Bill Kristol, the man who is wrong about everything, in the world, consistently, thinks that this is the right strategy. Or, at least, he thinks that the entire speech was Barack Obama admitting that George Bush and Bill Kristol were right about everything and Michael Moore is fat. Maybe?

It seems a little weird, to us, that a blog post on the most important foreign policy issue of the day, written for "the Foreign Policy Initiative," opens with a Michael Moore quote, in order to make fun of Michael Moore, but we are not respected conservative thinker Bill Kristol, so what do we know?

Anyway. Bill Kristol thinks an Afghanistan troop surge is a good idea so basically this will be Vietnam 2. (3? 4?)

Kristol writes:

David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel aren't stupid: Expect to see Barack Obama get on the plane after his session with the International Olympics Committee at mid-day Friday Copenhagen time, and be in Afghanistan with our troops five hours later, in time for the evening news Friday here in the U.S.

Speculation on flight path and landing sites to come. Do your worst, jihadis!

Kristol, born in Brooklyn to Orthodox Jews, was a Trotskyite at City College and an infantryman in World War II. When he came home, he edited Commentary, founded The Public Interest, and in the 1970s became the world's first Neoconservative.

Neoconservatives were, basically, former leftist intellectuals who decided they hated liberals, radicals, and Goldwater conservatives, and loved American moral superiority and, uh, tax cuts. It was much "sunnier" and nicer than regular conservatism. And they liked FDR. And Israel.

The big idea of Neoconservatism was, per 2003-era Irving, "cutting tax rates in order to stimulate steady economic growth." A revolutionary concept! Great for getting elected. And pretty good for getting reelected, until it stops working.

In fact, nearly every major tenet of his political philosophy, as he laid it out in 2003, informed the worst abuses of Bush administration. The entire section on foreign policy and American military might would be laughable if it weren't for the disastrous way in which his theories were tested on the ground.

He is survived by his son Bill Kristol—a remarkably embarrassing partisan party hack, which is at least not something Irving ever was—his wife Bea, and their daughter Elizabeth Nelson.

"The boss hears from two sources," Goldfarb says, "that Hillary Clinton is considering stepping down as Secretary of State this fall in order to run for Governor of New York."

"The boss" is... Weekly Standard founder Bill Kristol, right? If Bill Kristol says it, than it is the opposite of true. That is the only constant in American Politics. But on the other hand, the guy does know from women politicians who quit things early.

No, seriously, this doesn't make sense. She has one of the best political jobs in the world already, New York State is a mess and governing it is a shitty job, and, uh, David Paterson's staff is 75% Clinton vets. If Paterson gives up early and Cuomo reveals that he killed Jonbenet Ramsey then maybe this happens.

(We'd maybe be a little more inclined to believe it if Murdoch still owned the magazine! But even then it'd be in Page Six, wouldn't it?)

How do I know this, you ask? Well, the answer to that question is perhaps best explained by a comment someone named Marvin Settle posted under Palin's note. He wrote:

Wow, and the public thought she wasn't educated enough to be President? That is some of the most well researched and thought out material I have ever read. Thanks Sarah.

Exactly! Thank you Marvin Settle. Thank you very much.

The note in question is supposed to be Palin's response to Obama's response to Palin's infamous "death panel" Facebook note. Here's a sampling of it:

Yesterday President Obama responded to my statement that Democratic health care proposals would lead to rationed care; that the sick, the elderly, and the disabled would suffer the most under such rationing; and that under such a system these "unproductive" members of society could face the prospect of government bureaucrats determining whether they deserve health care.

The President made light of these concerns. He said:

"Let me just be specific about some things that I've been hearing lately that we just need to dispose of here. The rumor that's been circulating a lot lately is this idea that somehow the House of Representatives voted for death panels that will basically pull the plug on grandma because we've decided that we don't, it's too expensive to let her live anymore....It turns out that I guess this arose out of a provision in one of the House bills that allowed Medicare to reimburse people for consultations about end-of-life care, setting up living wills, the availability of hospice, etc. So the intention of the members of Congress was to give people more information so that they could handle issues of end-of-life care when they're ready on their own terms. It wasn't forcing anybody to do anything." [1]

The provision that President Obama refers to is Section 1233 of HR 3200, entitled "Advance Care Planning Consultation." [2] With all due respect, it's misleading for the President to describe this section as an entirely voluntary provision that simply increases the information offered to Medicare recipients. The issue is the context in which that information is provided and the coercive effect these consultations will have in that context.

