Bill Kristol Predicts Bush Presidency Will Succeed in the End – But He Hasn’t Been Right Yet

The Washington Post gave William Kristol space in its Sunday editorial pages to send a sweet summer bouquet to his BFF in the White House:

“I suppose I’ll merely expose myself to harmless ridicule if I make the following assertion: George W. Bush’s presidency will probably be a successful one.”

Kristol offers three reasons for this magical thinking: 1) We haven’t been attacked since 9/11, 2) the economy is doing great and 3) the war in Iraq is going to turnaround any day now.

In reality, of course, the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center came eight years after the February 1993 attack in which terrorists set off a bomb in the garage under Tower One. We’re not quite six years out from the 2001 attacks.

The economy may be doing well for the top income earners like Kristol and his buddies, but I don’t know anyone who thinks the economy is as “strong” as Kristol described it.

On the war, it’s hard to imagine how the United States, or any third party, could “win” an Iraqi-on-Iraqi civil war.

Maybe Kristol is privy to a new Bushite marketing campaign in the works for a September roll-out in which the president declares victory and gets out. Otherwise this is just more bad, delusional thinking from Kristol, whose track record is among the most abysmal of the Beltway pundits — a group that is beyond disgrace and would be tarred and feathered were it not for the fact that they are accountable to no one.

Kristol closes with this:

[What] happens when voters realize in November 2008 that, if they choose a Democrat for president, they’ll also get a Democratic Congress and therefore liberal Supreme Court justices? Many Americans will recoil from the prospect of being governed by an unchecked triumvirate of Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. So the chances of a Republican winning the presidency in 2008 aren’t bad.

What it comes down to is this: If Petraeus succeeds in Iraq, and a Republican wins in 2008, Bush will be viewed as a successful president.

I like the odds.

A brief scour of Bill Kristol’s writing and TV punditry produces very few instances when his prognostications have been correct. On the other hand, in January, Glenn Greenwald at Unclaimed Territory composed a list of instances when Kristol has been flat-out wrong :

• April 4, 2003: There’s been a certain amount of pop sociology in America … that the Shia can’t get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There’s almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq’s always been very secular.
• April 28, 2003: The battles of Afghanistan and Iraq have been won decisively and honorably. But these are only two battles. We are only at the end of the beginning in the war on terror and terrorist states.
• March 22, 2004: [T]here are hopeful signs that Iraqis of differing religious, ethnic, and political persuasions can work together. This is a far cry from the predictions made before the war by many, both here and in Europe, that a liberated Iraq would fracture into feuding clans and unleash a bloodbath.
• July 26, 2004:: What the Bush administration did say–and what so many reporters seem to have trouble understanding–is that Iraq and al Qaeda had a relationship that, by its very existence, posed a potential threat to the United States. [This is not just an error, but a lie. Kristol had to know this was false when he made the statement. – Editors]
• March 7, 2005: Just four weeks after the Iraqi election of January 30, 2005, it seems increasingly likely that that date will turn out to have been a genuine turning point. The fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, ended an era. September 11, 2001, ended an interregnum. In the new era in which we now live, 1/30/05 could be a key moment–perhaps the key moment so far–in vindicating the Bush Doctrine as the right response to 9/11. And now there is the prospect of further and accelerating progress.
• November 30, 2005 : All this made me think the 2006 elections could result in a Speaker Pelosi. I now think that unlikely. Pelosi’s endorsement today of the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq makes the House Democrats the party of defeat, the party of surrender … [It] it is much more likely that the situation in Iraq will stay more or less the same, or improve. In either case, Republicans will benefit from being the party of victory.

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