print“Someone Should Tell Bill Kristol Dwarf Tossing Is Cruel” is the current column, now on The Unz Review. An excerpt:
Prominent neoconservative Bill Kristol shared his election-year hallucinations with the nation. From the ashes of the Republican primaries would rise a man to stand for president against victor Donald J. Trump, a Sisyphean task that has been attempted and failed by 17 other worthies.
This individual is David French, an attorney, a decorated Iraq War veteran, and writer for the decidedly “Against Trump” National Review. Curiously, Kristol’s independent candidate is a “devout social conservative,” an evangelical who questions the merits of “de-stigmatizing” homosexuality, rejects the progressive premise upon which the transgender, potty wars are being waged, and would keep women out of combat.
Why, then, would a “relatively secular faction within the Republican Party,” the neoconservatives, make common cause with the Party’s fundamentalist wing? Jeet Heer, senior editor at the New Republic, asks this question—a riddle familiar to students and scholars of American conservatism.
The alliance, or, rather, the master-servant relationship between neoconservatives and the Religious Right is an old one. Political evangelists have long since been brought to heel by the Washington-based neoconservatives. “Most on the Religious Right have hardly resisted such cooptation, having perhaps nowhere to go financially, politically or professionally,” wrote Dr. Paul Gottfried in The Conservative Movement, his 1993 prophetic, forensic examination of the roots of the conservative crack-up.
French is vested in an aggressive, expansionist foreign policy. His impressive military credentials, in his role as a tool of democratic internationalism, are meant to provide a stark contrast to Trump’s nativism. At least as Kristol sees it.
French is no American Firster in the way Donald Trump is. For a man can don the uniform and fight Caesar’s wars, but that doesn’t necessarily make him someone who puts his country first—unless one conflates the interests and well-being of ordinary Americans with wars of choice plotted by the New York-Washington axis of power. This error is not one Mr. Trump commits. While the presumptive Republican Party’s nominee clearly has great affection for America’s veterans, he doesn’t love all the wars they’ve been ordered to fight. …
… Read the rest. “Someone Should Tell Bill Kristol Dwarf Tossing Is Cruel” is now on The Unz Review.