Section 1233 authorizes advanced care planning consultations for senior citizens on Medicare every five years, and more often "if there is a significant change in the health condition of the individual ... or upon admission to a skilled nursing facility, a long-term care facility... or a hospice program." [3] During those consultations, practitioners must explain "the continuum of end-of-life services and supports available, including palliative care and hospice," and the government benefits available to pay for such services. [4]

Now, let's just stop there because it doesn't even really take a careful examination of the entire note to deduce that it simply could not have been written by Sarah Palin, which leads one to pretty much dismiss all of the points it attempts to make. In fact, a cursory glance is more than sufficient to come to that realization as the note is obviously meticulously researched and footnoted, appears to be entirely grammatically correct (It even contains semicolons!), presents rather cogent arguments in a reasoned attempt to persuade, and on the whole is written articulately. In short, whoever composed this particular note is everything that Sarah Palin is not: thoughtful, patient, dedicated, thorough, and rational, traits that any casual, non-delusional observer of Sarah Palin would never, ever associate with her.

Another key indicator in determining that Sarah Palin did not write this particular note are the host of Palin rhetorical hallmarks missing from it. Just ask yourself this question: Is it possible for Sarah Palin to compose anything clocking in at just under 1000 words that's completely devoid of references to God, the troops, the liberal media, Alaska, Ronald Reagan, her baby with Down Syndrome, or a hilariously painful attempt to channel her inner Jack London with some great poetic flourish? No! There is absolutely no consistency between this Facebook note and anything we've ever seen written or spoken by Sarah Palin.

Interestingly, there are a couple of other coherent notes on Palin's Facebook page posted after the "death panel" note that refer to her in the third person, as if they were written by an aide or a staffer. Here is one such note. Perhaps someone was enlisted to speak for her after the "death panel" debacle?

So who's writing Sarah's Facebook notes? Hell, your guess is as good as mine. Meg Stapleton perhaps? Bill Kristol? An intern? The person ghostwriting her forthcoming book? Who knows! But whoever it is, their being enlisted to perform these services is obviously part of a diabolical plan to rehabilitate Palin's image as a staggering dipshit. However, they really should have eased into it, because it's just way too obvious that Sarah Palin did not write the note that was posted to her Facebook page tonight. Period.

If you watch The Daily Show you've probably noticed how guys like Bill Kristol, John Bolton, Next Gingrich and Mike Huckabee are booked as guests with regularity. Perhaps you've found yourself wondering, "Why the hell would these guys want to appear on The Daily Show?" I sure have! And now, thanks to Daily Intel's Jacob Gershman, we know why.

While the (conservative) movement professes a disdain for the "liberal media elite," it has made an exception for the true-blue 46-year-old comedian. "He always gives you a chance to answer, which some people don't do," says John Bolton, President Bush's ambassador to the United Nations and a Fox News contributor, who went on the show last month. "He's got his perspective, but he's been fair." Says Bolton: "In general, a lot of the media, especially on the left, has lost interest in debate and analysis. It has been much more ad hominem. Stewart fundamentally wants to talk about the issues. That's what I want to do."

Conservatives like Stewart because he's providing them a platform to reach an audience that usually tunes them out. And they often find that Stewart takes them more seriously than right-wing political hosts, who are often just using them to validate their broad positions, do. Stewart will poke fun, but he offers a good-faith debate on powder kegs - torture, abortion, nuclear weapons, health care - that explode on other networks. "Shepard Smith did the same discussion [on torture]," says (Neo-conservative Cliff) May. "He kept yelling me at me: 'This is where I get off the bus! Not in my name!' He wasn't arguing with me. It was just assertions and anger. That's not what Jon deals in."

