Bill Maher Slaughters Neocon Bill Kristol

Kristol Podcast: The Democrats" Awful Week

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast, with editor Bill Kristol on the Democrats’ no good, very bad week:

The Weekly Standard

Kristol Podcast: The Democrats" Awful Week

Kristol on the Crisis in Ukraine

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Kristol on the Crisis in Ukraine

Kristol Podcast: If Immigration Reform Is Urgent, Why Didn"t Obama Act?

The WEEKLY STANDARD podcast, with editor William Kristol on why the Republicans shouldn’t move aggressively on immigration reform this year.

The Weekly Standard

Kristol Podcast: If Immigration Reform Is Urgent, Why Didn"t Obama Act?

Kristol Podcast: If Immigration Reform Is Urgent, Why Didn"t Obama Act?

The WEEKLY STANDARD podcast, with editor William Kristol on why the Republicans shouldn’t move aggressively on immigration reform this year.

The Weekly Standard

Kristol Podcast: If Immigration Reform Is Urgent, Why Didn"t Obama Act?

Kristol Podcast: If Immigration Reform Is Urgent, Why Didn"t Obama Act?

The WEEKLY STANDARD podcast, with editor William Kristol on why the Republicans shouldn’t move aggressively on immigration reform this year.

The Weekly Standard

Kristol Podcast: If Immigration Reform Is Urgent, Why Didn"t Obama Act?

Kristol says Obama appeases the new Hitler, Rouhani, making Israel ‘the leader of the west’

Philip Weiss on September 23, 2013 67

As we reported this weekend, Israel and its supporters are flipping out over the apparent thaw between the United States and Iran, precipitated by Obama’s climbdown on Syria. Here is an angry piece by Bill Kristol at the Weekly Standard, calling Obama an appeaser, Rouhani Hitler, Assad Mussolini, and saying that only Israel can lead. It seems the piece is written in desperation: Kristol marshaling what forces he still has at his disposal to head off any understanding between the US and Iran.

There is so much hysteria here that I need to quote a lot of Kristol’s argument to give full measure to his world view. How many Americans share this understanding? Notice Kristol’s extended and repeated Hitler analogies, the characterization of Obama as an appeaser who will leave the U.S. to be eaten by locusts, the overblown tone employing Shakespeare and Churchill references, and the heroic description of Israel as “for now the leader of the West” because it will act against Iran.

Act Two opens at the United Nations. There, we’ll see a charm offensive worthy of Richard III by the new Iranian president and veteran deceiver of the West, Hassan Rouhani. In response, the Obama administration will move on from punting in Syria to appeasing Iran….

Smaller retreats lead to larger ones. The West’s failure to resist Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935—and his troops’ use of poison gas—was merely a foretaste of the failure to resist Hitler when he took the Rhineland in March 1936. In his essay in the volume Present Dangers, the historian Donald Kagan tells the story. Hitler had expected Britain to slap down Mussolini…. Hitler drew the lesson. The occupation of the Rhineland followed shortly.

There will be no Rhineland this time. Iran isn’t 1930s Germany, and the United States is more formidable than Britain. For now, Iran will have to achieve its goals by stealth and diplomacy, while Hitler achieved his by bravado and force. But the accommodation of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons lies ahead as surely as the accommodation of Nazi Germany’s expansionist dreams. Moreover, Rouhani knows what he is doing. He was Iran’s top nuclear negotiator for two critical years a decade ago and proved then his skill at duplicity in the furtherance of his regime’s nuclear ambitions.

And the Obama administration, too, will play its role, echoing the Baldwin government, which Winston Churchill in 1936 characterized as “decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.” Churchill continued, “So we go on preparing more months and years—precious, perhaps vital to the greatness of Britain—for the locusts to eat.”

As Iran moves closer to nuclear weapons, undeterred by the West’s leading power, a 21st-century tragedy threatens to unfold. Unless. Unless a dramatis persona who didn’t exist in 1936 intervenes: Israel. Ariel Sharon once famously said that Israel would not play the role of Czechoslovakia in the 1930s. Nor will it play the role of Poland. Despite imprecations from the Obama administration, Israel will act. One prays it will not be too late.

