Yesterday, Karl Rove was shamelessly contradicting himself in order to create confusion in the Democratic presidential race. Today, it’s Bill Kristol.
Kristol in today’s Times:
Furthermore, if you add up the votes in all the primaries and caucuses — excluding Michigan (where only Hillary was on the ballot), and imputing the likely actual totals in the four caucus states, where only percentages were reported — Clinton now trails in overall votes by only about 300,000, or about 1 percent of the total. By the end of the nominating contest, she may well be ahead on this benchmark — one not entirely to be scorned in a democracy.
Kristol during the 2000 presidential recount saga:
As a matter of constitutional law, the nationwide popular vote is an entirely irrelevant consideration here. No man has ever campaigned for the nationwide popular vote, and no man has ever been elected president because he’s won it. Like it or not, the Electoral College is everything. Intimating otherwise, and in the same breath circulating fictions about polling-place irregularities, the Gore camp has done its best to ensure that should George W. Bush eventually be elected president, some faint whiff of illegitimacy will hang over his administration. It will be unfair and corrosive.
When the Times hired Kristol I called him intellectually dishonest (among other things) and that’s certainly evidenced here. The man will say anything that suits his purposes, and I think that is grounds for ignoring him completely. And don’t say, “Well, the first way to ignore him would be to not blog about his self-serving contradictions.” The real first way to ignore him would be to not give him a column in the most prominent newspaper in America.
