Welfare Queen Little Billy Kristol Defends Mitt On Welfare Queens

Irving’s welfare boy, Billy, who can’t make an honest living

It is tempting to luxuriate in the fount of schadenfreude, today. Having been handed a stinking pile of feces, the spin doctors and sophists of the Right have beclowned themselves attempting to spin Mitt Romney’s straightforward contempt for half of America, who, in his own words, won’t take responsibility for their failed lives, think that they’re victims, and depend on government handouts. HALF.

Got that? Walk out on the street, and play “loves me, loves me not” with the random passers-by: Parasite, Not a parasite; moocher, not a moocher; irresponsible, responsible.

Not like brave individualists and “creators” like Little Billy Kristol, son of Irving, who defends “Walter Mitty” Romney, son of George.

Kristol isn’t delusional, of course. Merely vile. He realizes that he CAN’T defend Romney’s comments straight up, so, setting up the threadbare false equivalency, he offers this headline as inducement to those suckered in (and it’s HIS magazine, so he knew what the headline would be):

A Note on Romney’s Arrogant and Stupid Remarks
William Kristol / Weekly Standard

So we have in 2012 two presidential candidates who—when they thought they were speaking privately to their fellow 1 percenters—have shown contempt for fellow Americans.  —  Here’s Barack Obama, on April 6, 2008, in San Francisco …

The hackneyed Rightie tactic of building
a fake Obama, mirrored by Kristol today

Naturally, using the tried and true “truncated quote” technique that brought us “he says we didn’t build that!” theme of the failed Tampa convention, here’s the part of the old quote that Kristol snips off (in contradistinction to Mitt’s comments, which stand entirely on their own and aren’t based on a conscious distortion):

But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.  So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Um, now these are in some communities, you know. I think what you’ll find is, is that people of every background — there are gonna be a mix of people, you can go in the toughest neighborhoods, you know working-class lunch-pail folks, you’ll find Obama enthusiasts. And you can go into places where you think I’d be very strong and people will just be skeptical. The important thing is that you show up and you’re doing what you’re doing. [complete transcript here]

The reason why the loony  “elitist” charge has never
stuck to Obama — mostly because he’s clearly NOT. 

The OPPOSITE of Romney’s casual dismissal. 2008 Obama is calling on his behind-closed-door supporters to engage with those who seem intractable. Romney states that he isn’t going to waste his time on these. Can little Billy the Welfare Queen somehow manage to cut off Obama’s head to make sleazy Mitt look taller?

OF COURSE!  Kristol HAS to try and spin this into the same thing:

It’s worth recalling that Obama was speaking about Democrats who were voting in the primary for Hillary Clinton. So Obama seems to have contempt not just for the Republicans who oppose him, but for millions of Americans who ended up voting for him in November 2008.

(I wouldn’t sniff that last “argument” too carefully, considering where it just got pulled out of.)

The distortions are already monstrous, and Kristol isn’t a complete imbecile. He’s trying as hard as a weasel can to weasel out of a straight-forward statement by Romney to his plutocrat fundraisers in a closed-door event, just as Obama was speaking to his people (not quite plutocrats) in San Francisco in early 2008.

Protesting in favor of a war he got a waiver for

Poor little Billy has thus far distorted the context of the quote and now REINTERPRETS it, so that it is falsely equivalent to Mr. Romney’s.

Having created the false meme, Kristol then repeats Romney’s toxic quote, and makes this stunningly ham-handed act of mental gymnastics:

It’s worth recalling that a good chunk of the 47 percent who don’t pay income taxes are Romney supporters—especially of course seniors (who might well “believe they are entitled to heath care,” a position Romney agrees with), as well as many lower-income Americans (including men and women serving in the military) who think conservative policies are better for the country even if they’re not getting a tax cut under the Romney plan. So Romney seems to have contempt not just for the Democrats who oppose him, but for tens of millions who intend to vote for him.

It remains important for the country that Romney wins in November (unless he chooses to step down and we get the Ryan-Rubio ticket we deserve!). But that shouldn’t blind us to the fact that Romney’s comments, like those of Obama four years ago, are stupid and arrogant.

Indeed: Has there been a presidential race in modern times featuring two candidates who have done so little over their lifetimes for our country, and who have so little substance to say about the future of our country?

