Maybe now Bill Kristol knows how Barack Obama feels.
Like Obama, the long-time conservative commentator has become a (temporary) punching bag for the more radical elements of the far-right press. Kristol's sin? Acknowledging that Romney's "47 percent" comments made behind closed doors to wealthy donors were "stupid and arrogant."
Over the weekend, Breitbart.com condemned Kristol as a "pinhead" and suggested a wounded ego was the reason The Weekly Standard editor took issue with Romney's donor comments.
Last week, Fox News contributor Michelle Malkin lashed out at Kristol and denounced him as a "windbag" in "meltdown mode." For Malkin, insulting nearly half the electorate and deriding them as lazy and irresponsible was the perfect campaign pitch for Romney to make. Because according to Malkin, this campaign is all about "about America's makers versus America's takers." (Fox News also loved the "47 percent" attack line.)
That's clearly how the fanatical far-right media see the looming November election. Yet Kristol's critique of Romney's comments was self-evident: "It's worth recalling that a good chunk of the 47 percent who don't pay income taxes are Romney supporters."
The fact that Malkin and others castigate Kristol only shows how fanatically they take the oath of loyalty during the campaign season. (And how name-calling is their first response to a debate.)
There's also an alternate universe narrative being pushed in the fevered swamps of the right-wing blogosphere at places like Breitbart.com. It preaches to readers that Romney's campaign is in great shape and that pollssuggesting otherwise should be dismissed as bogus because the sampling is all wrong. (Biased!)
The suggestion that Romney's campaign is struggling is all a liberal media creation, goes the Breitbart line. The problem is when conservatives like Kristol puncture the bubble that Malkin and Breitbart bloggers hold so dear. In response, Kristol must be denounced as a fool.
Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol says that Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney is going to have a tough time winning if the election is a referendum on President Barack Obama’s first term.
“They need to focus on the next four years,” the conservative columnist told Fox News host Chris Wallace on Sunday. “If this election is just about the last four years, that’s a muddy verdict.”
“Bush was president during the financial meltdown, the Obama team has turned that around pretty well,” he explained. “He’s got to make it a referendum on the choice about the next four years, and explain what Obama would do over the next four years that would be bad for the country and what he would do would be good for the country.”
Kristol added that President Barack Obama had been “rattled” on foreign policy.
“Voters are watching, turning on the TV. Embassies are being burned, there are demonstrations in Pakistan. What’s going on there? Why is it happening? What can the next president do about this? Romney should answer that question,” Kristol pointed out.
“If they just go back to mindlessly reminding people for the 5,000th time, ‘Guess what? The economy’s not great,’ they will waste the next 10 days.”
Watch this video from Fox News’ Fox News Sunday, broadcast Sept. 23, 2012.
Fox News contributor Michelle Malkin is very angry. Again.
Malkin is very angry the "lap dog" press is being so mean to Mitt Romney and is making a big deal about the "47 percent" comments he made behind closed doors to wealthy donors about how nearly half of Americans are lazy, irresponsible and unwilling to work hard to improve their lives.
Typing off the age-old conservative script, Malkin robotically blamed the press for Romney's latest campaign stumble, claiming there's a conspiracy among journalists and Democrats to shift the attention away from Obama and focus on alleged Romney gaffes.
But there's a slight problem this time around with the blame game: Lots of conservative pundits, such as The Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol (as well as Republican members of Congress), have also denounced Romney's "47 percent" comments as irresponsible and misguided.
Malkin's response? Fox News contributor Kristol's part of the media problem and he's in on the colluded effort to doom Romney's campaign!
The intramural name-calling highlights the right-wing media fracture visible in the wake of Romney's "47 percent" debacle. Sides are being taken as to whether Romney's remarks were imprudent (i.e. "stupid and arrogant," as Kristol put it), or whether they can be used as a rallying cry to rescue his campaign.
More traditional Republican partisans in the press, such as the New York Times' David Brooks ("Thurston Howell Romney") and the Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan ("Time For An Intervention"), have come down hard on Romney and belittled his campaign efforts.
By contrast, name-callers like Malkin and the more radical, Tea Party-leaning elements of the far-right media, including Fox News, have cheered the candidate's derogatory remarks and urged Romney to repeat them often on the campaign trail.
For this faction, virtually any criticism of their candidate is deemed off-limits, and heretics like Kristol must be publicly condemned.
Besides, Malkin insists Romney's attack on U.S. voters was dead-on [emphasis added]:
He's talking, of course, about the Peggy the Moochers and Henrietta Hugheses of the world - savior-based Obama supporters for whom the cult of personality trumps all else. He's talking about the Sandra Flukes and Julias of the world - Nanny State grievance-mongers who have been spoon-fed identity politics and victim Olympics from preschool through grad school and beyond. And he's talking about the encrusted entitlement clientele who range from the Section 8 housing mob in Atlanta that caused a near-riot to the irresponsible debt-ridden homeowners who mortgaged themselves into oblivion and want their bailout now, now, now.
Malkin despises all these people and loved Romney's closed-door attempt to demonize them during the campaign season. For Malkin and her Tea Party friends, that's what national campaigns are about, pitting Americans against each other by depicting political foes as parasites who feed off the generosity of hard working taxpayers. "This election is about America's makers versus America's takers," Malkin declared confidently.
