As you know, over the past few weeks the Pod Save lads have loaned out their increasingly Third Way/Centrist credibility to help rehabilitate Chuck Todd's reputation and give Jake Tapper an open mike to pimp his Biden bashing book.
And now Savvy-o, the Muse of the Punditocracy, has closed that circle by putting Tapper and Todd together so they could take turns holding down Joe Biden's good name while the speculating wildly about all the terrible things they imagine he might have done.
Must be a great relief to both Tapper and Todd to finally be able to shed the "respected journalist" fig leaves they were forced to wear for so long and come fully out as the smarmy, bitter hacks some of us have always known they were underneath.
There is no concatenation of caveats, provisos, conditions, stipulations, reservations, qualifications, and conditional phrases you can deploy to, ahem, bulwark your editorial decision to give Butcher Bill Kristol a platform from which to mouth off about war in the middle east. On that subject, his mouth should have long ago been (metaphorically) filled with salt and sewn shut forever.
And it all began back in 2014 when the then-barely-post-pubescent executive producer of "This Week" , Jonathan Greenberger, took it upon himself to pluck Kristol from the rubble of his many, many catastrophically bad public opinions and rehabilitate his professional reputation.
[Fun fact: In 2024, Greenberger left ABC News to become... wait for it...
Jonathan Greenberger To Depart As ABC News D.C. Bureau Chief For Role At Politico
Jonathan Greenberger is departing ABC News, where he has been Washington, D.C. bureau chief, for a new job as executive vice president of Politico. Greenberger will start in his new position on April 22 [2024]
...because of course.]
Join me now in this brief jog down memory lane.
Given Kristol's very long and very public record of being pretty much wrong about everything (from the WaPo) --
Bill Kristol knows his predictions have been bad but he’s going to keep making them
...
“With Kristol what I love are not so much the big, grand predictions that are always wrong, but the smaller ones that really demonstrate how poor his actual grasp of politics is,” says Alex Pareene, the editor of Gawker, one of Kristol’s regular tormentors. “He is sort of ideologically motivated to make certain ridiculous claims — Iraq will be a huge success, Romney will win — and even his ‘peak Trump’ predictions are based on the fact that he can’t abide the ongoing rejection of his entire ethos by Republican voters. But it’s when he makes claims that are just wrong but not motivated by the advancement of his worldview . . . that we see just how bad he is at his ostensible job.”-- at no point in the past 20 years have any of the many corporate media drones who have chosen to hire him (and his idiot son-in-law, Matthew Continetti) ever been vindicated in that decision (from Politico in 2014)
Bill Kristol joins ABC News
Bill Kristol, the editor and publisher of The Weekly Standard, has joined ABC News as a contributor, "This Week" host George Stephanopoulos announced on Sunday.
...
The agreement, one source said, includes regular appearances on the Sunday show, as well as special events and other political-relaed events. But there's also a window that allows him to do other shows on cable television.
...
Jonathan Greenberger, executive producer of "This Week," said in a statement Kristol is "an original thinker" that will make their team stronger:
“Bill makes our outstanding team of contributors and analysts even stronger. He’s an original thinker with a unique perspective on the political and cultural landscape, and we look forward to hearing his voice on the 'This Week' roundtable on a regular basis."Furthermore, at no point in the last two decades has Kristol been exonerated of the years he spent strutting across the American media stage, blood-drunk and smirking, confidently insisting that not only could unleashing hell on Earth in Iraq “have terrifically good effects throughout the Middle East” and that it would be a “two-month war, not an eight-year war” but that inflicting Kristol-brand democracy on Middle Eastern countries at the point of an American sword was something we should be doing a lot more.
So how, you may fairly ask, is Butcher's Bill Kristol still abroad in the land?...
What the hell kinda cancel culture are we running here where the people who were this very loudly dead fucking wrong about everything got to keep their place in elite media circles and get to go right on being courted for their opinions on subjects about which they should shut their holes forever?
What the hell kinda cancel culture are we running here where the people who were actually right about everything continue to be treated as pariahs, and told to sit down and shut up because it's rude and unproductive to, y'know, remember stuff?
