William Kristol

BA, Harvard University PhD, Harvard University University of Pennsylvania Faculty Harvard University Faculty

I remember back in the late 1990s, when Ira Katznelson, an eminent political scientist at Columbia, came to deliver a guest lecture. Prof. Katznelson described a lunch he had with Irving Kristol during the first Bush administration.

The talk turned to William Kristol, then Dan Quayle’s chief of staff, and how he got his start in politics.

Irving recalled how he talked to his friend Harvey Mansfield at Harvard, who secured William a place there as both an undergrad and graduate student; how he talked to Pat Moynihan, then Nixon’s domestic policy adviser, and got William an internship at the White House; how he talked to friends at the RNC [Republican National Committee] and secured a job for William after he got his Harvard PhD; and how he arranged with still more friends for William to teach at Penn and the Kennedy School of Government.

With that, Prof. Katznelson recalled, he then asked Irving what he thought of affirmative action. “I oppose it,” Irving replied. “It subverts meritocracy.”

—THE DAILY DISH BLOG, THE ATLANTIC, 9/19/09

William “Bill” Kristol is the son of Irving Kristol, a heavyweight postwar intellectual who started as an anti-Stalinist Trotskyite and, as did many disillusioned with the Soviet Union and burdened with a Manichean outlook, eventually went nuts and fell in with the Republican right. During his first year in grad school, Bill roomed with conservative black person and certifiable lunatic Alan Keyes and acted as campaign manager for Keyes’s unsuccessful 1988 Maryland senatorial campaign vs. the nice, liberal, sane Paul Sarbanes.

With Keyes, Kristol began one third of his career, i.e., the promoting and championing of idiots for high political office. After taking a few years off—teaching, working as chief of staff for Secretary of Education William Bennett (who wrote The Book of Virtues while nursing is gambling addiction)—he resumed promoting nudniks and became staff chief for Vice President Dan Quayle, which prompted The New Republic to bestow on Kristol the faint-praise epithet “Quayle’s Brain.” The high point of the Quayle–Kristol mind meld came when Quayle and/or his “brain” decided to deplore American culture by criticizing the fictional TV character Murphy Brown, and as so often happens in sitcoms, hilarity ensued.

Kristol’s masterpiece of idiot-impresarioship, however, would wait until 2007. In June of that year, Kristol and fellow putz Fred Barnes had lunch with Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska, and the fellas fell in love. Palin took it from there, commencing her transformation from little-known weird-state chief executive, to openly ignorant campaigner, to shrill demagogue, to what we see today, a batshit lady playing the Muppet version of “Sarah Palin.”

We jump back to 1992, when Quayle and his boss, PRESIDENT GEORGE H. W. BUSH, lost to Bill Clinton and Al Gore, and Kristol moved on. In 1994, with fellow neocon nepotism beneficiary John Podhoretz, he founded The Weekly Standard. He also chaired or directed this or that “project,” culminating in the creation of the Project for the New American Century in 1997. This would jump-start the second third of Kristol’s career: the serious, grave, patriotic, wrongheaded, mendacious promotion of the invasion of Iraq.

By then, both as editor of the Standard and as a frequent guest on TV chat shows, Bill had already commenced the third third of his career, one that has eclipsed even his moron-championing: making confident, utterly wrong political predictions. A brief, by-no-means-exhaustive, timeline of his failed prognostications would include these gems:

• April 1993: An upcoming march in Washington will be “the high water mark” of the gay-and lesbian-rights movement.

• September 2002: The war in Iraq “could have terrifically good effects throughout the Middle East.”

• November 2002: Removing Saddam Hussein “would start a chain reaction in the Arab world that would be very healthy.”

• February 2003: “If we free the people of Iraq, we will be respected in the Arab world… and I think we will be respected around the world.”

• March 2003: The Iraq war will last two months, with little chance of sectarian conflict afterward; “Very few wars in American history were prepared better or more thoroughly than this one by this president”; “We’ll be vindicated when we discover the weapons of mass destruction”; the war will cost $100–$200 billion (actual cost: north of $2 trillion).

• April 2003: The battles of Afghanistan and Iraq will be seen as having been won “decisively and honorably.”

• December 2006: Hillary Clinton will prevail in the Democratic primaries over Barack Obama.

• November 2008: Ted Stevens will defeat Mark Begich in Alaska’s Senate race; he didn’t.

• May 2009: Barack Obama will name Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm to the US Supreme Court; he named Sonia Sotomayor.

• June 2011: Rudy Giuliani will be the 2012 Republican nominee for president.

• Anytime after June 2015: People are tired of the Republican frontrunner and have reached “Peak Trump”—a prediction he made, and had to remake, more than ten times during Trump’s run for the GOP nomination.

• October 2015: Joe Biden will enter the race for the Democratic nomination for president.

• February 2016: Marco Rubio will win the New Hampshire primary; guess who didn’t win the New Hampshire primary.

The list, as they say, goes on and on. He was right about one thing, though. In an editorial in the Standard published in March 2003, Kristol wrote about the US’s invasion of Iraq: “The war itself will clarify who was right and who was wrong about weapons of mass destruction.” Indeedy.

Does it matter that he’s always—okay, infinitesimally close to always—wrong? Who, after all, can really predict the future?

The thing is, “predicting the future” is the pundit’s job. If a stock picker, an astrologist, or a gypsy fortuneteller failed in his or her predictions as much and as publicly as Bill Kristol, he or she would be drummed out of the profession. But punditry—especially on the Republican side—is the world’s least accountable profession, and Kristol is the world’s most inept, least accountable pundit.

How’s that for subverting meritocracy, Pops?