So yesterday, I’m watching CNN and there’s an interview with Bill Kristol, a long-time political operative who never had a real job other than whatever work he can get by shooting off his mouth. He’s now helping to run some outfit called Defending Democracy Together, which is another one of the groups which sprang up on the fringes of the GOP with the intention of getting rid of Donald Trump.
When you’ve been hanging around D.C. as long as Kristol has been hanging around D.C., and you have published as many op-eds in both the alt-right media and the fake media as Kristol has published, you’re always available to help CNN or FOX fill up a few minutes of their 24-hour news cycle because there isn’t a political issue floating around the Pennsylvania Avenue – K Street – 14th Street reservation that you haven’t heard about and can therefore make a few prescient remarks.
Kristol is part of the old line GOP Establishment which has been fading away as the party, partially thanks to Trump, has been moving further away from reality. And as Trump’s campaign gathered steam, he didn’t need to build bridges to the Old Guard, nor was he particularly interested in them making any move towards him.
Trump could have bought off the leaders of the Anyone but Trump movement if he had offered guys like Kristol positions within his Administration or just exhibited some deference to their long-time presence in and around the power-blocs in D.C. But for reasons I stull don’t understand, and nobody in the fake media has bothered to explain, is how and why Trump actually believed his own bullshit about how new, different, and powerful the MAGA movement had become.
I’ve said this more than once, but it bears repeating again. Trump won the 2016 contest because he flipped three blue states (MI, PA, WI) by less than 2/10ths of one percent of the total votes cast in those three states. He then told crowds at more than 60 rallies in 2018 that the mid-terms were a plebiscite on him, and the Democrats picked up 40 seats in the House.
In 2020, he got his ass kicked in and then finished off his campaigning by going down to Georgia to help the GOP retain its presence in the U.S. Senate. The GOP lost both seats.
This is the leader of a new political wave that will reshape the Republican party and consign operatives like Bill Kristol to the sidelines once and for all? Trump’s running such a dingbat operation these days that his new social media site which he claims will bring him a wider audience than he ever got on Twitter was hacked even before it went live.
So, you think for one second that Bill Kristol would have hesitated for even a second if Trump had reached out to him and gotten him onboard his campaign? This is a guy who was Vice President Dan Quayle’s staff chief and realized that the real key to becoming D.C.-indispensable, was to help someone get elected to the only job that really counts in the nation’s capital, which is why he championed Sarah Palin to be on the 2008 GOP ticket with John McCain.
Kristol can now go around and tell everyone that he made a ‘mistake’ in pushing Palin, but he sure wasn’t doubting himself when he did everything possible to make her a serious candidate for Number Two in 2008. The one thing he forgot to do, however, was to somehow give Palin a new brain. Her performance was so crazy, so loony and so stupid that there was no way she would ever make the Presidential grade. Even Trump booted her off his campaign.
On the other hand, what Kristol accomplished in his work for Palin, was something which came home to roost when Trump began putting together his 2016 campaign. What I’m referring to is how, thanks to Palin, the Evangelical movement wasn’t just another voting bloc which the GOP cultivated in red states. In fact, virtually everything that Trump said in 2016 came right out of the Evangelical playbook, in particular his promise to ‘defend’ religion, as if something called the 1st Amendment didn’t exist.
My 7th-grade, public school teacher began every day by telling us to bow our heads while she read a section from the New Testament. Because I’m Jewish I wouldn’t bow my head, so I had to go out of the classroom and stand in the hall, which I didn’t really mind. I never said anything at home because I knew my mother, a devoted liberal, would come to school and make a big stink.
I’m glad that Trump has become a champion of religious freedom. I’m glad that Bill Kristol got another religious leader, Sarah Palin, into the fight. All three deserve each other and next year let’s not forget what Al Capone said – Vote Early, Vote Often. Let’s steal it again.