tightening at all. Moreover, polls conducted on a weekend -- particularly on a quasi- holiday weekend -- is generally unreliable.

Secondly, even with this tightening, McCain remains well short the 2/2/2 condition that we defined last week:

John McCain polling within 2 points in 2 or more non-partisan polls (sorry, Strategic Vision) in at least 2 out of the 3 following states: Colorado, Virginia, Pennsylvania.

Indeed, McCain has not come within 2 points of Obama in any polls in any of these states.

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Poor William the Bloody. He's virtually the only one left to defend his hand picked VP candidate, Sarah Palin for spending 150K on clothes, refusing to go on any of the Sunday Talk shows, not being viewed as competent for the job and now is being called a 'Diva' and going rogue by the McCain campaign as the wheels are falling off for Kristol.

In an interview with CNN today, one McCain adviser anonymously called Palin “a diva” and said “she is playing for her own future” political prospects. She is a diva. She takes no advice from anyone,” the advisor told CNN. “She does not have any relationships of trust with any of us, her family or anyone else. Also she is playing for her own future and sees herself as the next leader of the party. Remember: divas trust only unto themselves as they see themselves as the beginning and end of all wisdom.”

None of it is her fault. Nope, it's all McCain and the staff. And all his conservative pals criticizing her are just getting their information about Palin through the media. Obviously they are just lazy. I thought they all hated the librul media, Bill?

Kristol: I think Gov. Palin has been ill served by some of her staff.... I'm told she'll be happy to do a TV show, she hasn't gotten authorization, I hope she breaks free this week. She should do FNS and every other show as far as I'm concerned next Sunday. The staff has not served her well by hiding her.

I blame the campaign for not putting her out...I think it's just terrible that they're letting the image of her be that she's sort of rallying the crowds but has nothing serious to say.

Williams: If I said to you. who's being negative in all this media. Who's being so condemning of Sarah Palin, If I say David Brooks, Peggy Noonan, Kathleen Parker, Ken Adelman Mathew Dowd, who's the Democrat in there that's condemning, no those are all Republicans, Bill.

Kristol: Has any of them even read wither of those speeches. Has any of them met Sarah Palin or talked to her? There's a lot of condemnation going on that's based on second hand media accounts.

Williams: I think the reality is right now it hasn't been a help to the McCain ticket.

From June 30th, 2008...Kristol endorsing Sarah Palin on FOX....

I think I've made my feelings about Bill Kristol very clear in the past, but allow me to reiterate: He is never right. He is wrong constantly. Anything and everything he says is a pathetic mix of lies and ignorance.

Now that we're clear, I have to ask, what will it take before the New York Times realizes that they are paying for utter and complete wrongness to pollute their paper?

In less than six months since his column began, the New York Times had already issued at least three corrections for factual errors in Bill Kristol columns.

Today, he's given his editors another reason to keep their red pens close at hand.

Kristol's assertion that the 9/11 attacks "did not result in a much-feared (by intellectuals) wave of popular Islamophobia or xenophobia" in this country will surely come a surprise to the millions of Muslims and immigrants in this country.

This goes against plentiful data and the lived experience of Muslims, Arab Americans and immigrants in our country. Many Muslim Americans reported increased hostility toward them after 9/11. Shockingly, Kristol's "non-existent" Islamophobia and xenophobia have also proved deadly for a number of Americans who became victims of hate crimes after 9/11. (See Divided We Fall for a moving account of this painful reality.)

Considering the amount of xenophobia that Bill Kristol and his PNAC buddies have unleashed on this country in pursuit of their agenda, I'm surprised he thinks he can write this without bolts of lightening striking him down.

The McCain campaign has turned to sketch comedy writing lately because after William the Bloody Kristol rips McCain's erratic campaign on FNS Sunday saying the negative ads haven't worked, where's Rev.Wright, they are pathetic and why isn't Sarah Palin doing the Sunday shows among other things.

