Bill Kristol, professional buffoon

Note to Andrew Rosenthal: It's nice that your daddy was friends with Bill Kristol's daddy. But dude? You may want to rethink this little op-ed gig you gave him. Especially after his latest embarrassment:

Early Friday, I went to the Real Clear Politics Web site, as I do every morning, for my fix of political news and commentary. I perked up when I saw the third entry on the list of that day’s notable articles — “No. 44 Has Spoken.”

“Hank Aaron has spoken? Wow,” I thought as I clicked through.

Yes, it's Bill Kristol, professional papa's boy and perennial Mr. Wrong, pretending he's a Troo AMERIKAN!11!!1! He likes baseball! He likes Hank Aaron! He's trying for the same right-wing populist shtick that Rush Limbaugh works when he isn't spending his millions on Oxycontin and admitting he's a right-wing water carrier.

Said shtick involves Kristol being really disappointed that Der Spiegel was writing about Barack Obama and not Hank Aaron. Actually, I think Kristol made up the part about Hank Aaron, as Real Clear Politics and Der Spiegel aren't really known for extensive sports coverage, and Aaron retired, oh, about 30 years ago.

The column degenerates into a sigh-fest over press coverage of Barack Obama, and Kristol comes perilously close to Crybaby Conservative Territory.

Don’t the American people get a chance to weigh in on this in November? Maybe they’ll decide it’s more important to have John McCain as commander in chief than Barack Obama as orator in chief. Maybe they’ll further suspect that 200,000 Germans can’t be right.

I was cheered up by this notion.

But the next morning, as I drove around the Washington suburbs, I saw not one but two cars — rather nice cars, as it happens — festooned with the Obama campaign bumper sticker “got hope?” And I relapsed into moroseness.

All together now: Awwwwwwww. Poor widdle Billy Kwistol...

But never fear. Billy has been trying to think happy thoughts:

Later that day, I read a report of a fund-raising letter from Obama on behalf of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, arguing that “We must have a deadlock-proof Democratic majority.”

Yikes.

But then it occurred to me that one man’s “deadlock-proof” Democratic majority is another’s unchecked Democratic majority.

I take this to mean Kristol really had qualms about the GOP's hammerlock on Congress and Capitol Hill from 2002 to 2006. Right? Now here's Kristol trying to do his best imitation of a concern troll:

Given the unpopularity of the current Democratic Congress, given Americans’ tendency to prefer divided government, given the voters’ repudiations of the Republicans in 2006 and of the Democrats in 1994 — isn’t the prospect of across-the-board, one-party Democratic governance more likely to move votes to McCain than to Obama?

Now the dude's confused. Has he forgotten his party's recent history? Yes, the current Congress, which maintains a slender Dem majority, remains unpopular. But this has been no benefit whatsoever to the Republicans running for office. The current, wildly unpopular Republican president probably has something to do with it. And like the current slate of GOP senators and congresscritters running for office, Kristol avoids mentioning the big "B" in his current screed.

Now for some more wishful thinking on Kristol's part:

We’ll soon start hearing more from McCain about the deficiencies of today’s surge-opposing, drilling-blocking, earmark-loving Congress.

As soon as McCain completes his recent tour of supermarkets and sausage restaurants, that is.

And McCain will then assert that if you don’t like the Congress in which Senator Obama serves in the majority right now, you really should be alarmed about a President Obama rubber-stamping the deeds of a Democratic Congress next year.

Billy, Billy, Billy. Are you trying to set up McCain to fail? Because these nefarious Democratic ideas include things like health care for soldiers and reasonable time between deployments. McCain voted against them all. McCain didn't even show up to vote for most Iraq war resolutions. If you have your way, his Senate record will come back to bite him on the ass.

Someone give this guy a think-tank job where he can talk out his nether regions to his heart's content. Please.