How Life in the Bill Kristol Household Has Changed

Now on his uppers and dependent on the largess of credulous Liberals (who he still clearly loathes), in his 67th year, Bloody Bill Kristol, friend to presidents and architect of wars, find himself reduced to doing piecework like some drudge in a 19th century garment factory, cranking out one "OMG, the GOP is dead-dead-dead and deserves it!" piece every few days just to keep himself in wine and electricity.

Meanwhile, Kristol's idiot son-in-law. Matthew Continetti finds himself in even worse shape, broke and living in his father-in-law's basement, where he and his increasingly estranged wife bed down each night among moldering copies of The War Over Iraq: Beyond Baghdad and The Project for a New American Century while a giant portrait of the founder of the Kristol Nepotism Dynasty, Irving Kristol, glowers down at him.  

The old man's will decreed that there be at least one such portrait in every room so he could keep a stern eye on his legacy even from beyond this vale of tears, and everywhere Continetti goes, Kristol the Elder's eyes seem to follow him accusingly.  He can almost hear him whispering "Failure!  Failure!" even into his fitful dreams.

Because "failure" is the right and proper word.  

Before Trump and COVID, Continetti's throwaway Conservative rag, The Washington Free Beacon, and his presence in the mainstream media were held aloft by his proximity to his father-in-law's media clout.  But once Bill Kristol was tossed out of his own magazine and forced to crash on Charlie Sykes' couch and dance for Liberal dimes, the value of that clout was drastically reduced.  

Suddenly fewer and fewer people felt obliged to listen to a professional-Palin-apologist wax tragic over the cruel treatment Conservatives suffer at the hands of those devil Liberals (who were now keeping daddy-in-law off the dole) or, really, what the founder of The Washington Free Beacon thought about much of anything at all.  Then, just as quickly, network executives discovered that casting someone other than the 39-year-old son-in-law of Bill Kristol in the role of "punchably-smarmy, young, pasty, privileged Conservative" was, in the words of the prophet, "Super easy; barely an inconvenience", and just like that Continetti found himself being market-corrected right out of his comfortable seat on cable news by the also-39-year-old Noah Rothman.

It seems like just yesterday that Continetti was an stripling, cosseted cipher on a rocket ride to the very top of the food-chain in the carefully curated and temperature-controlled terrarium of Elite Conservatism.  All of that now lay in ruins.  The Republican Party is now nothing but The Fourth Reich for Dummies.  Every wingnut with a keyboard is in a mad dogfight over what the word "Conservative" even mean anymore.  And Continetti's own father-in-law is upstairs every night selling off his birthright as the Kwisatz Haderach of American Right for a penny a word and a pat on the head from the dirty commie Left.  

Well screw the family and screw their legacy and screw living in the basement, filed away with everything else his father-in-law wants to forget.  Bill Kristol is old and all of his whining cronies are old and their ideas are old and stink of failure. Everyone with eyes to see knows that the future of the Right is fascist.  That the +90% of the GOP who adore Trump and revel in his overt racism and authoritarianism are never going back to Bill Kristol's milquetoast party of Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio.  And that's a lot of wide-open real estate for a young man on the make to build on, provided he is willing to torch any shred of dignity he may have once had and use his fading mainstream media credentials to get himself in with the mob of bigots and imbeciles who now own the Right.

Which is why Matthew Continetti now has his own byline over at one of your Crazy Uncle Liberty's favorite fringe blogs. The Patriot Post. One of those hate-sites that caters to people who believe Fox News and Breitbart have gone all soft and leftie.  And there you will find Bill Kristol's idiot son-in-law pounding out a new column every week, excoriating the "Soviet Left" and praising the Dear Leader for "changing the world" (no link because fuck 'em):  

How Trump Changed the World

On Sept. 16 the editorial board of the New York Times did the impossible. It said something nice about President Trump. “The normalization of relations between Israel and two Arab states, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, is, on the face of it, a good and beneficial development,” the editors wrote. They even went so far as to say that the “Trump administration deserves credit for brokering it.” I had to read that sentence twice to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. Perhaps the world really is ending...

It is in the realm of foreign policy that Trump’s deviations from political norms have had the most positive and irreversible consequences...

By establishing inescapable facts on the ground over the ceaseless objections of critics, President Trump overrides the often meaningless verbiage that constitutes international diplomacy and ends up changing the very terms of the foreign policy conversation...

...Whatever a President Biden might do about China—and he seems far more interested in repairing our alliances in “Old Europe” than in tackling this paramount challenge of the 21st century—he would operate within the constraints Trump established and on the intellectual terrain Trump landscaped.

There is no greater measure of presidential significance than a chief executive’s ability to transform not just his own but also the opposing party. When it comes to the Middle East and China, the Democrats are closer to Donald Trump today than they were at the outset of his term. That they find themselves in accordance with someone whom they despise is evidence of Trump’s ability to realign politics at home and abroad. This is no small feat.

Some might say it’s worthy of a prize.

Oh to be a fly on the wall at the Kristol household this Thanksgiving after the second scotch.   

No Half Measures