As I've noted before, taking Bill Kristol at face value, rather than with a view to theBill Kristol: Would that grin lie? agenda he's trying to advance, is perilous. So Kristol's remarks at AIPAC arguing that "[t]here are actually no [significant foreign policy] disputes...with the exception of Iraq" between Barack Obama and John McCain --- a scant month and a half after Kristol accused Obama of being a crypto-Communist, and the very same day that he accused Obama of being insufficiently patriotic --- are baffling on several levels. Fortunately, John Schwenkler very nearly found the decoder ring:

[C]ould it be - could it be? - that, sly, unscrupulous, and politically sensitive weasel that he is, Mr. Kristol is aware that, on pretty much every foreign policy issue at stake in this election (including, of course, those issues with respect to which the candidates' disagreements are obviously inescapable), the voting populace is largely in sympathy with (what are at least perceived to be) the views of Senator Obama? Could it be that Ezra Klein's greatest dream - that the media will actually report on the differences between the presidential candidates - is Bill Kristol's worst nightmare, and that for this reason he is taking steps to prevent this from happening?

That's almost exactly right up until the last point. Yes, it's true that throwing up a wall of bullshit to deflect attention from your candidate's deeply unpopular views is a potentially effective means of helping him creep to victory on the strength of contentless non-issues --- like, say, whether his opponent is an insufficiently patriotic crypto-Communist. But to conclude that's all Kristol is up to doesn't give him nearly enough credit for a long-term vision, at least when it comes to tactical moves in the Republican party's internal turf wars. Campaigning on xenophobia, guilt by association, and red-baiting has desperate and unintentionally self-parodic qualities this year that it didn't have as recently as 2004. The likelihood is that John McCain will lose; if and when he loses, the multilateral truce among neos, paleos, reformists, and GOP hacks --- which is about as fragile as the truce in Basra to begin with --- is going to shatter before Obama's victory speech ends.

The neocons are in a decidedly weak position. Fairly or not, it's their foreign policy more than anything else that has made the name of the GOP radioactive --- and even worse for Republican partisans, has destroyed the party's nearly 40-year-old, frequently decisive advantage on national security. And though the Republicans somehow stumbled into nominating their only candidate with a prayer of victory, they exposed the neocons to even more risk by choosing, in John McCain, the most prominent exponent of their philosophy in American politics. Honest neocons like Lawrence Kaplan readily concede that neoconservatism's future rests on McCain's shoulders. Kristol, on the other hand, is trying to reframe the debate to obscure its ramifications for his ideology in case McCain loses.

Leon Wieseltier has a meandering, conceptually confused, pointless essay in the upcoming issue of TNR sort of criticizing the latest loathsome hit piece from Bill Kristol, sort of defending it, but mostly subjecting readers to a masturbatory public display that goes on for just about 1000 words and feels like ten times that number. As Wieseltier winds things out having proved nothing, argued for nothing, expressed no worthwhile insight, and informed no one of anything, the masochistic reader who makes it all the way to the end is treated to this:

And now for the grossly undialectical bit. The ink on the Times was not yet dry when Andrew Sullivan rushed to the defense of his idol, I mean Obama. When one types all the time, sooner or later everything will be typed, and so Sullivan, in his fury against Kristol, typed this: "A non-Christian manipulator of Christianity is calling a Christian a liar about his faith." Ponder that early adjective. It is Jew baiting. I was not aware that only Christians can judge Christians, or that there are things about which a Jew cannot call a Christian a liar. If Kristol is wrong about Obama, it is not because Kristol is a Jew. So this fills me with a certain paschal wrath. Nice little blog you have there, Obama boy. Pity if frogs or locusts should happen to it. Let my people be!

"Ponder that early adjective," Wieseltier writes, referring to Sullivan's description ofThe Most Preposterously Overrated Cocktail Conversationalist On Earth Kristol as a "non-Christian manipulator of Christianity." If you're not determined to be a willfully obtuse prick, then also ponder the noun it modifies --- "manipulator." What Sullivan is obviously saying is that Kristol's affectation of taking offense to a slight to Christianity is a transparently cynical imposture on the part of a man who in fact regards sincere Christians as an alien species that happens to be useful in serving his electoral ends. Why is it obvious that that's what Sullivan is saying? That question has an overdetermined answer: It's obvious because, agree or disagree with him generally, Sullivan is obviously not a "Jew baiter" of any kind; it's obvious because the context of Sullivan's criticism of Kristol makes it obvious; and most of all, it's obvious because no honest, competent, minimally-educated speaker of the English language could interpret Sullivan any other way.

