William Kristol (son of Irving); not to be confused with Jonah Goldberg (son of Lucianne), John Podhoretz (son of Norman), or Byron York (curiously, the son of Dick Sargent) writes in the Weekly Standard -- aka the National Review with better, if less sniffed, binding glue*:
It's become clear, by contrast, that the Democratic party doesn't really want to fight jihadism. It's just too difficult. Last week the entire Democratic congressional leadership sent President Bush a letter on Iraq. The Democrats didn't chastise the administration for failing to do what it takes to achieve victory there.
Bill Kristol, ladies and gentlemen, he'll be on FoxNews the rest of your life (for even when his body shuffles off this mortal coil, the Kristol-bot shall continue dropping pithy bon mots for the Murdoch family empire).
And now through the magic of the internets, the wit, the wisdom, the profound inability to learn that is, B-I-L-L:
February 24, 2003 (jointly with Lawrence Kaplan and interviewed by Kathryn Lopez -- oh man - there is some triumvirate):
"Iraq should become a democracy. After all, the president has repeatedly cast the impending war as an effort to bring democracy to a land that for decades has known only dictatorship. Having defeated and then occupied Iraq, democratizing the country should not be too tall an order for the world's sole superpower."
April 1, 2003, on Fresh Air (Bill, always your 'April Fool')
"And on this issue of the Shia in Iraq, I think there's been a certain amount of, frankly, Terry, 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."
There is much more, and Kristol is not alone. I don't recall any form of substantial mea culpa, do you?
It should come as no surprise that Bill loves him some Lieberman. After all, Joe's only critique of Bush is the same as Kristol's, that a tweak here and a tweak there and Iraq would have turned out (and still could) to be the bestest little client state evah!
I'm sure, "real Democrat" Joe & Kristol may have talked about it at the National Review Anniversary Dinner just last October -- we know Joe attended. It is, after all, the kind of thing you would expect a "real Democrat" to be present for. Granted our source for this is an admitted drug addict:
Back in the '80s, Bill Buckley and the National Review staff got fed up with Lowell Weicker. They had had it with Lowell Weicker. So they set up a PAC called BuckPAC, and BuckPAC essentially got Lieberman elected. They knew they weren't going to elect a Republican up there. So he was there and Buckley, even in his speech last night, made mention of the fact that Joe Lieberman is his favorite Democrat... Kay Bailey Hutchison was on one side of our table, circular tables and Lieberman was two seats to my right.
So Joe's whole political career of saying he's a "real Democrat" started because the right-wing wanted a Democrat to the "right" of a sitting Republican Senator. And he's a buddy of Bill Buckley too. A man who repeatedly proclaims he marched with Martin Luther King, now celebrating with its founder, the magazine that was an apologist for the Bull Conners of the world at that time.
Wow, tough choice for you Democratic primary voters today, huh? Here is, at last, your opportunity to make one of them, Joe Lieberman, feel "something" if not shame.
*Some of you may suggest that the National Review is actually stapled together (no doubt by some prominent conservative's young son, angling to be the next Jonah -- or perhaps a daughter who might catch the eye of "the Derb"). While this is true, I'm still relatively confident the more avid readers -- okay, those read to -- still sniff - and possibly ingest - the staples.