Why isn't Sarah Palin on this morning instead of Rick Davis. It is ridiculous. It's malpractice. It's a tough environment, maybe they would have lost anyway....but to do what they are doing is inexplicable to me.

McCain's very own Nancy Pfotenhauer came out and said that Kristol is buying Obama's talking points. No, really, she actually said this on Teevee.

Think Progress:

Asked to respond to Kristol’s criticisms, McCain campaign spokeswoman

Nancy Pfotenhauer said on Fox News:

Well, you know Bill is entitled to his perspective. And I used to work for Bill. And I can tell you personally sometimes he’s brilliant and sometimes he’s not. And this is one where it’s the latter category. You know, I think unfortunately he has bought into the Obama campaign’s party line.

Kristol has responded to McCain:

This afternoon on Fox News, Kristol fired back:

Is John McCain the best messenger for his campaign? Why isn’t he on this show? Why do we have Tucker Bounds and a bunch of nice young kids who are spokesmen out there spinning implausibly on behalf of the McCain campaign? McCain is better than his campaign.

What's the saying about rats leaving a sinking ship?

When Stephen wants an unbiased and honest opinion of how Hillary Clinton's speech went over with Democrats on Tuesday in Denver, who better to ask than Bill Kristol, right?

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COLBERT: "Now, of course, to judge convention speeches, I always turn to Bill Kristol. Monday night he said this about Michelle Obama's  speech."

KRISTOL: "I thought it was sort of generic."

COLBERT: "And, as for Senator Clinton's praise for Barack Obama, here's how Kriristol described that."

KRISTOL: "Generic. Could have been applied to any other democrat."

COLBERT: What a wordsmith. Kristol's description about Democratic speeches are so.... what's the word? Interchangeable? Non-descript? A kind of cheap knockoff of a brand name product? It'll come to me.

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Let me say first that while I didn't support Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee, I could certainly understand why her supporters did.  She's tough, she's arguably one of the smartest people in Washington and she's extremely capable.  And even her detractors must admit that it was a very tough primary season, made worse by the media's need to fill up 24/7 with content that appeared to relish pitting Democrats against one another, usually quite unfairly.

That being said, if any Hillary Clinton supporter actually goes through with this suggestion from Bill "I'm not right about anything, but I still get my regular TV gig to screw over the national discourse" Kristol, you are being played, big time.   This is Operation Chaos in all its nakedly partisan glory.

Kristol (who, by the way, is NEVER right about anything, have I said that recently?) is clearly scared of Obama's pick of Joe Biden for the vice president slot, because as he admits, Biden has the foreign policy experience, the alleged lack of which they are so fond of attacking Obama.  So in the only battlefield that Kristol has the gonads to scale, he challenges Clinton supporters (naturally, it's easier to be brave when others are the soldiers, isn't it, Billy?) to launch a protest by nominating Clinton as the Vice President at the convention, forcing a roll call vote. 

KRISTOL: Look, Senator Obama is going to be the nominee, there's no point in contesting that roll call. What I would encourage Hillary supporters to do...

WILLIAMS: Oh boy...

LIASSON: No!

KRISTOL: ...is to express their outrage over the pick of Senator Biden over the better qualified Senator Clinton as the Vice Presidential pick by putting her nomination for the vice presidency. That would be a good roll call vote, don't you think? Clinton and Biden. Although I'm not sure she wouldn't beat him. And that would be exciting and that would be a ben...it would be a favor to Senator Obama. Because the truth is Obama/Clinton is a much stronger ticket. It is a stronger ticket than Obama/Biden. Does anyone seriously doubt that Hillary Clinton would bring all the Clinton voters over? Whereas Biden I think is going to have a tough time doing so.

WILLIAMS: It would be drama. But I think that you make
that suggestion as a subversive act...

KRISTOL: You think? [laughs] No...no...

Listen up, for those of you considering this:  THIS IS A SUGGESTION FROM SOMEONE WHO THINKS THE IRAQ INVASION AND OCCUPATION WILL MAKE GEORGE W. BUSH A GREAT PRESIDENT IN THE HISTORY BOOKS. 

