Yes, the word is that Bill Kristol’s bawling, brawling neocon baby, the Weekly Standard is no more, mourned in predictably fatuous fashion by co-founder John Podhoretz, “The Murder of the Weekly Standard* and long-time contributor David Brooks, among others, for heroically refusing to swallow the Trumpian swill that is now de rigueur on the Right,1 and indeed Big Bill at least has been admirable in his withering contempt for Trump and all his works. But, I must say, not nearly withering enough, and, furthermore, not nearly withering enough to make up for decades of hypocrisy and deceit on the part of the Weekly Standard. Despite some good articles—I’m sure I read a couple over the years—97% of the time the Weekly Standard was simply Rush Limbaugh with a shave—a shave with an agenda, that agenda being the annihilation of the goddamn hippie Democratic Party for its unwillingness to die for the State of Israel.
The Weekly Standard was formed because, well, because Commentary was too Jewish to get the job done, and the National Review was, I guess, not Jewish enough—okay, not interventionist enough—though I’m not enough of an expert on the NR to know exactly where its politico-spiritual transmigrations had taken it by the early Clinton era (the WS was founded in 1994), whether it was aggressively interventionist or no, and how willing it was to trust, you know, Jews.2
The WS wasn’t all Jewish, of course—that would be self-defeating—and, hey, Jews aren’t stupid—yet their devotion to the cause of Israel, and the cause of the Republican Party was all-consuming. Neoliberal Democrats, like both the Clintons and Obama, tried to defuse the right-wing assault when it came to foreign affairs by promising to achieve the goals of the right—the removal of Saddam Hussein from power, for example—by peaceful, multilateral means, rather than unilateral action. But this well-meaning (well-meaning and self-defeating, because achieving undesirable goals is, well, undesirable, no matter how it’s done) ploy on the part of the Democrats only infuriated Kristol and the Kids all the more, because they hated multilateralism. They hated the UN, and they hated Europe, which they saw as dens of anti-Semitic and anti-American iniquity. They hated the big nations that defied the U.S., like Russia and China, and they hated the little ones as well, like Cuba and Iraq—hated them and needed them, because above all else the East Coast Right wanted enemies, wanted danger, wanted the excitement of confrontation and conflict that set their pulses pounding during the glory days of the Reagan Administration, when, of course, they won every election going away.
Kristol, Podhoretz, et al. had no trouble selling their cause to the mainstream Republican Party, reeling from the shock of Bill Clinton’s election. The GOP had thought that the glory of Operation Desert Storm would guarantee Republican victories as far as the eye could see. Instead, they discovered that, as John F. Kennedy once said, military intervention is like taking a drink. The effect wears off, and you need another.
In fact, the Republican Party in the Clinton era needed not a drink, and not a bottle, but a case, or perhaps a truckload. Because there was no fucking enemy! None! And without a threat—and an existential one at that!—the American people were more than guaranteed to slip into—nay, wallow—in sluttish antinomianism3—which is to say, vote for Democrats.
The Weekly Standard was formed to piggyback on the populist “outrage” orchestrated by Newt Gingrich that resulted in the massive Republican victory in the 1994 congressional elections. The Republican victory was driven almost entirely by domestic issues—outrage among white Americans at the Clintons’ obvious devotion to the people honest folks hated—black people, feminists, and homosexuals. Kristol’s Ivy League neocons had almost nothing in common with the army of the great unwashed led by Newt and El Rushbo, drawn very largely from the South and Midwest, but they happily embraced them nonetheless, delighted to endorse whatever contradictory, self-serving doctrines they professed, because the Standard didn’t have any domestic policy preferences at all—other than opposition to anything affecting their kids’ chances of getting into Harvard. They just wanted power.
In fact, embracing the greasy goyim cost them nothing, because they hated the Clintons as much as the “real” conservatives from the hinterland did. What I find most offensive about the “conscience conservatives” who fault Trump is that their take on him is “conscientious”, while their treatment of both Clinton and Obama was entirely vicious and unscrupulous. In the old days, whenever Bill or Barack would pick up a putter, the rain of derision that burst forth from the Standard, the National Review, and the Wall Street Journal—the “prestige Right”—was as if the heavens had opened on Noah. Every presidential vacation was an occasion for a boatload of sneers and leers. The non-crimes of “White Water” received ten times the coverage of the multitudinous crimes of Trump. It needs to be repeated, over and over again, that Trump routinely commits acts, any one of which, if committed by either Clinton or Obama, would have led to instant demands for impeachment by Billy and his boys, and, given the lynch party mentality of the Republicans in Congress, would have led to impeachment, even with a Democratic Senate. The Republicans didn’t care about consequences. Consequences were for sissies. They only wanted destruction.
For decades, Kristol and his gang fostered this cult of irresponsibility as a way of destroying the Democratic Party. They had no notion that what they were destroying was not the Democratic Party but the Republican. They lied this nation into a near-endless series of destructive, counter-productive wars, for which they take no responsibility and in fact continue to advocate more aggression. They cling to the argument they began with, that the United States, because it can trust no one (except Israel), must dominate everyone, and dominate them with the credible threat of war—indeed, of nuclear annihilation. The enormity of their crimes makes it impossible for them to repent. And they certainly haven’t.
Afterwords
This is not to say that the neocon’s pièce de résistance, the invasion of Iraq, was a “Jewish plot” as is absurdly alleged in some places. During the Clinton Administration, the entire Republican Party had become obsessed with taking out Saddam, aka “The Great Satan”, largely because they had nothing better to do. “We need a war,” said Lynne Cheyney famously. The Bush Administration had Saddam in their sights from the get-go, and the unholy trio who made it all happen were the seriously un-Jewish George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld. Bill Kristol was only the cheerleader—though he did wave his pom-poms with a passion.
There is a name for my complaints/primal screams about the Weekly Standard and neocons, and it is “Legion”, for they are many. And if that isn’t enough, look at what I’ve had to say about frequent WS contributor (now semi-rehabilitated) Max Boot. If you find my policy analysis overly effusive, the American Conservative, Scott McConnell offers a more measured take on the WC’s foreign policy sins.
1. Actually, both Podhoretz and Brooks are bitter because they see the demise of the Standard occurring not for ideological reasons but because capitalism—the owner, Philip Anschutz, wants to expand another publication of his, the Washington Examiner, doesn’t want competition from the Standard and does want its subscription list.
2. Supposedly, NR founder Bill Buckley couldn’t bring himself to name Brooks as his successor because of the religion thing.
3. Wikipedia has a nice discussion of “antinomianism” (until recently an explicitly theological epithet, meaning “lawlessness”, pretty much, but now repurposed for our non-theological times), but it isn’t entirely accurate, saying that George Orwell, from whom I took the phrase, “was a frequent user of "antinomian" in a secular (and always approving) sense.” When Orwell referred to the “sluttish antinomianism” of twenties Bohemians, critiquing The Rock Pool, a novel by his boyhood friend Cyril Connolly, I don’t think he was being “approving”. The article also says the Orwell uses the word several times in his famous essay on Henry Miller, “Inside the Whale”, but my computer can only locate a single appearance, though it is “approving”—“[A. E.] Housman would not have appealed so deeply to the people who were young in 1920 if it had not been for another strain in him, and that was his blasphemous, antinomian, ‘cynical’ strain.” Appropriately enough, Cyril Connolly (to go back to him) receives a thorough beatdown at the hands of Christopher Caldwell (no sluttish antinomian he) in the pages of, yes, the Weekly Standard.
