Krazy Kristol -- a new series

By Michael J.W. Stickings

One of our favourite targets here at The Reaction is neocon extraordinaire Bill Kristol, son of Irving. (Even though Heraclitus and I are just two degrees of separation away from him academically. But let's not go there.)

You can find our myriad posts on the K-man here, but, if I may, I would direct your attention specifically to this one by Heraclitus, this one by Libby, and this one by me.

Anyway, I'll turn this installment of Krazy Kristol -- surely a new and ongoing series here, now with a catchy name of its own -- over to Isaac Chotiner, who wrote this on Monday at The Plank under the transparently facetious title "Kristol's Wisdom":

Bill Kristol, who has lately been intent on proving you can make a lucrative career out of being right less often than a broken clock, valiantly defended Lewis Libby on Fox News Sunday yesterday. According to Kristol, Patrick Fitzgerald decided to go after "Scooter" instead of other members of the administration (like Ari Fleischer) because of the former aide's hawkish stance on Iraq. During the discussion Kristol made this remarkably inane point:

Ari Fleischer is the president's personal press secretary. He's at the same level in the White House as Scooter Libby. They're both assistants to the president. Ari Fleischer, in some ways, is closer to the president than the vice president's chief of staff. I was a vice presidential chief of staff and I sure wasn't as close as Marlin Fitzwater was to President Bush.

Ah yes, Kristol's time as Dan Quayle's "brain" is a good analogy to Libby's role in the current White House. Quayle and Cheney had approximately the same influence with their respective presidents, after all.

One should not be surprised that the founder of a think tank pompously and self-aggrandizingly called the Project for the New American Century, as well as one of the Iraq War's most ardent cheerleaders, would have such a sizeable ego. Even being wrong so often isn't enough to deflate it.