So maybe there's hope that Stewart can book Sarah Palin as a guest! After all, Bill Kristol promised he'd try to get her to go on the show during his last appearance! Wouldn't that just be swell?!

See, there's been this recession, lately, and it has kinda fucked over a lot of people, around the country. Hit particularly hard: state governments, many of which are facing massive budget shortfalls. The worst state of all is California, which is just basically going to cease to exist in a month or two.

Mr. Douthat notices (or rather he noticed suburban sprawl advocate and anti-rail city scholar Joel Kotkin noticing) that many of the hardest hit states are "blue" states! The entire argument, basically, is that California is blowing up, and Texas is fine, and so therefore Democrats can't govern.

Of course, California (which has, we thought, a Republican governor?) is in so much trouble because they have no property taxes to speak of (the tax having been capped at an absurdly low rate back in 1978) (taxes might've harmed the robust and never-ending growth of their vibrant real estate sector!) and, last we checked, Texas was facing a $750 million shortfall in their unemployment fund until their governor was "forced" to accept something called "stimulus" money from the federal government (money that a majority of governors would like to receive more of!), and finally the entire existence of the deep red deeply fucked Deep South is sort of glossed over, but the fact that his argument is so specious is not even the point. The point is that Bill Kristol could've written something this tossed-off and stupid (though Kristol would not have diplomatically noted that "clearly part of the blame for the current crisis rests with decisions made in George W. Bush's Washington").

Philip Anschutz, owner of the Examiner newspapers, is your bog-standard eccentric billionaire right-winger. He bought David Beckham, runs a Christian-friendly film company that produced the Narnia movies, and his Discovery Institute tirelessly battles the heretical idea that we evolved from monkeys. He owns many, many things. And now, one of those things is the Weekly Standard!

Being a right-wing writer is a pretty great gig because your owners do not give a shit if you make any money, as long as you're helping the cause. So congrats to Bill Kristol, the luckiest idiot in the world, because his position as editor of his shitty little magazine is probably safe. The guy cannot ever lose.

We don't know how much the mag went for but we are going to say "thirty-seven cents."

Kristol, the dumb son of a smart conservative who went crazy, is a lazy thinker, a terrible writer, and, as we mentioned, he has always been completely wrong about everything.

So because there is essentially an extensive and quite well-funded private welfare fund for hacks who get everything wrong, the Bradley Foundation is going to straight-up give him $250,000 for no fucking reason.

"Through the Bradley Prizes, we recognize individuals like William Kristol who have made outstanding contributions, in hopes that others will strive for excellence in their respective fields," said Mr. Grebe.

AHEM. The Bradley Foundation, obviously, is a conservative foundation that exists to give money to people who just really don't need or deserve it.

So, you know, how's your Wednesday going?

Douthat is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he blogs. He is one of those "reasonable" "centrist" conservatives, like David Brooks except not so much of an asshole. Yes, he thinks fertilized eggs are human beings, but he'll argue it politely and he'll readily acknowledge reality and even use it as a jumping-off point for his arguments!

Also he'll hopefully devote more than ten fucking minutes to each column he writes, unlike Mr. Kristol.

The Times poached Douthat from The Atlantic, where is one of their pretty good stable of bloggers. Of course they picked the conservative one, because the Times needs to replace a conservative with a conservative, because conservative David Brooks is not enough pretend "balance" on their op-ed page, and they picked a good conservative but it's still appalling affirmative action hiring, where ideology trumped whether they person is interesting and relevant and maybe even new and exciting.

Douthat will be forced to blog for a while before his columns start showing up on Monday's, to balance out raving leftist loon Paul Krugman.

Because, yes, a dumb liberal actor said a dumb qualitatively true thing about a professional political commentator—"He's an idiot," Damon told some newspaper, "he wrote that we should be grateful to George Bush because he won the Iraq war. We! Won! The! War!"—and so Breitbart, in his continuing effort to prove that he and his poor beleaguered persecuted Hollywood conservative friends are so much smarter than those goddamned limousine liberals is going to pay Matt Damon a tenth of what he'd make for an hour of commercial work to debate a singing frog about the war.

