Kristol On Buckley

Here's what he wrote today about what conservatism means:

The basic thought was: Don’t let ideologues try to create heaven on earth, because they’ll deprive us of freedom and make things a lot worse.

When was the last time Bill Kristol ever made an argument like that? And hasn't he spent the best part of the last seven years attacking it relentlessly? Hasn't he defended every attack on individual liberty that this administration has pursued, even torture and the abolition of habeas corpus? Warrant-free wire-tapping? Vast expansions of executive power? And doesn't he still hold that Iraq can be made into a model democracy, that there was no serious, sectarian divide in Iraq, that the war would pay for itself, that it would lead to a flowering of democracy across the Middle East, etc etc? And has he ever so much as uttered a single doubt about these utopian ideas since they foundered in the sands of Mesopotamia? One waits and waits for some kind of intellectual accounting from Kristol ... and then one waits some more.

The intellectual dishonesty and/or cognitive dissonance just boggle the mind. But they are rewarded with a column in the NYT. For the "conservative" slot.