BILL KRISTOL BLOWS IT TOO

Atlas Shrugs catches William Kristol following on the trail to wreckage Charles Krauthammer's taken, with a galling op-ed in the Weekly Standard where he denies the facts on the ground about Egypt. What an embarrassment the following is:

The United States has played a role in helping those transitions turn out (reasonably) well. America needn’t be passive or fretful or defensive. We can help foster one outcome over another. As Krauthammer puts it, “Elections will be held. The primary U.S. objective is to guide a transition period that gives secular democrats a chance.”

Now, people are more than entitled to their own opinions of how best to accomplish that democratic end. And it’s a sign of health that a political and intellectual movement does not respond to a complicated set of developments with one voice.

But hysteria is not a sign of health. When Glenn Beck rants about the caliphate taking over the Middle East from Morocco to the Philippines, and lists (invents?) the connections between caliphate-promoters and the American left, he brings to mind no one so much as Robert Welch and the John Birch Society. He’s marginalizing himself, just as his predecessors did back in the early 1960s.

Nor is it a sign of health when other American conservatives are so fearful of a popular awakening that they side with the dictator against the democrats. Rather, it’s a sign of fearfulness unworthy of Americans, of short-sightedness uncharacteristic of conservatives, of excuse-making for thuggery unworthy of the American conservative tradition.

Mr. Kristol, we all want freedom, and we are not siding with dictators, not even Mubarak. But to deny what's really at stake here - the horror story the Muslim Brotherhood will write if they take over - is to absolutely miss the boat. Most importantly besides that, those rioters are savage Islamofascists, and he pretends otherwise? I guess the Ayatollah's own minions were just "secular democrats" too, weren't they?

On top of all that, he's added himself to the list of dummies who've attacked Glenn Beck. Of course Beck isn't perfect (someday, I'll tell you how angry I am that he hosted a two-faced author named Brad Meltzer on his show, who scripted the misogynist screed spoken about in this article), but to say his concerns on the spread of Islamism have no weight is laughable in the extreme. Kristol has proudly ranked himself right down there alongside Krauthammer as another RINO whom the conservative movement will have to pan for his weakness, and distance themselves from before he really screws things up and then acts as though he's got no responsibility to take.