Bill Kristol Must Resign! (Justin Raimondo)

Bill Kristol is demanding the head of GOP national chairman Michael Steele, who, in a moment of honesty, questioned the wisdom of invading and occupying Afghanistan. Yet Kristol has never been elected to anything: indeed, the pretentious little gremlin once threatened to quit the GOP, back in the 1990s, when the Republicans in Congress voted to deny funding to Bill Clinton’s Balkan adventure. Kristol, who had thrilled at the opportunity to “crush Serb skulls,” as he put it, stamped his foot and declared his imminent defection. Too bad he never followed through on his promise. Now he’s assuming the mantle of Republican kingmaker: based on his atrocious record as the GOP’s grand strategist, it’s Kristol, not Steele, who should resign.

Having dragged the GOP down to utter defeat with eight years of “big government conservatism,” i.e. perpetual war and ballooning deficits, and handed the country over to the tender mercies of the Obama cult, it seems Kristol and his fellow neocons are determined to drag the party all the way down to the status of an irrelevant sect, i.e. the neoconservatives writ a bit larger. The Iraq war, of which Kristol was a leading champion, has bankrupted the country, and destabilized the entire region, just as Republican critics of the war such as the Committee for the Republic, and top Pentagon leaders, feared it would.

It is nonsense to pretend that there was no resistance to the neocons’ fanatic warmongering on the right. As the neoconservatives were lying us into war with tall tales of Iraqi WMDs, a group of authentic conservatives, including C. Boyden Grey, a former official in the first Bush administration, William Nitze, son of Ronald Reagan’s top arms negotiator Paul Nitze, and John B. Henry II, a Washington businessman and direct descendant of Patrick Henry, issued a manifesto descrying the rise of an American empire. To cross that Rubicon, they warned, would mean the end of our old republic. It would bankrupt us, and lead us down the path to a form of collectivism impelled by militarism: “America has begun to stray far from its founding tradition of leading the world by example rather than by force.”

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