Why we'd expect our famous people to not have dumb political opinions like all the rest of us, or why we'd blame them for said opinions being considered "newsworthy," and also why we'd assume anyone but persecution-imagining conservatives would care what Matt Damon thinks of a nonentity like Bill Kristol? Unexplained, by anyone.

But, you know, he's a millionaire movie star, this Damon, and so repeating something Kristol said and calling him an idiot means it is time for the final showdown between rich conservative commentators and evil liberal celebrities, and so Matt Damon and Bill Kristol will enter the Thunderdome.

GOD BLESS AMERICA.

As for whether The Times would find another conservative voice for its Op-Ed page, Mr. Rosenthal said: “Sadly, I can’t answer that question, except to say stay tuned. We have some interesting plans.”

Let's think about some options!

What about a lovable conservative lady to balance out Dowd and Gail Collins? Not an Ann Coulter, but maybe a Kathleen Parker (though she is just maverick-y enough to be palatable to Times readers!). Or that one token conservative woman at the Slate ladyblog? Someone like her, but more famous. Man, you know who would be great? Condi Rice!

Which brings us to another obvious, Safire-ian choice: the former Bush person. The model, of course, would be Karl Rove. But he's busy! And oy, the complaining they'd hear. So what about Bush speechwriters like Matt Scully or Michael Gerson? They can put words together! Or, hey, Mike Murphy—the former McCain hagiographer who became disgusted with his hero's campaign after he was sacked?

And, of course, there's the "future of the Republican party" guy. Oddly, right now, this means someone like Newt Gingrich, who is writing books about poverty and stuff, and not being the big prick he was in the '90s. Or maybe Rod Dreher, the Conservative who cares about the environment and being nice to people and stuff!

They could go the libertarian route again, even though John Tierney didn't work out. But who is a famous-enough liberatrian? How about Pamela "Atlas" Geller Oshry! She's perfect! Make it happen, Rosenthal!

Conservative nepotism beneficiary Bill Kristol became the resident Times Op-Ed conservative in January of 2008, with a one-year "tryout" contract. This provided all the time he needed to get the entire Obama election story wrong, every week. Kristol reliably and consistently wrote whatever the opposite of truth and reality was, in every column, and his disconnect from reality was so great and so embarrassing that he was considered a dead columnist walking from about June onwards. That is before the Sarah Palin debacle! Kristol was almost as responsible as John McCain's staff for foisting that woman on us, cheerleading her brief rise and happily ignoring her descent into ridicule.

Soon Kristol was using his column to call on John McCain to fire his entire staff and let Sarah Palin be Sarah Palin, which may have made the last month of the campaign even more entertaining, probably, but it wasn't anything approaching realistic or useful advice for anyone but Fox News bookers.

And so, today, his last column for the Times, completely without fanfare. It is about how the conservative era is dead and how Obama will bring back the Fightin' Liberals of the FDR era, back before liberals were all big vaginas like Jimmy Carter, who the vigorous and manly Ronald Reagan once personally slapped in the face. (In the classic 1964 film The Killers.)

"All good things must come to an end. Jan. 20, 2009, marked the end of a conservative era."

There is a bit about how Obama quoted Thomas Paine but didn't say he was quoting Thomas Paine, because as we all know, Thomas Paine is a controversial conservative, unlike cuddly liberal teddy bear George Washington, but FDR, who had balls, quoted Thomas Paine and told everyone he was quoting Thomas Paine, and then he beat the Nazis!

Also there are some bits about how Conservatives have been right about everything since 1980, up until now, and all their policies and things worked, and fixed America, which is why the Conservative Era is now over. And also Obama will save liberalism, or bring on the new liberal era, even though he is secretly pro-American, which means Conservative, obv.

Way to go out on a high note, Bill.

But who will be the next conservative Times columnist? Is it supposed to be Bono?