However, if, like Wieseltier, you'll let nothing stop you from being a willfully obtuse prick --- say, because you think it's okay to smear somebody as an antisemite if that'll help even scores in a twelve-year-old schoolyard feud, and your editor doesn't have the guts to tell you "no" --- you'll hardly let little things like intellectual defensibility or fundamental decency get in the way of a satisfying slander. And if you've gotten that far thinking your case that Sullivan is a bigot could persuade anyone who read the original quote --- or didn't read the original but knows anything about Sullivan, or didn't read the original and doesn't know anything about Sullivan but knows the definitions of English words and idioms and the syntactic rules combining them into sentences --- you're not terribly likely to notice the irony of first accusing a 44-year-old married gay man with degrees from Oxford and Harvard of "Jew baiting" and then calling him a "boy."

Of course Wieseltier didn't intend an anti-gay slur (except in the accidental allusion to Obama girl and the implication it entails that Sullivan's attraction to Obama's candidacy is sexual). All Wieseltier intended was an ugly cheap shot at an old enemy, and was so intent on getting the cheap shot off that he didn't mind its being a witless non-sequitur --- though nothing in the Wieseltier piece follows from anything else, so this particular digression into inanity isn't necessarily suggestive. But never mind any of that. Let's adopt Wieseltier's interpretive standards. By those lights, Wieseltier has leveled a disgraceful swipe at the dignity of gay men and women, and should be held accountable for it.

There is no reasonable interpretive standard under which Wieseltier is guilty of gay-baiting, and even if Wieseltier can't be bothered to extend intepretive charity, you and I are better than Wieseltier and should do so. No matter how forgiving our interpretive standards, however, there is no way of getting Wieseltier off the hook for his suggestion that the smear of Sullivan is the only "grossly undialectical bit" in his essay. No public intellectual is able to pack more elementary philosophical errors --- mistakes for which a sophomore concentrator in a rigorous course would be swiftly reprimanded and never make again --- into fewer column inches than Wieseltier, and his latest conceptual trainwreck doesn't fail to deliver its share of whoppers. I'll mention only one, which is perhaps the most telling. Discussing the motives behind religious belief, Wieseltier writes that "It is because suffering is so hospitable to illusion that philosophers have often made an ideal out of lucidity."

Sorry no, that's simply wrong. The first consciously philosophical embrace of lucidity as an ideal comes from Plato's Republic, in the form of an argument that allowing standards of lucidity to grow lax will leave the politeia vulnerable to political demagogues. Nearer to our own time, when philosophy adopted lucidity as a necessary but insufficient standard for getting to take part in the enterprise at all, it was as part of a turn away from metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics, and towards language and logic, on the grounds that slovenly logic had produced philosophical abortions like, say, most of the corpus of Continental post-Hegelianism at the turn of the twentieth century. For both the Greek logicians and the founders of analytic philosophy --- the schools that accord lucidity a place among the chief philosophical virtues --- lucidity is virtuous because it is necessary for doing good philosophy. Ponderous introspection about notions like "the nature of suffering," on the other hand, tends to be a hallmark of excruciatingly bad philosophy. (Not that it's impossible to do that sort of thing well; but the odds are stacked against it.)

Why is this confusion important? Because it dramatically sharpens the contrast between what Leon Wieseltier thinks he knows, and what Leon Wieseltier actually knows. It takes a staggering ignorance of the philosophical tradition to make Wieseltier's claim, an ignorance that pervades virtually everything he writes about the subject. (Read this if you think that's hyperbole.) Which raises the question, How could someone who knows so little philosophy and is so bad at the philosophy he does know conjure up the arrogance required to make embarrassingly misinformed, sweeping generalizations about it? In researching the origins of Wieseltier's beef with Sullivan (the rumor is that Wieseltier helped engineer Sullivan's ouster from TNR), I think I found the answer in an old Sam Tanenhaus profile of the pompous fraud:

A prestigious Kellett fellowship took Wieseltier to Oxford in the fall of 1974 to study philosophy, but when he got there ''philosophy at Oxford was in transports of logical notation,'' he remembers. ''I had no interest in studying mathematical logic or the logical analysis of language.''