Wow, that took an awfully tortured path to get to this implicit conclusion (paraphrased):

Mitt Romney is indefensible, as even a liar and propagandist such as myself must admit, but clearly, with a carefully snipped quote and a phony interpretation, Barack Obama is EQUALLY indefensible, and, therefore you should vote for Mitt Romney because …

He’s no WORSE than President Obama.

This is nakedly stupid and intentionally false. Which is why Bill Kristol is a welfare queen:

Implicit Kristol stance, GOP “fact” since Reagan

Rupert Murdoch’s unloading of the country’s most vigorously pro-war journal marks the end of a particularly sinister and regrettable era in the history of U.S. media.

At a glance, the move may seem unremarkable, given the Standard’s relative size. With a circulation of about 65,000 and annual losses estimated from $1 million (New Yorker, 10/16/06) to $5 million (Forbes, 6/29/09), the Standard represented only a tiny fraction of Murdoch’s vast media empire. Murdoch’s News Corporation, one of the largest media conglomerates in the world, took in nearly $33 billion in revenue in 2008 from properties in virtually every sector of the media, including such giants as Fox News Channel, Dow Jones, HarperCollins and MySpace, as well as hundreds of newspapers and television stations across the world.

While it yielded no financial gain for Murdoch and News Corp shareholders, for a time the Standard was arguably the most effective magazine in the nation in terms of its influence on policy. Edited by GOP political operative and neoconservative extraordinaire William Kristol, it had the eyes and ears of prominent members of the new Bush administration, Department of Defense and Congress, who drastically escalated the United States’ imperial ambitions. Perhaps no publication was as active or as successful in shaping the propaganda campaign that would enable this remarkable foreign policy transformation to take place. [from report cited below ...]

He couldn’t actually MAKE IT in the free market. He depends on the handouts of plutocrats to gin up his toadying lies. And here is a prime example of Bill Kristol’s toxic lies:

Kristol gets schooled by real journalist Pete Hamill

Extra! September 2009

The Weekly Standard’s War
Murdoch sells the magazine that sold the Iraq invasion

By Michael Corcoran
Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting

… In case Congress or the American public did not share Boot’s attitude, the Standard did all it could to find (or invent) evidence linking Iraq to 9/11. One high-profile article, “Case Closed” (11/24/03), earned public praise from the vice president, who called it the “best source of information” detailing this supposed relationship (Rocky Mountain News, 1/9/04). Cheney’s endorsement is now touted in an editor’s note atop the online version of the article. (Hayes later grew this sophistry into the 2004 book The Connection: How Al-Qaeda’s Collaboration With Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America.) In 2005, Hayes, along with Thomas Joscelyn, contributed another 10,000 words in an article titled “The Mother of All Connections” (7/18/05). Hayes would later be hand-picked to write Cheney’s official biography (Guardian, 9/04/06).

Of course, it is now widely understood that these supposed connections were spurious, having been debunked by every government body that has looked into the matter, including the Pentagon (Institute for Defense Analyses,11/07) and the Senate Intelligence Committee (6/08).

That the Standard’s views so closely mirrored those of the powerful was not happenstance. Murdoch, by design, distributed the magazine with an eye not on building a wide base of readers, but on influencing elite decision makers. And he made no efforts to hide this process. The journal’s website reads: “Lots of Washington publications say they have influence. The Weekly Standard delivers it…. Each issue is hand-delivered—by request—every Sunday morning to an exclusive list: the most powerful men and women in government, politics and the media.”

So, the notorious and war-criminal liar Billy Kristol,  the welfare queen who “depends on the kindness of strangers” can only manage a feeble “well Obama feels the same way, too!” lie?

Welfare queen Republican Craig T Nelson,
who was “on welfare and food stamps”
and “made it without help”

I’d say that the spin machine needs a service call, to get it up and running again.

Then again, since when has being caught in an outrageous lie caused them a moment’s hesitation?

But it is astonishing to chart the tortuous contortions necessary to create an equivalence between a statement of understanding and a statement of condescension and contempt issued, in large part, aimed at the selfsame group of people.

Yoga position #429: The Kristol

As Kristol noted in a statement following the sale [of The Weekly Standard] … Murdoch’s “generous support and (if I may use the term) liberal disposition have made whatever we’ve accomplished possible.”  [ibid.]

The point is that an army of well-paid spokeserpents are going to distract us ANY WAY THEY CAN.  Because the truth, like sunlight,  makes their skin burn.

Courage.

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