Bill Kristol: Still Getting More Wrong Than Right After All These Years

It is somehow comforting that while the world has changed in spectacular and spectacularly unexpected ways, neocon sock puppet William Kristol's view of things -- make that everything -- has not.

This predictability made him, word for word, the worst New York Times op-ed columnist ever, something that the Gray Lady herself recognized after only a year of his blather when he was shown the door.

In fact, Kristol, whose intellect is a fraction of his late great father's, bumbles from issue to issue, getting more wrong than right, and often spectacularly (there's that word again) so.

Like when he declared that the architects of the Bush administration's torture policies be given the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Or in enthusing, with a barely concealed stiffy, about a wunderkind that he had discovered up in Alaska while on a Weekly Standard cruise who was going to change politics as we knew it. In fact, Kristol continues to embrace the Killa From Wasilla long after most Republicans have fled from her.

(Okay, so he's right about Glenn Beck.)

Where Kristol is nowhere more predictable is when it comes to flexing America's military muscle around the globe. His formula is simplicity itself: Bomb first and considered the consequences later. Somalia. Iraq. Iran. Pakistan. Libya. What's the diff? Or as Ross Douthat says, that "the virtues of toppling tyrants trump whatever perils may come next."

And so Kristol is firmly on the side of the hawks -- what few of them are -- when it comes to lowering the boom on Libyan strongman Qaddafi, while giving Defense Secretary Gates the back of his hand in the process for his admirable caution.

As national security ace Thomas Ricks puts it, "what's not to like" about yet another American war in an Arab state?

Joking aside, and acknowledging that "there's blood on his hands" analogies are almost as tiresome as Nazi analogies, there is probably no one of his generation who sat out the Vietnam War, eschewed government service and yet was more influential in provoking the bloodiest and stupidest war of this generation than Kristol.