Kristol impugns the nation’s patriotism — again

July 21, 2007

Aside from the tragedy of the war itself, one of the more disconcerting elements of the ongoing political debate is just how little progress we’ve seen in nearly five years. Vapid arguments that were absurd in 2003 are still used routinely. Offensive talking points that were discredited before the invasion even began still appear in major news outlets.

Take, for example, the latest diatribe from William Kristol.

With the ongoing progress of the surge, and the obvious fact that the vast majority of the troops want to fight and win the war, the “support-the-troops-but-oppose-what-they’re-doing” position has become increasingly untenable. How can you say with a straight face that you support the troops while advancing legislation that would undercut their mission and strengthen their enemies?

You can’t. […]

Having turned against a war that some of them supported, the left is now turning against the troops they claim still to support…. [The troops] are our best and bravest, fighting for all of us against a brutal enemy in a difficult and frustrating war. They are the 9/11 generation. The left slanders them. We support them.

The point of Kristol’s piece was to denounce The New Republic and The Nation for pieces that cast some U.S. troops in an unflattering light, but instead of just questioning the articles themselves, Kristol feels justified in rehashing the notion that to disapprove of a war is necessarily to condemn those fighting it. It’s an “argument” — I use the word loosely — that has a child-like sophistication.

It’s apparently impossible for Kristol to conceive of the failure of the so-called surge, or realize that the only thing “strengthening” our enemies is the status quo.

Indeed, to see the world as Kristol does, most Americans, a majority of both chambers of Congress, a considerable number of veterans, and even a growing number of Republican lawmakers, all stand in opposition to the men and women in uniform because they believe the president’s policy is a mistake. All deserve to have their patriotism questioned because they have the audacity to see conditions as they are, not as Dick Cheney wills them to be.

But simply as a matter of rhetoric, this notion of support-the-troops, support-the-mission was transparently ridiculous years ago, and Kristol, had he the ability, should be embarrassed to be repeating it now. Why is conservative discourse stuck in 2003?

Why does anyone listen to Bill Kristol anymore? How many times does he have to prove himself complete and utterly clueless before we all just walk away?

  • Kristol like many conservatives, has always seemed to have a hate/hate relationship with average Americans this just piles on.

    And while I am quite sure most troops “want to fight and win the war” I am also quite sure that most of those know that may not be possible. Wanting something to be and it being a possibility are things that can exist at the same time even if they are opposed.

  • Since we support our troops then we must support all their actions. For instance, the soldiers who raped the 14 year old Iraqi girl and murdered her family deserve our full support. Right?

    PS Possible scandal at TPM. I watched a video about the reaction to a Cheney acting presidency and one of the scenes was of an ad asking Would You Like to Know the Date of Your Death. Then I noticed the very same ad was at the top of the page. Product placement of one your advertisers in content is questionable. Okay it’s not much of a scandal.

    Would anyone else love to see Dick Cheney acting the scene of Kurtz in the cave in Apocalypse Now when he says “The horror.”?

  • Comedienne Billy Kristol’s psychopathic humor isn’t funny anymore. How can he and his NeoCon 9/11 Hit Squad say with a straight face that they support American Democracy while advancing the destruction of our Constitutional Republic through the vulgar and anti-patriotic practice of Right Wing Authoritarianism?

    They can’t.

    Having turned against a democracy that some of them supported, the Reich Wing, led by people like Comedienne Billy Kristol, is now turning against the democracy they claim still to support.

  • Using the bad analogy, he’s a drowning man grasping at very short straws. Everything he’s “fought” for has been turned into a mess and its proven he’s the biggest phony in recent memory.

    Hey, Bill K, again with the repeat themes. Come’on! Pick up that long plastic stick thingy with the metal tube called an M-16 (the open end is what you point away from you) and show all of us how to fight. I don’t know if they make a Kevlar vest big enough to cover Bill’s generous ass though.

  • They are the 9/11 generation.

    I think Billy’s field testing a new slogan for the White House’s PR machine. Or is this a re-run of an older article while Bill is on vacation?

    [The troops] are our best and bravest, fighting for all of us against a brutal enemy in a difficult and frustrating war.

    Fine Bill, let’s take some of the best things you have and smash them up. Does that make sense to you?

    I also love the way Kristol assumes the soldiers have a fucking choice in the matter and ignores the multiple deployments, truncated leaves, back-door drafts that keep them there. But in fRightwingerville the soldiers want nothing more than to spend another day patrolling in 100+ degree temps and dodging bullets, just as Bill’s ideological ancestors knew slaves wanted nothing more than to toil in the fields all day.

    Pathetic motherfucker.

  • Billy Kristol was born on thrird base and now wants everyone to think he earned his societal position as talking head. Kristol wouldn’t last two minutes in the world of middle class America – he’d most likely offend his neighbor into taking extreme prejudice upon his lawn or something like that.

    Anyway, Kristol is morally bankrupt. Carnage seems to be his policy meatcleaver. What an antihumanitarian he is to think life is to be wasted to make his idol look good. Well, Mr. Kristol, I am an American who doesn’t share the same idol or cult worship you seem to be hoisting upon this WH crowd. Listen and look – the Iraq Occupation is just that – an occupation of an Islamic society by a Western secular superpower that had the myopia to announce for all to hear on that fateful day aboard the aircraft carrier, “Bring it on”.

