Vincenzo Kolchak lays out one of his least favorite columnists.
October 27, 2008
The New York Times
Op-Ed Columnist
Remember the Marne
By WILLIAM KRISTOL“My center is giving way. My right is in retreat. Situation excellent. I attack!”
That’s the message supposedly sent by General Ferdinand Foch of France to his commanding general, Joseph Joffre, during the crucial First Battle of the Marne in September 1914. The French and British counterattacks succeeded. The German Army, after advancing for a month, was forced back.
Here in the U.S., after more than a month of Democratic advances, it’s the Republican center that’s giving way, and some on the political right who are in retreat. The Obama campaign is marching toward the biggest nonincumbent Democratic presidential victory since 1932, and the Democratic Party is fighting its way toward its best overall presidential and Congressional year since 1964.
Situation not-so-excellent. Time for McCain to attack — or, rather, finally to make his case.
The heart of that case has to be this: reminding voters that when they elect a president, they’re not just electing a super-Treasury secretary or a higher-level head of Health and Human Services. They’re electing a commander in chief in time of war.
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New York Times
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I guess it was the word “Marne” in the title that tempted me to read
this — I was very amused the use of Foch’s bravura performance as
Kristol’s text for the day. It’s remarkable that in this last eight
days, anyone (probably not even McCain) would bother to mention that the
surge is working. And the idea that McCain and Palin would re-capture
the hearts of America with unscripted appearances on Sunday news shows
speak further of Kristol’s delusional state.
Here is a man who in the last two months helped create McCain’s
problems, then attacks McCain & Co. for the problem, then attacks again
for McCain & Co. making Palin the problem, attacks the McCain’s campaign
negative fear mongering that is Kristol’s stock in trade and then
contemptuously dismisses the economic problems that will do us in more
surely than any terrorist initiative. It’s underscored by the two
articles on economics that box Kristol’s, one of which quotes Yeats
whose center, like Foch’s can’t hold.
I wonder what hour of his LSD trip Kristol is in — I also wonder if the
guys who hired him at the NYT were tripping on the same acid when they
made him a pundit.