Allow me to translate that: Real philosophy is hard, so rather than even try to do it, Wieseltier spent his fellowship sucking up to Isaiah Berlin and quit grad school a few years later, at a time when it was still possible to become a celebrated public intellectual without having expertise in anything. Over the next thirty some-odd years, having turned enough clever phrases and misappropriated enough philosophical concepts to secure a reputation among easily deceived people as a learned man --- thereby validating Plato's warning --- Wieseltier came to believe his own delusional self-flattery.

Which brings us, finally, to the voice in the whirlwind coda to the smear of Sullivan, wherein he enjoins God to bring plagues down on Sullivan's blog. Since the first four paragraphs of the essay have no point, the puerile score-settling of the last paragraph at least serves to lend them a vicarious point. But why leave it at that? Surely Wieseltier could not be expected to pass up the opportunity the calendar provides him to compare himself to Moses --- or, as he would prefer, gives Moses the opportunity to be compared to Leon Wieseltier.

One month ago, John McCain looked set to limp into the general election much like Bob Dole did 12 years ago, only at a much greater financial disadvantage and against a stronger candidate.

Then, just before the weekend, video surfaced of some of Barack Obama's spiritual advisor JeremiahBarack Obama and Jeremiah Wright Wright's best sermonizing, and the media unsurprisingly went to town. Wright's general message had hardly been a secret, but actually seeing him pronounce judgment on the country ("God damn America") and Barack Obama's rivals ("Hillary Clinton ain't never been called a nigger") connects on a gut level that merely reading about his exploits never approaches. Obama hardly helped his cause with an overly broad and frankly unbelievable denial --- "the statements...were not statements I personally heard " --- that has sent reporters trawling through archives to see if they could place Obama at the Trinity church during one of Wright's blame-America-fests.

Suddenly, McCain's general election strategy was written for him: Step 1) Allow the RNC and outside groups to play the Wright videos on an endless loop; step 2) sit back and take the occasional trip to Iraq; step 3) victory. It's hard to imagine how McCain or his supporters could have overplayed the inside straight they'd been dealt.

Leave it to Bill Kristol to overplay a strong hand, and embarrass everyone he's associated with in the process. Kristol's New York Times column today attempts to place Obama at the scene of a particularly noxious Wright sermon. It's a hell of a gotcha; the only problem is that it's blatantly false, as Marc Ambinder showed (given his 7:11 am timestamp) handily despite just having gotten out of bed. Kristol's error begins in describing the Newsmax.com writer, Ronald Kessler, from whom he'd gotten the non-scoop, as a "journalist." Even Kristol's lame correction, which essentially disembowels the whole piece, manages to describe a specimen of writing from Newsmax as a "report."

While it isn't exactly a shock that Kristol would launder fabrications from a sub-tabloid quality propaganda merchant through the Grey Lady, the fact that the Times couldn't be bothered to double-check Kristol, presumably in possession of some knowledge of what their newest hire considers journalism, is at least a mild surprise.

None of this is to deny that Obama really does have a problem, and has some questions to answer. Pace Josh Marshall, there is plenty of material in Wright's preaching "that doesn’t come out of the sermon tradition of African-American Christianity with a 60s twist." (Martin Luther King, for one, never said "God damn America," and there is hardly a better example of African-American Christianity with a 60s twist.) No, it isn't fair to tie Obama to Wright's beliefs --- he plainly doesn't share them --- but that hardly means that projecting Wright's sermons onto Obama won't be an effective tactic.

Still, the takeaway lesson from Kristol's goof applies broadly: Don't credulously buy into "reporting" at websites that routinely make things up, because they routinely makes things up. And if you're a scrivener hoping to damage Obama and you're prepared to bend the truth to do so, be sure that your fabrications can't be instantly exposed. Otherwise you might make the story about you rather than your quarry.

Last week, after the New York Times announced Bill Kristol as the newest addition to its roster of columnists, prompting a predictable (though not necessarily unjustified) mix of outrage and bewilderment among liberals, Jack Shafer rose to the Grey Lady's defense. No need to recite Kristol's many, many faults, we all know what they are. Shafer argued they shouldn't be disqualifying:

Pundits shouldn't lose or win gigs on the basis of how many of their predictions come true but whether they write interesting copy. Kristol—love him or hate him—writes interesting copy...

I can't promise that he'll be good, but he'll be different, he'll be interesting, and I guarantee he'll never be as bad as Roger Cohen.