Can I possibly reiterate how wrong Kristol ALWAYS is? 

I don't care how unfairly you think Clinton was treated during the primaries (and frankly, I might agree with you on that) nor how great a VP you think she'd make (she'd be great and it would be a historic administration with an African-American and a woman leading the country--I'll stipulate the whole to you for the sake of argument), it is simply bad for the party, bad for the country and insulting to our collective intelligence as Democrats and/or liberals to do anything that the leading neo-con cheerleader for the Worst. President. Ever. suggests.

Don't even think about it.

Full transcript of his pathetic tactics below

Continue reading »

  Boy, this is great. On the same day Bill Kristol says this:

"NBC’s Andrea Mitchell reported on “Meet the Press” that “the Obama people must feel that he didn’t do quite as well as they might have wanted to in that context. [...] 'What they’re putting out privately is that McCain may not have been in the cone of silence and may have had some ability to overhear what the questions were to Obama.'

"That’s pretty astonishing, since there seems to be absolutely no basis for the charge."

The newspaper in which he said it says this:

"Senator John McCain was not in a “cone of silence” on Saturday night while his rival, Senator Barack Obama, was being interviewed at the Saddleback Church in California. "

What's even worse is that his editors were forced to change the online version of the article and make a note at the bottom that a different version was published in the print version. How many more times does Bill Kristol have to be proven completely and utterly wrong before the Times fires him?

  (video and post sent in by PublEuS via email)

Neo-Con Man Bill Kristol had one of his weekly ironic moments...

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"...if countries don't have confidence in our ability to help them, it's going to be a much more dangerous world."

Uhhhh.... In which case, maybe we should have (1) finished the job in Afghanistan, and (2) not invaded Iraq in the 1st place????

Sometimes the jokes just write themselves. On FNS, Bill Kristol was furious that President Bush went to the Beijing Olympics instead of watching it on TV because of the propaganda value that Bush gave to China against the pro-democracy agenda.

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Kristol:  You can talk to human rights and pro democracy activists both in exile and over here and those over there. They did not want him to go and to legitimize what is a giant propaganda festival for Beijing.My wife told me I shouldn't say that I disapprove of Bush going, I disapprove of the dictatorship in Beijing. I disapprove of the totalitarian propaganda spectacle on Friday night. She said this would make me look "crotchety" ...

Kristol is the Minister of Propaganda at FOX so for him to complain about it really is high comedy. And I'll throw in the fact that his wife called him---errrr--crotchety. Yea, that too...

It's FOX NEWS SUNDAY, which means more idiocy with William the Bloody. Too bad for Bill that Maliki endorsed Obama's Iraq plan of withdrawal---which basically makes him out to look more ridiculous than he normally does. There are no warmongering mountains too high for William the Bloody to climb.  He's going way over the top with his attacks of Obama.

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Kristol:  ...I never before running for President in a time of war who was so unqualified to be Commander in Chief. No, I don't mean that in a polemical way.

Bill keeps his hate going. 

If there was a website for warmongering porn, Kristol would be the webmaster. He's fantasizing about this a great deal I'm sure. He must spend hours upon hours with sweaty palms and tired fingers surfing the net for hot---new--nekkid---bomb Iran porn. Is it free, Bill?

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Kristol. I think honestly, if the president felt John McCain were going to be the next president he would think it more appropriate to let the next president make that decision than do it on his way out. I do wonder with Sen. Obama, if president Bush thinks Sen, Obama win does he somehow think that, does he worry that Obama won't follow through on the policy...

WALLACE: So, you're suggesting that he might in fact, if Obama's going to win the election, either before or after the election---launch a military strike?

Kristol: I don't know. I think he would worry about it. On the other hand, you can't, it's hard to make foreign policy based on guesses about election results...