By Tanya Somanader
The profile of 22-year-old assassin Jared Lee Loughner has triggered a debate over gun control, society’s treatment of the mentally ill, and “the dangerous intersection of the two.” The shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, was a known recluse and a rejected Army recruit with a history of troubling behavior that he documented “in rambling postings on his MySpace page, YouTube videos and classes he attended at Pima Community College in Tucson.”
Railing against “new currency,” government “brainwash methods,” and his own mind-control abilities, Loughner’s mental health “prompted college officials to suspend him and tell his parents that he would have to get a mental health evaluation if he wanted to return to school.” However, despite evidence of his precarious mental state, Loughner walked into the Sportsman’s Warehouse in Tucson, passed a background check, and legally purchased a gun on Nov. 30, 2010.
Current federal laws prohibit selling weapons to the mentally ill but, as forensic psychiatrist Dr. Park Dietz notes, current gun control laws allow “no way to determine [someone] is a mentally ill person.” “The only thing the existing law does about that is quite absurd,” Dietz said, referring to the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms form which only asks the applicant whether “they had been adjudicated dangerously mentally ill.” What’s more, there is no waiting period in Arizona unless someone is flagged by the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). A measure even more unlikely to work in Arizona as the state is woefully behind in entering the 121,700 records of disqualifying mental illness into NICS, having entered only 4, 465 between 2008 and 2010.
But even with Loughner slipping through the system, the magazine clip he purchased with his gun wouldn’t have existed had gun laws been up to date. The now-expired assault weapons ban that existed from 1994 to 2004 prohibited gun manufacturers from marketing handguns with the high-capacity magazines Loughner used. Under the assault weapons ban, it was illegal to make or sell clips holding more than 10 rounds. The magazine used by Loughner held 31 rounds. The Brady Campaign said that, had he used a traditional magazine, “it would have drastically reduced the number of shots he got off” before reloading. While President Bush backed renewing the ban, it never passed Congress in 2004. The failure to address these gaps in gun control was not lost on conservative Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, who said the following on C-Span this morning:
KRISTOL: I think it really would be terrible if our political discourse gets further poisoned by the kind of debate about this assassination attempt and these murders. Can’t we just agree that these murders are terrible? We can have a reasonable debate about what could be done about security. We can have a reasonable debate about policy issues, like gun-control. I think that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to address. I wouldn’t do it the day after. It’s better to reflect a little bit about sensible legislation, but it’s not ridiculous for someone to say ‘let’s look at why this guy could got so many shots off so quickly.’ Maybe we should go back to at the assault weapons ban — I’m ambivalent about that, I think there are policy arguments on both sides — but that’s a kind of reasonable response.
Watch it (begins at 1:05):
While Kristol may recognize gun control as an important discussion, some conservative lawmakers remain adamantly opposed to such a “reasonable response.” Ignoring the failure of these laws, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) argues “we have state and federal laws on the books that already prohibit persons who have been deemed mentally insane” so “I don’t think we’re going to legislate our way out of the risk.” Believing Arizona’s weak gun laws were “unrelated to the shooting,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) stated more bluntly, “the weapons don’t kill people; it’s the individual that kills these people.”
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who is leading a nationwide campaign against gun violence, said, the Tucson “shootings are just terrible examples, and a terrible reminder, of the gun violence that happens every single day in our country. … And so it will continue until we get serious about cracking down on illegal guns and protecting innocent people.”
Update The New York Times notes today that the number of Americans supporting stricter gun laws has been gradually declining over the last 20 years, decreasing from 78 percent in 1990 to 44 percent in 2010. While the 1999 Columbine and 2007 Virginia Tech shootings have had little effect on these views, 54 percent of Americans mark "substantially more support" for a nationwide assault weapons ban.
Update Longtime gun control advocate Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) said today he will "introduce legislation banning high-capacity ammunition clips like the one linked to a weekend shooting." "The only reason to have 33 bullets loaded in a handgun is to kill a lot of people very quickly. These high-capacity clips simply should not be on the market," he said. Lautenberg will introduce the bill when the Senate returns to session later this month.
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.”
On the Fox News Sunday roundtable this morning, the panelists discussed President Obama’s health care summit. NPR’s Mara Liasson said that while it may have been “political theater,” it was also “very clarifying” because it “laid bare exactly where the two parties stand.”
Host Chris Wallace asked Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, “Have you been clarified?” — leading to this candid acknowledgement from Kristol:
KRISTOL: No, but I didn’t watch it, so — (laughter). I have a life. (laughter)
Everyone on the panel, particularly Wallace, appeared to find Kristol’s admission quite hilarious. More disturbing, however, was that Kristol continued to opine on the health care summit as if he did indeed watch it:
KRISTOL: You compared it at the beginning of the hour to a dog-and-pony show, and I thought to myself, that’s really an insult to dog-and-pony shows. I like the dog shows there on the Animal Planet. … Many people were impressive. The President showed his usual professorial ability to sort of say certain things and highlight certain facts, or alleged facts.
Kristol of course couldn’t comment on what “certain things” or “certain facts” were particularly insightful, since he “didn’t watch it.” Being knowledgeable on the subject matter apparently isn’t a requirement to be a Fox News pundit. Watch it:
Introducing the panel, host Wallace asked Liz Cheney how her father was recovering from his mild heart attack. “He’s doing well,” she said, noting that he was “probably watching” Fox News this morning. “We’ll try to do nothing to upset him,” Wallace responded.