It is a strange course of events, heavy with historical irony, that has made the prime minister of Israel for now the leader of the West.

Once again this demonstrates the significance of MJ Rosenberg holding the line on the use of the term Israel Firster. Kristol is surely an Israel Firster. But only when people are allowed to talk about this allegiance freely will there actually be a public understanding: that not all Jews are Zionist, that Zionism calls on tribal and paranoid elements inside the Jewish community, and it has helped to build a militarist and discriminatory regime that is more and more isolated from positive world opinion.

Philip Weiss is Founder and Co-Editor of Mondoweiss.net.

View all posts by Philip Weiss →

WHAT REALLY HAPPENED

Kristol says Obama appeases the new Hitler, Rouhani, making Israel ‘the leader of the west’

Kristol Podcast: What is the Obama Doctrine?

DVIDSHUB via Flickr

The WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with editor William Kristol on the extended embassy closings, the global war on terrorism, and America’s stature in the Middle East under the Obama Doctrine.

The Weekly Standard

Kristol Podcast: What is the Obama Doctrine?

Lowry, Kristol march in "lox" step

Kristol and Lowry joined forces to make a bigger impact on House Republicans.

William Kristol, The Weekly Standard editor, and Rich Lowry, The National Review editor, are two highly influential conservatives in charge of their own highly influential publications. So the decision to co-author and co-publish a joint editorial calling on Congress to kill the Senate’s immigration bill shows just how much of an impact they wanted to have on House Republicans.

“We both felt strongly about something and we were hoping to move conservatives on it,” Lowry told POLITICO on Wednesday.

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By joining forces, Kristol and Lowry saw a chance to make a bigger impact on House Republicans than either of them could have alone. And indeed, the joint byline made headlines around Washington. It was no longer Kristol or Lowry making an argument, but “top conservative pundits” teaming up ahead of a crucial House meeting Wednesday to plot strategy. Lowry is also a columnist for POLITICO.

Red State editor Erick Erickson said both men are “two of the most influential thought leaders” in the GOP who often don’t see eye to eye.

“That they do agree and have the ear of separate groups within the congressional GOP makes it pretty clear that the stars are aligned against passage of the legislation in its present form,” Erickson said in an email to POLITICO. “The counter strategy by those who favor the Gang of 8 bill will be to divide and conquer, i.e. hoping to get one of them to like some compromised form of the legislation.”

The idea to join forces was Kristol’s. The plan to go in on a joint byline was hatched over breakfast at The Astro Diner in midtown Manhattan.

“Bill had lox, onions and eggs, because you can’t get those in Northern Virginia, and I had pancakes,” said Lowry, who is based in New York. “Then we lamented how our wives don’t like homey run-down diners.” Once “favorably disposed” toward the immigration bill, as he wrote in the op-ed, Kristol had come to believe as Lowry did that it was “a comprehensive mistake.”

“Bill had evolved on the bill,” Lowry explained. “We discussed where we were at breakfast, and it was basically the same place. Then it was Bill’s brainstorm: he sent me an email, I expanded on it, then we edited and edited until it was done.” (Kristol, who is traveling in England, was not available for comment.)

In the piece, published in both The Weekly Standard and The National Review, the authors argue that the bill “doesn’t solve the illegal-immigration problem” and that its “changes in legal immigration are just as ill considered.”

Republicans “can be pro-immigrant and pro-immigration, and even favor legalization of the 11 million illegal immigrants who are here and increases in some categories of legal immigration—and vigorously oppose this bill,” they write.

This was not their first op-ed together. Kristol and Lowry have known each other since the mid-1990s (Lowry described them as friends), and in 2006 co-authored a piece for The Washington Post calling on President Bush to send more troops to Iraq. In that instance, the roles were reversed: Lowry initially opposed a troop surge, then came around to Kristol’s view.

“I’d been skeptical about need for more troops, then realized I was wrong and moved to Bill’s direction — it was similar circumstances,” Lowry said.

Coming together this time was another chance to make waves across Washington, something that was especially important at a time when conservatives were split over the immigration bill. On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote its own piece urging House Republicans not to walk away from the bill and instead “consider and pass the parts [of the bill] that are pro-growth and that most Republicans support.”

