Get FREE BuzzFlash News Alerts

Email:  
Home

Kristol's Last Stand in The New York Times

Submitted by meg on Mon, 01/26/2009 - 10:43am.

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Meg White

I'll miss Bill Kristol.

The "error-prone neo-conservative Sarah Palin booster," as Jason Linkins called him this morning, published his last column in The New York Times today. It was an irrational call to arms to all conservatives to block President Barack Obama at every opportunity, so that liberalism can fail and neo-conservatism can rise again.

"If Reagan's policies had failed, or if he hadn't been politically successful, the conservative ascendancy would have been nipped in the bud. So with President Obama today. Liberalism's fate rests to an astonishing degree on his shoulders. If he governs successfully, we're in a new political era. If not, the country will be open to new conservative alternatives."

Kristol's message? Nip Obama in the bud. Don't let even one of his proposals make it though without a fight, even if they are good for the country.

The thing that was so great about this final column of Kristol's (other than the fact that I won't see his mistake-laden tirades in The Times anymore) is that it made Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman's column, just on the other side of the op-ed page, shine. Krugman deftly dissected the conservative arguments against Obama's stimulus package as only an expert economist could.

He knocked down all of the arguments made against the program (cost-per-job-created numbers, the supposed superiority of tax cuts to public spending and the paper tiger solution of monetary policy) and showed them to be "obvious cheap shots" and "fundamentally fraudulent antistimulus arguments." He goes on:

"Basically, conservatives are throwing any objection they can think of against the Obama plan, hoping that something will stick."

At least Krugman will still be around to tell it like it is. And even though the think-tank ideologue won't be around to contrast his extremist punditry with Krugman's measured knowledge, we'll just have to let brilliance speak for itself.

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS

Technorati Tags:Technorati Tags:

»

Rethuglicans are focused...

Submitted by Norm on Tue, 01/27/2009 - 10:28pm.
on only two things, money and power. They will do everything and anything to obtain and hold both. It's simpy depressing to think that the best and the brightest Americans in the last 28 years went to Wall Street to grab as much money and power as they could for themselves while driving America ever faster into the economic disaster that has finally befallen us. Yes, America has had a decent GDP growth rate over the last 28 years, but the growth numbers are fudged. It's easy to see why the growth numbers are fudged by seeing how little is actually manufactured in America and how large our trade deficits, budget deficits and national debt have grown since Ronald Reagan seized the White House following his treasonous October Suprise of withholding the American hostages in exchange for American arms. Union labor has shrunk from 20+% to less than 8% of the American workforce with over half of union labor consisting of unionized Local, State and Federal employees who are barred from striking. Yes Argentina was and is the economic model used by the Rethuglican Party to rule America. Our fascist brethern are just chomping at the bit to Argentinian-style disappear any American who advocates human rights and/or worker rights. Had our Mayberry Machiaellis more fascist foot soldiers, America would have had massive disappearances of dissidents. Bush worked hard to remove Habeus Corpus and he would have done far more had he had the opportunity. Bill Kristol is just a pathetic mouthpiece for the Rethuglicans. I'm just surprised that he hasn't told the American people, "Let them eat cake."
»