William Kristol is a blathering idiot.

Yesterday was William Kristol's last column for the NY Times. Hallelujah, hooray, huzzah and all other celebratory words beginning with "H". Of course, he's moving to the Washington Post so he'll still have a platform for spewing his delusional ideas.

The gist of yesterday's column was that conservatives have a lot to be proud of. Really? Starting an unnecessary war under false pretenses; condoning torture; shredding the Constitution; eviserating the economy; increasing the animosity towards the United States throughout the entire world, including among our allies; claiming unprecedented executive powers; using fear and propaganda to manipulate voters; stealing elections; creating an atmosphere in which greed and duplicity are not only tolerated, but rewarded; shameless, criminal lying and deception (Iran/Contra, the US Attorney firings, creating a 9/11-Saddam Hussein link, ignoring FISA and spying on Americans); sending women ever closer to a return to the Dark Ages; ignoring the peril that the environment is in; making a fetish of anti-intellectualism; allowing plainly-crazy, fantasists such as Creationists a place at the table once known as Science...

I could go on and on and on.

Yet this is the record that Kristol and friends celebrate. Do they honestly believe the bullshit that comes out of their mouths and their pens? Can they possibly be THAT misguided, that blind to reality? On what planet do they live?

And at the same time, the current Republicans in Congress--who like to think of themselves as the best-ever hall monitors in the school-of-fiscal-sanity but are in fact one of the main reasons we're in this economic mess due to their fealty to free-markets and deregulation--these people are making a gigantic fuss over President Obama's stimulus plan because it doesn't include enough tax cuts.

TAX CUTS!!!! Do they know any other words? Let's suppose they get all of their precious tax cuts. Do they honestly believe that that money would be put back into the economy? People are not going to use the $600 they'd get back to start a small business or invest it. People are scared, with good reason, and they will SAVE IT. Either that, or they'll use it to pay off a medical bill. Tax cuts are not going to create a single desperately needed job. They jump up and down and scream "government spending" and "tax and spend Democrats" because it is their mantra and it has always worked for them in the past.

Things are different. Yes, Obama plans to spend a lot of money. Guess what? We have to. We have to put that money into re-building our infrastructure, which would--hey!--actually create jobs!

No one enjoys paying taxes. But without them, we would not have roads, public schools, bridges, clean water, job safety standards, public health programs such as the CDC and NIH (Center for Disease Control and National Institute of Health), Social Security, Medicare, the GI Bill, the MILITARY (you know, the organization that Repubs love to talk about during elections and then promptly forget about once in office--thanks for fighting for us boys and girls but once you get back home you're on your own), hell, the NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE.

Guess what Republicans. You've had the past three decades, minus a couple of years (years in which the country gained a surplus, by the by) to run this country. And you've run it into the ground. President Obama's call for bipartisanship and coming together is wonderful and I'm glad he's saying it because it reminds me to cool my jets; it reminds me that we won't get anything done unless we work together. It (sometimes) makes me take a breath when I want to shout at the top of my lungs "SHUT UP REPUBLICANS. SHUT THE HELL UP."


p.s. Ronald Reagan did not end the cold war all by his little lonesome. Communism in the Soviet Union was already failing from within.