1. Mark Penn The world's worst pollster delivered Bill Clinton the White House in 1996, you know, when he ran against a literal wooden board in a suit named Bob Dole, so obviously Penn was well-qualified to organize the series of damaging turf wars that was the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, a squabbling joke of smears and slap-dash message reinvention. He charged her a zillion dollars to lose and everyone in the world hates him. Of course he is releasing a book about these little demographic groups he makes up and he is also a columnist at a famous newspaper, the Wall Street Journal.

2. Bill Kristol Bill is also a columnist for a famous newspaper, the New York Times. He invented Sarah Palin. He is a sad pathetic moron whose shame at his own intellectual dishonesty occasionally threatens to break through the surface of his constant lying, to himself and to the nation, about everything. He will probably not be a columnist at the Times for very much longer but he does still have his very own Rupert Murdoch magazine, and his last name.

3. Mark Halperin Mark Halperin used to write a little blog for ABC called "The Note," and it was a terrible thing that was in some part responsible for how bankrupt and idiotic the beltway press was during the late '90s and early 2000s. Then he left to go write a blog for Time and now no one pays attention to him, thank god. But he still writes bad books, like his one a couple years ago about how The Way To Win was to worship Matt Drudge and Karl Rove and Be a Republican. The week John McCain said "the fundamentals of our economy are strong," and finally lost the damn election for good, Halperin blogged that Senator McCain "http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/18/mark-halperin-somehow-con_n_127512.html?page=3">won the week. He will keep his well-paying job at Time forever, or until somewhere else hires him to do the same thing, which is be wrong 100% of the time. Also he'll release a book with someone smarter than him and he'll go on conservative talk radio to fellate Hugh Hewitt as Hewitt bloodies him with a bullwhip, sexily, again.

4. Jeff Jarvis The entertainment journalist who got internet famous for blogging about batteries or something is now the official overpaid consultant of saving the newsmedia, even though he doesn't really know what reporters do (he is pretty sure they should blog about batteries or something). If you give him $1,000 and fly him to Qatar he'll save your newspaper, with a panel discussion.

5. Wolf Blitzer and everyone else at CNN. Wolf basically represents everything wrong with CNN. He just makes noises. Meaningless syllables. He fills up time, so much time, with these nonsense syllables, saying nothing, at all, ever. And CNN this year sucked. Anderson Cooper's show is ratings-grabbing fluff nonsense. The Magic Wall iPhone election map thing is stupid. The fucking holograms! Campbell Brown accepts no bullshit, stop bullshitting Campbell Brown. Oh, and they still let Lou Dobbs fear-monger every day for what seems like three hours of hate. Ugh. Go away, CNN.

6. Steve Schmidt This is kind of a no-brainer, because he lost a presidential election, which is a sure way to make it on one of these lists, but the extent of his failure is still kinda under-appreciated. He destroyed the brand of the Republican party's formerly most sellable asset, Senator Johnny Maverickseed, and hence crippled the party for at least two years. Hah. He is the man on this list most likely to be at least underemployed in 2009, though he won't go hungry.

7. Jimmy Fallon Jimmy can stand in for Jay Leno and Ben Silverman and everyone else at NBC. They have two good scripted sitcoms, and the rest is nonstop garbage. And now this once-forgotten nobody gets Letterman's old show! And national nightmare Jay Leno will be on every day at 10 pm! And Conan will be shipped out to LA in order to become bland and unappealing! 2009 will be a bad year for not wanting to shoot your television set.

8. Robert Rubin and everyone who has ever worked for him. Rubin broke the economy, and trained a new generation of democratic finance-wizards who helped break the pieces of the economy into smaller pieces, and then he went to work for Citigroup, where he still draws a nice fucking salary, after shepherding through legislation that allowed for the creation of Citigroup, a massive financial services conglomerate that also broke the economy, this year. Everyone who worked for him will now fix the economy with their fancy new jobs in Barack Obama's administration.