Funny old world.
Pa. Sens. John Fetterman and Dave McCormick praised the U.S.'s attack on Iranian nuclear sites. 🔗 inquirer.com/news/fetterm...
— Philadelphia Inquirer (@inquirer.com) June 22, 2025 at 8:32 AM
[image or embed]
Magnets! No one even knows how they work, but there they've been, since the world began 9,000 years ago, making it possible to manufacture extremely inexpensive bolt and screw holding dishes, and providing crucial plot points for groundbreaking teevee shows.
Magnets are also useful in one other way: generating metaphors.
For example, did you know that, despite the name "magnet" as in "magnet", they can also repel each other? It's true! I proved this using Science and two Scotty dog magnets I bought from a train station vending machine when I was five or six.
As I recall, we were waiting on the Denver Zephyr to take us out west to see relatives. One round-trip coach ticket cost $47.30. It was good for six months.
Anyway, one of the things you can do with magnets is force two north or two south poles together, if you apply sufficient force. I could push my Scotty dog magnets (but were they really "mine?" Do any of us really "own" the magnets in our lives?) and make them touch north to north or south to south, then let go and they would jump apart. Hours of entertainment on the long trip to Denver!
Later in life I learned that there were different kinds of magnets, but you could still play with them the same way -- forcing north to north or south to south. However the amount of force required was...considerably different.
And this is what our little alliance with the Never Trumpers has been so far: the smothering, hydraulic fascism of Donald Trump and the Republican party were enough to hold this coalition of otherwise repulsive forces together.
But this also where our analogy begins to fall apart.
First, because the two forces were wildly asymmetrical in size: 97% the OG Democratic party coalition smooshed in with 3% recently-former Republicans cast out of the shithole empire they had made.
Second, because the two forces were wildly asymmetrical in terms of expectations. Dirty hippies like me were scolded repeatedly that it was just plain rude to expect these arrivistes to, y'know, admit they'd been wrong. Or apologize. Or even minimally acknowledge that us dirty hippies got it right. Or reflect honestly on the lifetime of labor they had spent on behalf of Team Evil. Or talk about the Before Time and how we got to where we are.
In fact, quite the opposite has happened. They have been left free to go right on blaming the Left for much of the mess they had made. To continue to "Both Sides" Republican atrocities. To carp about how we ran our party and roll their eyes at issues that matter to us: issues on which the Democratic party -- which now shelters them -- was built. And, in general, carry on like aggrieved elite guests who had expected 5-star service from us Democratic menials and loudly complain to the management when they don't get it.
And above all, they demanded the media spotlight. To be the center of attention, and the arbiters of public discourse. And what little was left of the "liberal" media consented, no strings attached.
But this was all supposed to be temporary, right? They were to cohabit with us, and we were charged with putting up with their bad manners and sense of arrogant entitlement, until such time as Trump was defeated. Which they supposed would be fairly easy given their delusion that the problem was just a handful of bad actors, while the rest of the GOP were just dupes and innocents who Trump bamboozled.
And then they found out the ugly truth. The truth we had been trying to tell them all along, and which they refused to believe. That it's not just Trump. Not just a few bad actors. It's the whole shebang. The whole fucking party, from "the root to the fruit" as the saying goes.
That means the Republican party is going to be a bone in the throat of American democracy for decades to come, and ridding ourselves of its toxins is going to be a long, slow grind, against which the fascists will fight us every inch of the way. Which is not what our Never Trump allies signed up for. They were, as the saying goes, "here for a good time, not a long time". The plan was to use our party, our media, our energy, our resources to, as the saying goes, "decapitate the regime". They would then return to their own party where, as the saying goes, the would "be greeted as liberators".
But that dream is dead.
And so, facing the realization that there will never be a hospitable Republicans party to go back to, and the only viable alternative are people you spent the last 30 years professionally hating, for many Never Trumpers the external force keeping them in grudging alliance with us dirty hippies has begun to falter, and they find themselves in a kind of civic freefall. So, with nothing to orient them but their own, internal ideological gyroscope, they are returning to their truest forms.
