Most Dangerous?

I like to think of Charles Krauthammer and Fred Barnes as locked in a perpetual struggle for the title of "America's worst pundit." Brian Beutler, however, views Bill Kriston as the country's "most dangerous" pundit on the grounds that he "has what seems like a mainline to the White House and yet, of all his colleagues, he is the most casually dishonest, the most outwardly war-hungry, and the most recklessly illogical." Beutler cites the following as an example:

Real progress has already been made in the war against Al Qaeda in Iraq, and the terrorists know it.That's why they're surging against our surge, and why they are attempting to convince us that we have lost when it is they who are losing.

Also: War is awesome. Indeed, Kristol is like a horrifying right-pundit Chimera fusing together the worst aspects of Krauthammer and Barnes, but adding in a strain of raw cleverness that elevates -- and yet denigrates -- the resulting punditry from banal categories like "worst" to more exalted realms of "dangerousness."

Comments

Well, the consensus (even among lefties like Fred Kaplan) is that we have made significant progress against Al Qaeda in the Anbar province over the last several months.

IMO, some of the most insightful writers on Iraq (partly because they have both logged a lot of time there) have been an Atlantic colleague of yours and his son, Bing and Owen West, who have an op/ed about Iraq in they NY Times today: The Laptop Is Mightier Than the Sword

Posted by Fred | June 15, 2007 8:34 AM

I'm still struck by a Bill Kristol moment on Fox News, right after the fall of Baghdad in 2003. He was giddy, smiling, glowing, and gloating. He wanted to go on to Syria and Iran right then.

This guy loves war like little girls love puppies and kittens.

Posted by stm177 | June 15, 2007 8:34 AM

You can read more about what the West's talk about in their NY Times essay, and even donate money toward a partial solution here: Spirit of America.

IMO, Owen West is an American hero. A Stanford b-school grad and Goldman Sachs trader who served two tours in Iraq as a Marine officer, and is trying to propose a smarter way of fighting the war. So is his father, for that matter: an old Vietnam vet who has spent more time in Iraq than most pundits who blog about the war.

Posted by Fred | June 15, 2007 8:43 AM

From a bio at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Kristol

1)In 2003, just as the Iraq War was starting, Kristol appeared on the National Public Radio show "Fresh Air" and made the following statement:

"There's been a certain amount of pop sociology in America ... that the Shia can't get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There's almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq's always been very secular." [1]

Posted by Don Williams | June 15, 2007 8:44 AM

Random, senseless death at the hands of a deranged, homicidal maniac is a terrible tragedy. However, would we view it as such were it to strike the broadcast news studios at Fox and the White House during an Oval Office war strategy meeting?

Posted by steve duncan | June 15, 2007 8:48 AM

Ah yes, I forgot the best part:
"In 1973, he received a B.A. from Harvard College, graduating magna cum laude in three years."

In my opinion, Kristol is smart enough to know when he's lying -- he just assumes that most of us are too stupid to do the same.

Posted by Don Williams | June 15, 2007 8:50 AM

Sometimes it's tough to know which Billy Kristol is the comedian.

Posted by Rich | June 15, 2007 8:53 AM

I think he is more dangerous because, unlike Fred Barnes and many others, he looks like a real human being: smart, animated, sense of humor... You really need those special sunglasses from They Live to figure him out.

Posted by abb1 | June 15, 2007 8:56 AM

Why did Bill Kristol speed through Harvard College in three years? To save money on room & board? In defense of Kristol, he isn't as delusional about the current immigration bill as his colleague (fellow Fox News panelist and co-editor of The Weekly Standard) Fred Barnes. Makes me think that Kaus is right when he says Rupert Murdoch has rigged FNC to be pro-open borders: when a panel discussing the comprehensive bill consists of three political writers (e.g., Fred Barnes, Mort Kondracke of Roll Call, and Mara Liason of NPR) and all three are in favor of the bill, it seems a little obvious.

Posted by Fred | June 15, 2007 8:58 AM

[Well, the consensus (even among lefties like Fred Kaplan) is that we have made significant progress against Al Qaeda in the Anbar province over the last several months]

Well yes, Fred, but the increase in insurgent violence has occurred in provinces other than Anbar and in insurgent groups not linked to Al Qaeda which rather underlines the delusional and dangerous nature of Kristol's punditry. We could annihilate Al Qaeda in Iraq, down to the very last man jack of them, and we would still be in the shit.

By the way, Bing and/or Owen West certainly have a way with euphemism

[In Vietnam, the mobility of the Vietcong guerrilla forces was eventually crippled by a laborious hamlet-level census completed by hand in 1968]

That would be the "Phoenix Hamlet-level census", wouldn't it?

Posted by dsquared | June 15, 2007 9:00 AM

There's a 'that way madness lies' quality about Kristol-- I suspect that his views result from a 'No Enemies To My Right' dynamic among wingnuts. He's the boundary value, after Kristol comes the void.

Posted by MattF | June 15, 2007 9:00 AM

Don Williams,

Steve Sailer had a different opinion than Kristol regarding Iraqis: PC Thinking = Disaster, This Time in Iraq

Posted by Steve Sailer's Sock Puppet | June 15, 2007 9:02 AM

Kristol sees himself as a modern Richelieu: a cynical true believer. Unfortunately for him, Dan Quayle was his Louis XIII. (It is ever thus: only ijuts take advice fron cynical true believers.)

