Bill Kristol's appearance on The Daily Show last night very likely will be seen as a watershed event. Finally, after all these years of spouting 100% wrong bullshit dressed as "serious" public policy, Kristol is reduced to simply blushing as Stewart recites the litany of Kristol's (and neocons') sins.

It's prime viewing. I was able to see the blushing very well when I watched last night in real time; in fact, I really thought Kristol was at risk of "stroking out". I don't know how well it will show up in computer videos, but trust me, he turned redder than I've seen anyone turn in a long time. I don't think it was anger, either. I think he just might, finally, just a little, teesny bit, be beginning to get just a hint of the damage he has done to our country.

Link to video at my name.

And... "Unlike John McCain, [Obama] won't try to bomb his way out of the mess."

And... "Toxic Tactics"...

And... "Nauseatingly"...

... "on display by the McCain campaign over the past several weeks."... hat else can Glenn and all the world say? See. So sad, I's say?

A campaign gan sitting on the seats. Watching a big baboon weasel with a moth jaw stuffed with acorn nuts. O so hollow. Crack corn.

Johnny McCain. Hip beam gymnast.

Balanced beast? Falls low. No Balance.

Calling them scumbags "does them too much honor and dilutes a perfectly good insult".. but it's all we got. Evildoers is already taken.

a another accident. oops.

I meant push post reread.

O Beethoven.

O Poor heehaw's haiku.

O Lawyer pick guitarist.

Apropos of nothing in particular, I went to summer camp with our buddy Goldfarb about 15 years ago. And gosh, he doesn't seem to have changed much at all. I've been trying to figure out which would reflect more poorly on Goldfarb, Kristol, and their ilk: that they actually believe the nonsense they spew, or they simply view it as a tool to remain in power.

Clearly these people have some functioning brain synapses, even after working on such a vile and fact-free campaign, so I'm tempted to think it's the latter. And I suspect that that IS worse. When you have Joe the Plumber on TV suggesting that Obama will bring about the end of Israel, that can be laughed off as simple (though dangerous) ignorance. But the Kristols and Goldfarbs of the world need to be put out to pasture for a good long while.

In the uneasy, unholy Republican alliance between Straussian neocons and the evangelical right, vivid expressions and simmering subtexts of anti-Semitism go determinedly unremarked. Meanwhile the most blandly centerist critics of militant Zionism and Likud, and consensus-seeking advocates of a 2 state solution are routinely, viciously denigrated as anti-semitic. This slur is knee-jerkily predicated upon the fraud that all criticisms of Israeli or Likud policy are intrinsically anti-Jewish. And if they come, as they often do, from commentators who are Jewish themselves, they are necessarily both "self-hating" and anti-semitic. (The parallels with accusations of anti-Americanism against American critics of Republican policy are too eerie to be merely coincidental.)

The dirty little neocon secret is that the ideological godfather of their poisonous movement, political philosopher Leo Strauss, a Jewish refugee from Hitler's Germany, remained a lifelong admirer of Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger and Nazi law professor Carl Schmitt, about whom, in 1933, he commented:

"Just because the Germany of the Right does not tolerate us (Jews), it simply does not follow that that the principles of the Right are therefore to be rejected. On the contrary, only on the basis of the principles of the Right - fascist, authoritarian, imperial - is it possible in a dignified manner without the ridiculous and pitiful appeals to 'the inalienable rights of man' to protest against the mean nonentity (Hitler)."

In other words, the best way to 'protest' against Hitler was by embracing the 'fascist, authoritarian, imperial' worldview of Nazism. Needless to say, that better-Nazis-for-freedom-strategy didn't work out too well for the millions of exterminated Jews.

Similarly, the fact that the religous Right has only recently abandoned its Jew-hating John Birch-ish heritage in favour of a Rapturous, Israel-as-Armegeddon eschatology, doesn't seem to give the (often Jewish) neocons any discernible pause about this electorally beneficient alliance. Even when their harridan high-priestess, Ann Coulter, stipulates the need for Jews to convert to Christianity (in order to be "perfected") the rabid Right, and their Jewish enablers, remain singularly untroubled by such pungent anti-semitism.

Instead, we hear them howl, without basis or self-reflection, about the 'anti-semitism' of an unimpeachably moderate, bravely centerist Arab like Prof. Rashid Khalidi, and even more bizarrely, by association, the 'anti-semitism' of Barack Obama. You have to wonder sometimes why they don't just revert to their lizard brain subtext, call him a sand-nigger and be done with it...