As usual he's ridiculous. Obama will be strong on National security and the fact that these discredited conservative punkits still get to voice an opinion is frustrating all by itself. We should ask William the Bloody where that WarPorn chat room is... A bunch of warmongers have been speculating on Bush's plans to attack Iran for quite sometime.

Think Progress:

The claim that Obama's potential election could force Bush's hand also isn't new. Earlier this month, far-right pseudo scholar Daniel Pipes told National Review Online that "President Bush will do something" if the Democratic nominee won. "Should it be Mr. McCain that wins, he'll punt," said Pipes.

Both Kristol and Pipes apparently agree with President Bush's claim in March that McCain's "not going to change" his foreign policy.

Keith offered up a delicious wingnut trifecta of shoddy research and revisionist history Monday night.

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Bronze goes to Bill Kristol for (once again) making up facts not supported by reality in his attempt to smear Barack Obama and praise John McCain, his neocon brother-in-arms.

Comedian Rush Limbaugh gets the runner-up spot for disparaging a 10th grader's decade-old research paper as he tried to trash Barack Obama's astute observation that the current economic climate resembles the conditions that preceded the Great Depression.

And, of course, the coveted gold goes to convicted felon FOX News analyst Ollie North for having the sheer audacity to chide Barack Obama for suggesting we negotiate with Iran when he (North) was the principal architect in the Reagan-era scheme to illegally sell weapons to the Iranians.

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In one of the odder transformations seen this primary season, some of the harshest critics of Hillary Clinton are now championing her candidacy with great gusto. Kristol seems to lead this pack of concern trolls from the vast rightwing conspiracy, but we've also seen Rush Limbaugh, Joe Scarborough,and Karl Rove among others rush to her defense. And then last month's bizarre endorsement from her once arch nemesis Richard Mellon Scaife.

In this clip from yesterday's Fox News Sunday Kristol rallies to her side saying, "She is a better candidate than he is. "

And Kristol continues today in the NY Times:

I normally don’t claim to speak for other members of the vast right-wing conspiracy. After all, we’re each nefarious in our own, individual way. Indeed, we often disagree with one another.

But I do think I can speak for most of my fellow right-wingers when I say this: We once looked forward with unambivalent glee to the fall of the house of Clinton. Many of us still do. But we also see the liberal media failing to give Hillary Clinton the respect she deserves. So, since we conservatives believe in giving credit where credit is due, it falls to us to praise Hillary.

Of course, the disdain for all things Clinton has not lessened one iota among these people. The annoying clucking sound we hear is only Republicans savoring the prospect of Democratic discord, their only real means to retaining the White House.

The neocon warmonger speaks. With Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton locked in a very good battle leading up to Super Tuesday, Kristol makes this misogynistic quote:

BILL KRISTOL: Look the only people for Hillary Clinton are the Democratic establishment and white women... it would be crazy for the Democratic party to follow the establishment that's led them to defeat year after year... White Women are a problem - but, you know... we all live with that...

[Hume, Williams, Wallace, Liaison crack up]

JUAN WILLIAMS: not me...

HUME: For the record, I like white women.

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I'd say white women have a problem with you now, Mr. Kristol. I've heard in a just a few other places that the Latino vote is a very important constituency out west that both candidates are vying for, but for some reason William the Bloody refuses to acknowledge them. I wonder why? Are you still happy NY Times?

Dave Manatt from Politics TV says:

Where to begin? I'm no paleo-feminist -- and the attacks on Obama and Kennedy by NOW et. al. have only re-enforced every stereotype about them - but this FOX moment is just solid sexism at its worst. 

Then the panelists - Williams... One of the panel "liberals", who of course infamously has faced sexual harassment charges in the 90s while working at the Washington Post. The other "liberal" on the panel and only woman, Mara Laison said... nothing. Hey NOW -- how about going after her???

Finally, there is the matter of accuracy. Kristol wants to perpetuate the myth of the "loser Democrats". Hmmm, Bill. Where were you in the 06 midterms? Looks like his neocon bunker mentality won't thaw until election day.