I & I Editorial BoardOut of a sense of morbid curiosity, we decided to venture over to the Bulwark, the opinion site founded by alleged conservative Bill Kristol with the single mission of providing readers a daily dose of anti-Trump vitriol.
We wondered if perhaps the folks at Bulwark were celebrating because Donald Trump’s victory means that their reason for existing just got extended another four years. Had Trump lost, their pretense of being a conservative “bulwark” would have shattered.
They aren’t celebrating.
Instead, Trump’s overwhelming victory against overwhelming odds has them struggling to think straight.
Jonathan Last, after lamenting that Biden didn’t pack the Supreme Court and add four Democratic senators by declaring Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., states, then effectively accuses 51% of American voters of not being “committed to … the Constitution and the rule of law.”
Mona Charen reveals how hopelessly out of touch she is with everyday Americans by admitting that she “wrongly attributed (Biden’s unpopularity) mostly to his age,” instead of the economic disaster his policies unleashed on the working class. And then she shows that she has learned absolutely nothing by calling Kamala Harris’ loss “an elite failure of the first order.”
But the worst of the bunch is Kristol.
His response to this unprecedented turn of events is simply to say that Trump’s agenda must be stopped. “There should be no honeymoon for the Trumpists, no honeymoons for authoritarians,” he writes.
“This requires organized opposition,” he continues, “to thwart or delay or impede Trump’s plans.”
And what plans does Kristol want to stop?
Like Kamala Harris, he either can’t or won’t give any specifics.
Does he want to stop Trump’s plans to cut government spending? Cut taxes? Rein in the regulatory Leviathan? To secure the southern border? Protect free speech from Big Government and Big Tech censors? Does he want to stop Trump from building up America’s weakened defenses? Or keeping men out of women’s sports?
He’s not saying.
In fact, the only clue Kristol provides as to what he wants to stop is when he warns that “The Trumpist planning to deploy the federal government on behalf of America First policies abroad and the Project 2025 agenda at home is underway” and that the faster anti-Trumpists organize, the better their chances to “make things less bad for Ukraine, less bad for immigrants, less bad for civil servants, less bad for domestic dissidents, less bad for our future.”
But Harris ran on this exact campaign – empty bromides, vague platitudes, and unhinged fearmongering about Trump and Project 2025 – and was crushed.
So who exactly does Kristol think is going to join his revolution and fight to … what … continue an unending war in Ukraine, protect illegal immigrants, coddle government bureaucrats?
Good luck mustering those troops, pal.
But what’s truly stunning is that Kristol and his cast of Bulwark clowns continue to insist that they, and they alone, represent true conservatism.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
Amazing that those claiming to protect “our democracy” form authoritarianism are calling for the top-down imposition of an effort to block the expressed will of the voters. Projection, anyone?
I don’t read The Bulwark. I didn’t even know there was such a blog. But now that I do know, I’ll know what to avoid.
I expected to read how far Kristol had fallen. It’s a shame because at one time, he truly was a Conservative Bulwark. He’s now a pouting Miss Grundy character, and that, believe me, is no ascension.
But the greatest disappointment, who always struck me as a wonderful writer who made wonderful and witty observations-and who also always struck me as a “very classy lady”, is Mona Charen.
How far she apparently has fallen into a Trump Derangement Syndrome bed. But I guess everyone has to pay the rent.
billy and his clowns wouldn’t know conservatism if it bit them in the a–!!!
He/they may have been “conservative” at one time(like liz cheney?) but they are nowhere near that now. Instead of calling them rinos, call them cinos.
Trump certainly isn’t perfect but he is way better than ANYTHING the communist /democrats have been offering for decades!
Ukraine’s war is not an unending war! With 500 missiles to destroy russian railroad bridges and gas-diesel production facilities they could collapse russia’s logistics in 2 weeks. We cannot surrender to putin who is deliberately killing Ukrainian women and children to try and break Ukraine’s will to fight. That would be like watching some men ravage a women and doing nothing. You accept the indecisive Biden’s drip of weapons and ammo as proving the war unwinnable and lose sight of the absolute horror a large dictatorship is bringing down on a friend of the United States. Now is the time to be decisive with real weapons like Churchill before the US entered the war. It is unbelievable to me that you people, General Kellogg and even Dr Victor Davis Hanson call for such surrender. This war can be won and the key is russia’s logistics and being decisive.
This almost sounds like the early 1960s, when some of the generals thought that we could defeat the Soviet Union in a nuclear war, so we should launch a nuclear attack. If JFK did not reject their ideas and stop them, it surely would have happened. If “now is the time to be decisive with real weapons,” do you think that using nuclear weapons would win the war for Ukraine? If we collapsed Russia’s logistics, would they not use their nuclear weapons, with essentially the same result?
Kristol, Wills and the other “so-called” are no longer relevant and have lost what little credibility that they had left.