What's the Deal With Bill Kristol?

No doubt many of you are wondering what the deal is with Weekly Standard Editor and long-time neo-conservative columnist Bill Kristol and his single-minded efforts to hand the presidency to Hillary Clinton by convincing some poor, unsuspecting schlub to mount a run as a third-party candidate.  I don’t know Mr. Kristol personally, but this is really not all that hard to figure out.

There are two main motivations at play here:  Vanity, and a maniacal desire to protect Israel.

Kristol obviously wants us all to believe that it’s all about political principles with him, that he just can’t stomach the thought of a man he considers to be a low-life, Donald Trump, occupying the White House for the next four to eight years.  And that would all be well and good and perfectly acceptable as an explanation had Mr. Kristol not on several occasions uttered with his very next breath that he’d be perfectly fine with Mrs. Clinton obtaining the presidency as the results of his own actions.

Note to Bill:  There simply is no conservative political principle that can turn Hillary Clinton into a preferable president over the GOP nominee.  There just isn’t.  Sorry, but that cat don’t flush.

No, principle isn’t it.

A big part of Kristol’s motivation is obviously vanity – or hubris might even be a better word for it.  For the last few months since he became the titular leader of this doomed-to-fail cause, he has suddenly become the liberals’ favorite conservative in Washington, and he obviously delights in all the attention he is getting.  He obviously relishes his daily appearances as the fake-conservative talking head of choice on MSNBC.  He no doubt loves being the lead story at times on CNN and NBC.  He probably even finds himself suddenly being invited to fancy dinner parties and receptions from which he has been excluded for decades, and finds he really enjoys the high dollar hors d’ouevres that are being served.

In other words, he’s become John McCain circa 2006 or Lindsey Graham circa 2012, and he likes it.  No shame in it, really – it happens to lots of “conservatives”.

But Kristol’s biggest motivation always has been the protection of the state of Israel.  Advocating for U.S. maintenance of its special relationship with Israel has always been a centerpiece of his writings throughout his career. 

That’s a noble cause, and one with which I entirely agree. 

The problem with Kristol is not the cause, but the methods.  He obviously believes that the best way to ensure that the U.S. will never abandon its most loyal ally is to ensure that our country becomes entangled in every bloody conflict that erupts in the entire Middle East.  At the rare times in which no such conflicts present themselves, Kristol invariably advocates that the U.S. invent them, as he did with his tireless advocacy for the invasion of Iraq.  Involvement in all of these conflicts ensures that the U.S. must maintain a major military presence in the region, thus ensuring our ability to quickly intervene on Israel’s behalf should it be attacked by the hostile nations that surround it.

The truth here is that Kristol realizes that Donald Trump understands that the U.S. no longer needs to be dependent upon the importing of millions of barrels of crude oil each day from Middle Eastern producers, thanks to our ability now to extract oil from previously inaccessible shale formations.  For the last 70 years, that need has created a strategic national interest for the U.S. in ensuring the free flow of oil out of the Persian Gulf.

Trump understands that that strategic national interest no longer exists, and that, in Kristol’s mind, makes him a very dangerous man who must be defeated by any means necessary, even if that means handing the presidency to Hillary Clinton and giving her 3 to 4 appointees to the Supreme Court.

The other truth here is that Kristol loved the foreign policy decisions made by Mrs. Clinton and President Obama while she was Secretary of State.  He was all for getting the U.S. tangled up in a civil war in Syria, even though that meant literally arming and creating ISIS as it exists today.  And he was all for our disastrous military involvement in Libya, even though our country had zero strategic interest to intervene in that country.  And he was all for U.S. promotion of the “Arab Spring” movement, since it destabilized several governments in the Middle East, and destabilization always ensures the creation of more bloody conflicts.

Because all of those horrible decisions and all of those disastrous policies work to ensure the U.S. maintenance of a major military presence in the Middle East.

This is how Bill Kristol’s mind works.  Don’t kid yourself otherwise by attributing some principled motivation to him.  But do pity the poor schlub he has apparently convinced to become his own personal sacrificial lamb in this election season.