Chris Wallace Calls The Perpetually Wrong Bill Kristol An ‘Expert’ On Iraq

By Matt Duss

Demonstrating again Fox News’ hilariously low standards, this morning Fox News’ Chris Wallace referred to Bill Kristol as an “expert in [the] area” of Iraq’s elections:

WALLACE: Bill, you certainly are an expert in this area. The two leading candidates seem to be the current prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, and the original prime minister [Ayad] Allawi. From the U.S. point of view, who would we rather see?

KRISTOL: I honestly don’t know. I think — the good news has been the degree of reformist parties and the new leaders who have begun to emerge in the Iraqi political system.

Watch it:

Kristol has spent the last decade proving that he doesn’t know. Here’s a classic example of Kristol’s Iraq “expertise” from 2003:

On this issue of the Shia in Iraq, I think there’s been a certain amount of, frankly, a kind of pop sociology in America that, you know, somehow 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.

Months later, Iraq would explode into a civil war driven by competing radical Sunni and Shia militias trying to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime.

Kristol’s propensity for error is so serious that, according to Newsweek’s Eric Margolis, Bill’s late father Irving Kristol sometimes lamented to an old family friend, “My poor son has got it wrong again.” Journalist Eric Alterman wrote in the Nation, “if one looks for a consistent pattern to Kristol’s perpetual wrongness, it’s not hard to discern. For Kristol is less interested in being correct than in advancing his side’s interests. He’s not a journalist; he’s an apparatchik working undercover as a man of the press.”

In other words, the perfect Fox News journalist.