    If Mr. Kristol was truly a democratic (as in a supporter of democracy) he would pull his head out of his authoritarian ass and begin the call for a sane redeployment of our men and women in uniform who are currently being asked to do the impossible by our current dear leader of the WH. Anything short of such action and Mr. Kristol will continue to show his true prejudicial colors. -Kevo

  • Unfortunately, there is still a fairly wide audience for Kristol’s blather. These are the same people who say, with wide-eyed innocence, “why does everybody hate us?” when the rest of the world – which disregards Bill Kristol and gets its news from less partisan sources – expresses its disgust and loathing.

  • While your analysis of Kristol’s ongoing buffoonery is essentially correct, you’re overlooking a far more important point. From Kristol’s perspective, rational thought and logic are irrelevant. He knows his arguments make no sense within a logical framework, but he doesn’t care. He knows that politics are based in perception, not reality. The important thing is for the idea he’s promoting to gain traction in the collective consciousness. Enough people–usually those who aren’t following events closely–believe what he says to merit continuing the obsfucation. The meme told often enough and forcefully enough often becomes the perceived truth.

    What I don’t understand is that Kristol’s opponents in the blogoshere and elsewhere aren’t constantly highlighting this simple fact. It’s not enough to merely debunk Kristol’s argument–though it is critically important to do so. Kristol’s motives and transparent cynicism must also be constantly challenged and derided.

    Kristol’s tactics are nothing new. He uses them because they have proven to be successful time after time throughout history. Every authoritarian regime twists the narrative to their own benefit in precisely the same way Kristol now is doing. He should be constantly compared to the souless apparatchiks under Stalin, Mao and Hitler (fuck the inevitable–and likely incorrect–criticism based on Godwin’s Law that will come from Kristol’s supporters, if Kristol’s tactics mirror those used to similar effect by Goebbels then that fact should be pointed out time and again).

  • “…They are the 9/11 generation. The left slanders them. We support them.”

    We are all the 9/11 generation. The left is trying to protect them. The right doesn’t even support them enough to give them breaks between deployments, an increase in wages, the proper equipment, or the proper medical care when they return home injured.
    They force them to ride right into the ambush called a civil war. The force them to terrorize women and children and kill innocent people in all the confusion. The soldiers have become disgusted with the right, with their authoritarian propaganda. They have lost all respect for the people forcing them to die for nothing.

    The republican conservative right has demonstrated that they care only for what they can get the men and women in uniform to accomplish for them and not for the men and women themselves. They forced them to follow a General George Custer war plan chasing “terrorists” right into an ambush called a civil war, forcing them to stand up and get blown away, and then have the nerve to turn to us and say, “See how brave they are”.

    Soft hands Kristol has never physically suffered or sacrificed a day in his life. He’s been wrong about everything every step of the way about the Iraq occupation. It’s long past time that he needs to STFU. He can’t stand to face how wrong he’s been so he pretends it never happened or he would know his opinions don’t count anymore. Sometimes a person looks like a creep because they really are a creep.

  • Why is conservative discourse stuck in 2003?/

    Because when conservative discourse stuck its head deep into its own alimentary canal in 2003, someone played a really mean trick on them and smeared it with superglue first. They’ve been too embarrassed to seek medical help ever since.

  • Richard Hofstadter on the pseudo-conservative (i.e. what is today’s “movement conservative”):

    “It can most accurately be called pseudo-conservative — I borrow the term from the study of The Authoritarian Personality published five years ago by Theodore W. Adorno and his associates — because its exponents, although they believe themselves to be conservatives and usually employ
    the rhetoric of conservatism, show signs of a serious and restless dissatisfaction with American life, traditions and institutions”

    “Their political reactions express rather a profound and largely unconscious hatred of our society and its ways — a hatred which one would hesitate to impute to them if one did not have suggestive clinical evidence”
    “Their political reactions express rather a profound and largely unconscious hatred of our society and its ways — a hatred which one would hesitate to impute to them if one did not have suggestive clinical evidence … The pseudo-conservative, Adorno writes, shows ‘conventionality
    and authoritarian submissiveness’ in his conscious thinking and ‘violence, anarchic impulses, and chaotic destructiveness in the unconscious sphere…… The pseudo conservative is a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition.'”

    Let’s start calling them “pseudo-conservatives” – it’s much better than “neoconservative.”

  • Professor Hofstadter was a true American patriot – someone who became educated in the American experience and imparted such knowledge to the rest of us through his most formidable writings. I’m sure he would chagrin at the namby-pamby crap coming from this WH and its antidemocratic apologists. Hofstadter was a most effective debunker of American myth and misnomer, and I think if he were with us today he would call bullshit loud and long on Bush and his Cheneyland delusions. -Kevo

  • By way of quick cocktail napkin math, my best guess is that this is day 1,581 of the Iraq Hostage Crisis. Bill Kristol, George Bush and Dick Cheney are holding our men and women as captives over there until they get their way.

    “How can you say with a straight face that you support the troops while advancing legislation that would undercut their mission and strengthen their enemies?”

    Well Bill, their mission is whatever you have wanted it to be and not what they have elected or would have chosen. Strengthening “their enemies” is what happens when Mr. Kristol’s rhetoric proves to radical Islamists that the US is as bad an actor as guys like bin Laden assert.

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