“House Speaker John Boehner… and his colleagues face a fundamental choice: kill immigration reform, or try to pass constructive and pro-growth measures that have broad public and business support, including from millions of conservatives,” the editorial board wrote. “The first option would be a policy blunder and perhaps a political disaster… To fail to fix any part of an immigration system that everyone agrees is contrary to U.S. economic interests, and after the Senate has passed a bipartisan reform, would play into Democratic charges that House Republicans are mere obstructionists.”

Lowry told POLITICO, “I don’t have a problem with the House passing stuff that makes sense. But it should be pretty far from the Senate version, and it shouldn’t go to conference.”

But as the House met on Wednesday, even the smaller, popular pieces of reform looked like they would fail House approval, and top Republicans are now predicting that comprehensive immigration reform will die in the House.

Now as in 2006, Kristol and Lowry seem likely to get their way.

POLITICO – TOP Stories

Lowry, Kristol march in "lox" step

Kristol To House GOP On Immigration: No Capitulation, No Comprehensive Bill, No Conference

BILL KRISTOL: They can get what they want to get in the Senate. It’s still going to be, of course, a minority, maybe a third or so of Senate Republicans voting for it. I think it’s bad legislation. The more you look at it, the worse it gets. The jamming it through, the vote last night on cloture. That I really find hard to forgive for Republicans. I mean, if they believe in this bill, they should be willing to debate it for a couple of weeks, let people go home and discuss it with their constituents over July 4th. That was Harry Reid’s cloture motion. That’s not voting for Marco Rubio. That’s voting for Harry Reid, and the Republicans who voted for cloture are going to have to explain, I think, why they’re scared of a debate on this bill. The other consequence of this, I think, is the House, and I talked to a House Republican last night. They are in a state, and I think not only are they not going to take up the Senate bill — they may move some small immigration bills of their own focusing on border security and a few other things — but I think they’re now of the attitude, and I agree with this, that they should be careful not to get sucked into some kind of conference for the Senate bill, where it could come back to the House. It would be hard for Boehner not to bring it back up, and then it could pass with a majority of Democrats in the House. I think they’re very wary of falling into some sort of legislative trap where even though a majority of House Republicans don’t want this bill, it could end up being very hard for them to block it.

So, I think you’ll see in the next couple of weeks House Republicans moving to not just not take up the Senate bill, certainly not rubber stamp it or not even take it up, but also try to figure out how to avoid going to conference for the Senate bill. The slogan, “No conference for the Senate bill,” I really think that’s the right thing for House Republicans to do, and I hope they do it.

MICHAEL GRAHAM: Would they be able to offer a counter-proposal to confront the notion that Republicans are just the party of no, they just resist everything? Could they put together a package of border security issues, workplace enforcement and then the possibility that if targets are met that there’d be some legalization of the people who are here without getting themselves into a conference trap?

KRISTOL: Sure, they could pass individual pieces of legislation or knit them together as they wish. That’s not going to be easy. This is a hard problem, and in some cases maybe deciding just to do nothing for now and revisit it in a year or two, but I hope they can pass pieces of legislation. I think the key then is to say, “Look, the Senate should take up this legislation.” The Senate could amend it, the Senate could send it back to us. That’s traditionally the way legislation often gets worked out. But we are not going to let you use as an excuse for going to conference some piece of border security legislation or guest worker legislation or high-tech visa legislation that we pass. Because once they go to conference, the Senate can dominate the conference, the few renegade House Republicans can team with House Democrats to end up with a conference report. Then the speaker’s in the position of is he not going to bring up a conference report? And once it gets to the floor, it can be passed with overwhelmingly Democratic votes in the House. So, it’s a little technical, I guess, as a legislative process matter, but I think it’s very important that House Republicans, on the one hand, put forward their own ideas, absolutely, but on the other hand, take the position: no capitulation to the Senate bill. I’d say no comprehensive legislation in the way comprehensive is being used — 1,200 page bill full of pork and exceptions and waivers and all that. So no capitulation, no comprehensive legislation and no conference with the Senate bill.

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Kristol To House GOP On Immigration: No Capitulation, No Comprehensive Bill, No Conference