For example, this is where you find the one-time main pitchman for The Bulwark, Charlie Sykes: decamped to a standalone podcast where he has the likes of Adam Kinzinger, Ryan Lizza, Tom Nichols and Chris Cillizza on continuous rotation. A frictionless environment where the strawman Left can catch strays all day long without a discouraging word ever being uttered.
Or Mona Charen (above) who, in this Trump 2.0 timeline, has also shed herself of her weekly Bulwark roundtable podcast. In her new digs she can hang out with the likes of disgraced former The Atlantic writer, Kevin Williamson, and Both Sides to her heart's content, and there's no one around to say otherwise.
Or Bloody Bill Kristol, reverting to type like neocon memory plastic the minute the prospect of invasion and conquest in the middle east was raised.
Do not doubt that it is a new world, because it is. And these unreconstructed Republican "allies" of ours are figuring out that there is no going back to the way things used to be. But their creed is a brittle one, and reverence for an imaginary Conservative golden age is the only scripture they have left, and frankly they're too old to change now. So within the political physics of this new and frightening world, they seek out/create habitats where they can continue, as much as possible, to wear the old vestments, practice the old rites, and chant the old holy words.
...is like bringing the Sackler Family in to consult on the opioid epidemic.
If there is one subject on which Bloody Bill should volunteer to shut his hole until the end of time, it's this one.
And yet... from The New York Times:
Some of the same neoconservatives who pushed for the war in Iraq are now pushing for war with Iran. “You’ve got to go to war with the president you have,” said William Kristol, a Never Trumper and editor at large of The Bulwark who was a prominent advocate of war with Iraq. “If you really think that Iran can’t have nuclear weapons, we have a chance to try to finish the job.”
Maybe Kristol thinks it's funny to deliberately echo Donald Rumsfeld from 21 years ago --
You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.
-- when he shrugged off the troops' concerns that the criminal incompetence of the Bush administration meant that they had been sent into battle with the wrong equipment and were now having to garbage-pick discarded ballistic glass to up-armor their vehicles.
Because maybe Kristol really is the sociopath we always thought he was.
And if your argument for not only letting him into our tent, but standing down as he and other Never Trumpers colonized what little was left of the "Liberal" media and elbowing actual Liberals out of the public discourse goes something like this --
“You’ve got to go to political war with the sociopaths you have,”
-- then please show yourself to the exit.
Woh, wooh, woooh feeling!
I was listening to a focus group of Biden to Trump voters (as one does) and this group were the ones who are currently regretting their vote. And I noticed that every sentence out of their mouths began with some conjugation of the verb "to think".
"I thought he was a business man...".
"I thought he was gonna look out for regular people. Normal people...".
"I thought he was gonna fix things...".
And so forth.
And it became immediately clear to me where they had gone so terribly wrong. It was with the "I thought..." bit.
Because they very clearly didn't think. Because they're dumdums.
The verb they're struggling to find is "to felt". As in, I felt this or that. And I understand this, because I have felt things too!
For example, I might I "feel" I really need a Kobalt 30-ft Red Line generator Laser Level Kit when I see one on sale at Lowes. Because, damn it, it's really cool! It even has lasers!
But then, after I have my feeling moment, I put my thinking cap and have a couple of thinking moments. See if you can spot the different!
I think, "Do I really need this thing? Since I don't have any projects that, y'know, require a 30-ft Red Line Generator Laser Level Kit, am I really just inventing reasons in my own head for why I should buy it?"
And then I think, "Also, even though it's on sale, it's still pretty pricy. Don't I have other actual projects towards which investing the money I would spend on this admittedly cool 30-ft Red Line generator Laser Level Kit would be the better move?
And then I think, "Also, based on the public record and public statements of this 30-ft Red Line generator Laser Level Kit over the past decade, is there a pretty good chance, if I buy it, it will wreck the economy, and destroy our relationships with our allies, and enable fascists to do terrible things and trash the constitution?"
And if there's a fair chance that the answer to these questions is "yes", then I'm not going to buy the 30-ft Red Line generator Laser Level Kit.
See, that's how thinking works.
Ya feel me?
