Bill Kristol

In the wake of the contested election and the surging rallies against Ahmadinejad and the Mullahs who rule Iran, prominent Republicans in the House and other conservatives want the president to make a firm statement.

There’s some head-spinning intellectual dishonesty at work in the first two major-media columns that argue, counterintuitively, that Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter’s switch to the Democrats is good for Republicans. First, Bill Kristol:
On May 24, 2001, I wrote an op-ed for The Post in the wake of Vermont Sen. James Jeffords’s party switch. I argued that [...]

Praise be to Bill Kristol. Someone should issue him a remedial reading-comprehension exam.
Recall yesterday that Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, wrote a morale-boosting memo yesterday to the CIA saying, “Those methods, read on a bright, sunny, safe day in April 2009, appear graphic and disturbing.” What he means to say is pretty straighforward: [...]

I’m at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington for “Afghanistan: Planning for Success,” the first conference put on by the Foreign Policy Initiative, the new neoconservative think tank/messaging operation. Before the first panel kicked off, FPI directors Bill Kristol, Dan Senor and Robert Kagan milled around in the hall, near the breakfast table, along with Cliff [...]

In my piece a few weeks ago about the rudderlessness of GOP foreign policy, I mentioned a National Journal item reporting that several of the neoconservative heavies — Bill Kristol, Bob Kagan, former occupation-of-Iraq spokesman Dan Senor — were thinking of opening a “new conservative foreign-policy think tank-cum-messaging institution.” You know, like the Project for [...]

Marc Ambinder has the big media news: Ross Douthat, age 29, will replace Bill Kristol as a columnist for The New York Times.
Douthat’s book “Grand New Party,” which he co-wrote with Reihan Salam, is a good guide to his thinking and influence. He is not, like Kristol, a recovering partisan operative, and he is not, [...]

Bill Kristol hears that Rasmussen Reports, the conservative pollster whose surveys have consistently shown the lowest levels of support for the stimulus, is releasing a poll (a “SHOCK POLL,” as Drudge will call it) showing a plurality of voters oppose the stimulus, by a margin of 43 percent to 37 percent.
The longer the plan sits [...]

One of the more frustrating aspects of counterinsurgency is talking to the people who were recently shooting at you — sometimes while they’re shooting at you. Often that gets misinterpreted as softness, but it’s more of a recognition that the only way to achieve a true victory is by coopting your opponents. What looks like [...]

The most interesting angle on President-elect Barack Obama’s bread-breaking with conservatives last night was the intrigue on Rush Limbaugh’s Website.
Speculation swirled all over the EIB: Obama asked for ideas to save the economy, Rush had some good ones on Monday, and Tuesday he’s mysteriously in Washington… coincidence?
Sadly, Sam Stein reports that “Limbaugh was definitely not [...]

Here’s how the latest pool report (courtesy of Ken Bazinet of The New York Daily News) from the Obama transition team ends:
This is for real, folks. The bloggers are going to love this one.
Boy, you’ve got that right.
The PEOTUS departed Hay-Adams at 6:17 p.m. and at arrived at 6:34 p.m. at [address redacted]. Thanks to [...]