Fair enough, I thought. I don't read op-eds in order to agree with them, and who knows, maybe time will pardon Kristol for writing well --- or at least interestingly.

Well, as you may have seen, Kristol's first offering from atop his new perch is out today, and as it turns out, Kristol, in addition to not being good, wasn't interesting, wasn't different, and was worse than Roger Cohen. Take a look at Kristol's opening paragraphs:

Thank you, Senator Obama. You’ve defeated Senator Clinton in Iowa. It looks as if you’re about to beat her in New Hampshire. There will be no Clinton Restoration. A nation turns its grateful eyes to you.

But gratitude for sparing us a third Clinton term only goes so far. Who, inquiring minds want to know, is going to spare us a first Obama term? After all, for all his ability and charm, Barack Obama is still a liberal Democrat. Some of us would much prefer a non-liberal and non-Democratic administration. We don’t want to increase the scope of the nanny state, we don’t want to undo the good done by the appointments of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, and we really don’t want to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory in Iraq.

Even if you agree with the sentiment, ask yourself, if you read these lines without knowing their source, would you be more likely to attribute them to (a) a New York Times columnist, or (b) a branch office of the College Republicans? Kristol employs precisely two modes of expression here, the cliched ("a nation turns its grateful eyes," "inquiring minds want to know," "snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory") and the hackneyed ("[insert name here] is a liberal Democrat"). The cherry on top, the icing on the cake, the gilding of the lily, the coup-de-grace --- or so you might call it --- is Kristol's discordant clunker, "After all, for all...." Did anybody read this thing out loud before it went to print?

The column is an even more embarrassing failure in content than in style. As James Fallows points out in the midst of making a writing workshop out of the Kristol piece, "the subject -- how the GOP should run against Barack Obama -- is one on which readers would want to hear a well-connected Republican's views." And the best this well-connected Republican has got is "Barack Obama is a liberal Democrat." The reason this is risible is not that the GOP won't use that as an attack line (they will), and it's not that it will necessarily be ineffective (it's worked before), but that it's no different from what a poorly-connected Republican party functionary would come up with just ad-libbing.

Even Kristol's effort to be a contrarian is phoned in. The larger point of the column --- an argument for not writing off Mike Huckabee's viability as a general election candidate --- is certainly counterintuitive, and the reason it's counterintuitive is that it's fantastically implausible. Which raises (N.B.: doesn't beg) the question of whether it's plausible to think Kristol actually believes any of this.

Consider: Huckabee won the Iowa caucuses by winning most of the support of the evangelicals who made up 60% of Iowa's Republican electorate, and losing most of the rest of the Republican vote. Kristol, does, presumably, know that the conditions that give Huckabee a leg up in internal Republican politics cap his general election prospects well below 50% (if not, he really ought to read the writers under his aegis). Moreover, since Kristol is discussing Huckabee's viability in the context of a campaign against Obama, let's not forget that a Huckabee nomination would neutralize Obama's only real vulnerability, namely Obama's relative inexperience in national politics. Finally, is it at all believable that Kristol wouldn't have heard about Huckabee's profound cluelessness on foreign policy --- an issue which Kristol is known to care about somewhat, and which, in the very same column, he suggests would be a liability in an Obama candidacy? (Last we heard from Huckabee, he was pushing for a foreign policy triangulation between Tom Friedman and Frank Gaffney.)

Several weeks ago I noticed that before the rise of Huckabee, in the course of touting Joe Lieberman as a Republican vice-presidential candidate, Kristol promoted (among other possibilities) a Huckabee-Lieberman ticket. I couldn't believe then that this was anything other than a Straussian sop to the Christian right, just as I can't believe now that Kristol's Huckabee boosterism is sincere. I thus readily confess to having no bleeding idea what Kristol is trying to achieve with this column --- and neither do you.

Bill Buckley might have been a fine New York Times columnist. Christopher Caldwell would be an excellent one. Pat Buchanan would at least pass Shafer's interesting, different, and better than Roger Cohen test. If the Times needed an insightful neocon, they could have called Eli Lake. As for Kristol, Matt Yglesias is right, somebody whose writing takes a decoder ring to decipher --- even if the comprehensible bits weren't lazy and insensible --- doesn't need to be wasting column inches anywhere, let alone a paper whose editors he feels should be prosecuted for committing journalism. Heckuva job, Pinchy.

Coda: Kristol also managed to misattribute a Michael Medved quote to Michelle Malkin. Now that's lazy.