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | June 15, 2007 9:14 AM

Indeed, Kristol is like a horrifying right-pundit Chimera fusing together the worst aspects of Krauthammer and Barnes

...with some Peter Lorre tossed in. Man Kristol is creepy.

Posted by ed | June 15, 2007 9:15 AM

It's true--Barnes is the administration's lap dog; Krauthammer is like the homicidal pit bull cyclone-fence caged behind the garage; for Kristol, it's too easy to say he's the fox in the henhouse...you really gotta read Mikhail Bulgakov's "Heart of a Dog" to get a bead on him....

Posted by elle loco | June 15, 2007 9:19 AM

It might help some of the innocent among us to know the nature of the Weekly Standard.

Scott McDonnell explained it sweetly in The American Conservative:
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" Enter the Weekly Standard—edited principally by William Kristol, a genial and sharp son of an eminent neoconservative family—which arrived on the scene thanks to a $3 million annual subsidy from Rupert Murdoch.

It is not always understood beyond the world of journalism that political opinion magazines almost invariably lose money—sometimes a lot of it. The deficits are usually made up by their owners and subscribers’ contributions, some quite substantial.

Commentary was supported for most of its life by the American Jewish Committee and now has a publication committee of formidably wealthy people.

William F. Buckley’s National Review always had angels; Buckley once answered a query about when his magazine would be profitable by saying, “You don’t expect the Church to make a profit, do you?”

The venerable Nation, at the time of the Standard’s founding, had an annual deficit of roughly $500,000, made up by owner Arthur Carter.

The prestigious Atlantic Monthly reportedly loses between $4 and $8 million a year. "
-------
Ooops. I guess that last sentence was somewhat tactless. Sorry, Matthew.

Ref: http://www.amconmag.com/2005/2005_11_21/article.html

Scott goes on to note:
"Its role [Weekly Standard] can be likened to the Yellow Press, the Hearst papers and Pulitzer’s New York World, which did everything they could to instigate a war against Spain over Cuba in the 1890s and boosted their circulation mightily in the process. In the wake of 9/11, the Standard didn’t have to create the martial atmosphere artificially, just divert it from Osama to Saddam.

Without the Weekly Standard, would the invasion of Iraq taken place? It’s impossible to know. Without the Standard, other voices—including those of the realist foreign-policy establishment, which had been dominant in the first Bush administration and which opposed a precipitous campaign against Saddam—would have been on a more level playing field with the neocons. That would have made a difference. "

Posted by Don Williams | June 15, 2007 9:49 AM

Brooks, Broder and Friedman aren'r in the running? Then again, there are about 30 others vying for places 3 through 30 or 33 and there is not much seperation between them.

Posted by Joe Klein's conscience | June 15, 2007 9:54 AM

Re "Brooks, Broder and Friedman aren'r in the running? Then again, there are about 30 others vying for places 3 through 30 or 33 and there is not much seperation between them."
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Tom Friedman told Haaretz that there are only 25 although Haaretz says there might be 30 -- "almost all of them Jewish".

See "White Man's Burden" at http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=280279&contrassID=2&subContrassID=14&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y

An excerpt:
"Is the Iraq war the great neoconservative war? It's the war the neoconservatives wanted, Friedman says. It's the war the neoconservatives marketed. Those people had an idea to sell when September 11 came, and they sold it. Oh boy, did they sell it. So this is not a war that the masses demanded. This is a war of an elite. Friedman laughs: I could give you the names of 25 people (all of whom are at this moment within a five-block radius of this office) who, if you had exiled them to a desert island a year and a half ago, the Iraq war would not have happened.

Still, it's not all that simple, Friedman retracts. It's not some fantasy the neoconservatives invented. It's not that 25 people hijacked America. You don't take such a great nation into such a great adventure with Bill Kristol and the Weekly Standard and another five or six influential columnists. In the final analysis, what fomented the war is America's over-reaction to September 11. The genuine sense of anxiety that spread in America after September 11. It is not only the neoconservatives who led us to the outskirts of Baghdad. What led us to the outskirts of Baghdad is a very American combination of anxiety and hubris. "

Posted by Don Williams | June 15, 2007 10:18 AM

Awww. Fred Barnes has a specialness that is being overlooked here. He may not be rabid enough to be america's worst pundit, but he is certainly America's funniest sycophant. It is impossible to read Rebel in Chief without getting a good laugh from every page. And as a bonus, he doesn't write in some hard and elitist way, but in easy paragraphs that a second grader could understand.

Posted by roger | June 15, 2007 10:27 AM

Roger,

The dorky blond from the WSJ editorial page -- Kim Strassel -- may be an even bigger fan of Bush (er, President Bush, that is).

Posted by Fred | June 15, 2007 10:35 AM

"Neoconservatism" is the final decay product of the GOP in the same way that political correctness and other manifestations of cultural liberalism is the final decay product of the New Deal Democratic party. Neither serves the day-to-day interests of ordinary people, as both are merely political tools wielded by the elites that have a lock on power at all levels.

Posted by kafka | June 15, 2007 1:48 PM

So when is Kristol going to play the Joker? Man, that guy's grin is creepy. (And Alan Colmes can play the Scarecrow.)

Posted by Reality Man | June 15, 2007 11:54 PM

denigrates is not the word you wanted.

we need more categories -- most dangerous, most embarrassing, most frivolous etc.

Posted by a | June 18, 2007 2:18 PM