9. Michael Bloomberg Go away, old man, we're sick of you.

10. Everyone in New York By "everyone in New York" we mean, obviously, the type of people who actually think they represent "everyone in New York," which means people in media, finance, the "arts," publishing, and whatever the hell people who read blogs do all day, for a living. Not the "everyone in New York" that includes people who live in, like Staten Island or whatever. No, the ones who watch Gossip Girl. Basically all of these people should be unemployed, next year.

Special Bonus "Never Ever Get Fired" Award

Tribune Company Innovation Chief Lee Abrams He is an insane person and every dollar spent on him is a dollar wasted, by a bankrupt company, but he is a treat, and we would miss his memos.

"The prose was so limp ('Who, inquiring minds want to know, is going to spare us a first Obama term?') that you had the sense Kristol wrote his column during the commercial breaks of his gig on Fox News Sunday and gave it about the same amount of thought." —George Packer on Bill Kristol, last month.

"A beautiful statement really, of sort of, justice really." –Bill Kristol on Fox News Sunday, yesterday, on Dick Cheney's refusal to apologize for cursing out Pat Leahy.

"No spin. No doubletalk. A cogent defense of his action — and one that shows a well-considered sense of justice. ('I thought he merited it.') Indeed, if justice is seeking to give each his due, one might say that Dick Cheney aspires to being a just man." –Bill Kristol in his New York Times column, today, on the same subject.

(Then he changes topics entirely and writes about Blagojevich and quotes the Kipling poem like everyone else did last week, including the bit about how he left out the last line. This is not even "phoning it in," this is Twittering it in the general direction of In.)

Since time immemorial the New York Times has kept its rich old conservative readers slightly satisfied with some token conservative voices in the Op-Ed section. For many, many years there was reliable old Bill Safire, the Nixon speechwriter, a member of the smart old educated class of Republicans who were able to write up support for disastrous policy implemented by the corrupt and incompetent with smart, almost plausible-sounding arguments. He left, replaced with John Tierney, a libertarian-leaning sort who didn't last long on the op-ed beat and now writes "researchers say a counterintutive thing" features instead. And there is David Brooks, a quietly doctrinaire Republican who fancies up his usual party line with armchair sociology. But Brooks broke with the party this year, calling Sarah Palin a cancer, leaving only poor, dumb, Bill Kristol. Bill Kristol, who tried to sell America on Sarah Palin, and ended up repeatedly embarrassing himself, over and over again, and losing John McCain his election.

Now he just mumbles about hating the mainstream media, to all his mainstream media friends, in the pages of the New York Times. Already the vultures are wondering who'll replace him—you can be terribly wrong and stupid and remain a Times columnist indefinitely, but you must be terribly wrong and stupid in the service of the conventional wisdom. So Tom Friedman's Iraq columns get a pass, as does Maureen Dowd's constant stream of nonsense.

But Kristol is no longer merely just a hack, he's a failed hack. No one bought his line this year. So maybe someone nutty and anti-Palin like, say, David Frum is next for the Affirmative Action Conservative Slot?

As one McCain advisor put it to me: “In the last six weeks there was a remarkable echo. You could listen to arguments made by folks inside of the campaign who were close to Bill Kristol and then open up the New York Times and read them in Kristol’s columns. It was ‘set Sarah free,’ coupled with an agenda designed to appeal to the religious right and the more raucous elements of the party. They got their way often enough, and we started noticing that at many of the Palin functions it was non-stop ‘Sarah, Sarah,’ while John McCain all but vanished. Were they trying to get McCain elected in 2008, or to help Palin on the way to the Republican nomination in 2012? You can’t get yourself into a situation in which anyone can credibly ask that question.”

Bill Kristol is a partisan hack without any redeeming original thoughts, so he just serves as a pipeline for whatever talking points his pet factions of the conservative movement want to get out that day. A good hire. [Daily Beast]

Kristol doesn't just drink the Republican Kool-Aid; he's the giant punchbowl crushing through the wall. This is the guy who had the nerve to tell Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, just a few days ago, that McCain was going to win. This does not bode well for any sort of Republican upset. (Video at top.)