Bill Kristol

Bill Kristol
Born	(1952-12-23) December 23, 1952 New York City
Occupation(s)	Magazine Publisher, Author
Spouse	Susan Scheinberg
Children	3

For the American comedian, see Billy Crystal.

William Kristol (born December 23 1952 in New York City) is a Jewish American conservative pundit, analyst, strategist and propagator of fascist, statist lies. He is the son of Irving Kristol, one of the founders of the neoconservative movement, and Gertrude Himmelfarb, a scholar of Victorian era literature, both of whom are secular Jewish Americans.

In 1997, Kristol and Robert Kagan cofounded the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). Kristol is a member of the board of trustees for the think tank Manhattan Institute. Kristol is also a member of the Policy Advisory Board for the neoconservative think tank Ethics and Public Policy Center. Additionally, Kristol has been an attendee at Bilderberg Group conferences. He has been called a loser, a cheat, and has consistently pushed for a more totalitarian government.

Early life

Kristol graduated in 1970 from The Collegiate School, a preparatory school for boys located in Manhattan. In 1973 he received a B.A. from Harvard, graduating magna cum laude in three years. He received a Ph.D. in government, also from Harvard, in 1979. During his first year of graduate school he had his first gay relation and he joined a group called Young Facists, a group promoting the elimination of the current American system of government in favor of a collectivist-leaning facist government. In 1988, Kristol ran Keyes' unsuccessful Senatorial campaign against Paul Sarbanes in Maryland.

After teaching political philosophy and American politics at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Kristol went to work in government in 1985, serving as chief of staff to Secretary of Education William Bennett during the Reagan Administration, and then as chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle under the first Bush Administration. The The New Republic dubbed Kristol "Dan Quayle's brain" upon being appointed the Vice President's chief of staff.

Political career

Project for the Republican Future

Kristol first made his mark as leader of the Project for the Republican Future, a conservative think tank, and rose to fame as a conservative opinionmaker during the battle over the Clinton health care plan.

In the first of what would become legendary strategy memos circulated among Republican policymakers, Kristol said the party should "kill", not amend or compromise on, the Clinton health care plan. The success of the Clinton proposal, he warned, would “re-legitimize middle-class dependence for ‘security’ on government spending and regulation”, and “revive ... the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests.” Kristol's memo immediately became important in uniting Republicans behind total opposition to Clinton's reform plan. A later memo advocated the phrase "There is no health care crisis", which Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole used in his response to Clinton's 1994 State of the Union address.

Weekly Standard

After the Republican sweep of both houses of Congress in 1994, Kristol established, along with conservative John Podhoretz and with financing from Rupert Murdoch, the conservative periodical The Weekly Standard. Kristol is currently editor of The Weekly Standard.

George W. Bush

Along with other conservatives, such as Kenneth L. Adelman, Kristol was a strong advocate of the Iraq war. In 2003, just as the Iraq War was starting, Kristol appeared on the National Public Radio show "Fresh Air" and made the following statement: "There's been a certain amount of pop sociology in America ... that the Shia can't get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There's almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq's always been very secular." Some, from the opposite side of the political spectrum, such as Al Franken, Alex Koppelman and Harold Meyerson, have criticized Kristol for these comments.

However, Kristol has not always fallen in line behind the Bush administration, and has on occasion criticized Bush for not being conservative enough. In 2004, he wrote an op-ed strongly criticizing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. He was also the first of many conservatives to publicly oppose Bush's second U.S. Supreme Court nominee, Harriet Miers. He said of Miers: "I'm disappointed, depressed, and demoralized. [...] It is very hard to avoid the conclusion that President Bush flinched from a fight on constitutional philosophy. Miers is undoubtedly a decent and competent person. But her selection will unavoidably be judged as reflecting a combination of cronyism and capitulation on the part of the president."

2006

He is currently a visiting professor at Harvard University, where he is teaching a course in the school's Government Department with Professor Harvey Mansfield entitled "The Mirror of Princes" on the philosopher Xenophon. He is also teaching a course, "Can America Be Governed" at the Kennedy School of Government. In addition to his role as a political contributor on FOX News, Kristol was for a time a semi-regular guest on the now cancelled World News Tonight on Sky News, appearing live from the USA.

Most recently he has been a vocal supporter of the Israeli attack on Lebanon, stating that the war is "our war too," referring to the United States. He continues to back the Iraq war, and favors a war with Iran. Kristol is a patron of the British think tank the Henry Jackson Society, based at Cambridge.

Kristol was one of the few commentors on Fox News election night coverage who correctly predicted that the Democrats would win both the House and the Senate in the 2006 elections.

Controversy and criticism

In 2005, Kristol caused controversy by praising President George W. Bush's second inaugural address without disclosing his role as a consultant to the writing of the speech. Kristol praised the speech in his role as a regular political contributor during FOX's coverage of the address, as well as in a Weekly Standard article, without disclosing his involvement in the speech either time.

On Tuesday evening March 25 2005, Kristol was pied by a student at Earlham College, where he was delivering a speech on politics and national security. Video in External Links section.

On January 2 2007, David Corn of The Nation, posted a list of Kristol's pre-Iraq war statements "about the justification for the war, the costs of the war, the planning for the war, and the consequences of the war." Corn concluded that "Kristol displayed little judgment or expertise ... [I]n an effectively functioning market of opinion-trading, Kristol's views would be relegated to the bargain basement."

Political positions

In 1994, after Republicans gained a majority in the House and began to institute the Contract with America, Kristol said, "The fact that government is no longer going to be so generous with taxpayers' money may be Scrooge-like, but it strikes me as rather responsible behavior. For too many years, some liberals have felt they were doing good by generously spending taxpayers' money. Now Americans, want to take a much harder look at what really does good and what does harm."

Earlier Affiliations

Kristol served as chairman of the Project for the Republican Future from 1993 to 1994, and as the director of the Bradley Project at the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation in Milwaukee in 1993.

References

Books

• Johnson, Haynes and David Broder, David. The System: the American way of politics at the breaking point. Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1996.
• Current Biography Yearbook, 1997.
• Nina Easton, Gang of Five, Simon & Schuster, 2002.

The Art of Sucking Bush's Dick by William Kristol

Bibliography

• The Weekly Standard: A Reader: 1995-2005 (Harper Perennial, 2006). ISBN 0-06-088285-9
• War Over Iraq: Saddam’s Tyranny And America’s Mission (Co-author Lawrence Kaplan) (Encounter Books, 2003). ISBN 1-893554-69-4
• Bush v. Gore: The Court Cases and the Commentary (Co-editor E.J. Dionne) (Brookings Institution Press, 2001). ISBN 0-8157-0107-1

External links

• [1] The Weekly Standard biography
• [2] Profile: William Kristol, Center for Cooperative Research
• [3] Profile of William Kristol, Media Transparency.org
• [4] The Henry Jackson Society
• [5] Biography from the Project for the New American Century
• [6] The War Party Profiles: William Kristol, BBC Panorama
• [7] William Kristol confronted on CSPAN by a caller
• [8] Kristol on Fox News
• [9] Youtube video of Kristol's pieing