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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
Actually, not because of anyone's intention but just because of some sociological and some other things that have happened over 25, 30 years, the parties have sorted themselves out much more ideologically, which has some benefits and some costs.
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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
All defense secretaries in wartime have, needless to say, made misjudgments.
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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
American power should be used not just in the defense of American interests but for the promotion of American principles.
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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
[Among conservatives] there's been too much pseudo-populism, almost too much concern and attention for, quote, 'the people'.... After all, we conservatives are on the side of the lords and barons.... We...are pulling up the drawbridge against the peasants.
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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
And on this issue of the Shia in Iraq, I think there's been a certain amount of, frankly, Terry, a kind of pop sociology in America that, you know, somehow 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.
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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
At the end of the day,[Mitt] Romney was pro-life, but [Rick] Santorum was more fervently pro-life, and had been for longer. They're all going to repeal Obamacare, but Romney has once endorsed something like it. In the old days, there really were differences on fundamental issues, even on foreign policy, [for which] [Newt] Gingrich, Romney, and Santorum were pretty similar.
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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
Barack Obama is not going to beat Hillary Clinton in a single Democratic primary. I’ll predict that right now.
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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
Conservatism as an "ism" is always going to be somewhat in tension with a political party.
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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
Conservative policies have on the whole worked - insofar as any set of policies can be said to 'work' in the real world. Conservatives of the Reagan-Bush-Gingrich-Bush years have a fair amount to be proud of.
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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
Conservatives shouldn't count on the Supreme Court to do our work for us on Obamacare. The Court may rule as it should, and strike down the mandate. But it may not. And even if it does, the future of health care in America - and for that matter, the future of limited government - depends ultimately on the verdict of the American people.
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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
Donald Trump beat Jeb Bush and beat Hillary Clinton. And when everyone thinks of Donald Trump that's pretty impressive.
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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
[Donald ] Trump is more important than all of us. He's more important than the media.
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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
[Donald Trump] will try to renegotiate the trade deals a little bit.
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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
First of all, legally, it's hard to do these things[ get rid of ObamaCare]. Donald Trump needs a lot of competent people.
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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
For all the talk about the bitterness and the partisanship in American politics, is it really that bitter and partisan? Think of American history. Think of Joseph McCarthy. Think of the New Left. Think of [George] McGovern. Think of [Ronald] Reagan. Think of George Wallace. We've had an awful lot of real extremism on both wings.
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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
Fox gets two million viewers a night, and MSNBC gets one. It's four million people, five million people, and 130 million people are going to vote. There are an awful lot of voters, and an awful lot of politically engaged, intelligent people who are not hanging on whatever happens on Bill O'Reilly or Rachel Maddow.
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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
Frankly, if you're 26 years old and there's a war on women or there's not a war on women, you can get all wrapped up in it and get lots of traffic on your website and get into exchanges and scream and yell about it on MSNBC or Fox, and a week later no one can remember what that was about.
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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
Going from three TV channels to broadcast TV to cable to talk radio; obviously the online explosion has changed things.
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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
Having defeated and then occupied Iraq, democratizing the country should not be too tall an order for the world's sole superpower.
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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
He has a competent person, I think who will be confirmed as HHS secretary, Congressman Tom Price.
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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
He should release the tax returns tomorrow. It's crazy. You've got to release six, eight, ten years back tax returns. Take the hit for a day or two. He has to give a big speech in defense of capitalism, and that will elevate, I think, this race above this tactical back and forth, which I do think he's on the margin of losing.
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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
I am on the whole a defender of the current, despite being a conservative. I mean, I think things are better than when I was younger.
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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
I don't think [Mitt] Romney can sit there and wait to win because perhaps people are disappointed with President [Barack] Obama.
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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
I don't think you want political parties that are entirely driven by some extremely doctrinal ideology.
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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
If Donald Trump behaves well, personally, and morally - I agree with Van [Jones] on this - if he distances - if he disassociates himself from forces that he unfortunately coddled and even fostered a little in this campaign, if he is responsible about the way in which he goes about his policy, initiatives on immigration and ObamaCare, trade and other areas, he has a huge opportunity, because the truth is that a lot of this stuff isn't that - there is a lot that can be done.
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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
If President [Barack] Obama - President [Donald] Trump shows up with a, you know, cleaver and just says, I can get rid of all these regulations, I can get rid of ObamaCare, no problem at all, then that would be a mistake.
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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
If terror groups are to be defeated, it is national governments that will have to do so. In nations like India, governments will have to call on the patriotism of citizens to fight the terrorists. In a nation like Pakistan, the government will have to be persuaded to deal with those in their midst who are complicit.
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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
If the American people really come to a settled belief that Bush lied us into war, his presidency will be over.
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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
If we free the people of Iraq, we will be respected in the Arab world... and I think we will be respected around the world.
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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
If you look at the polls, for all the talk about immigration and even trade, ObamaCare was an extremely important issue for Trump voters in 2016.
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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
If you look at the polls - the conservatives are fine.I think there will be a fair amount of enthusiasm, or at least motivation. They very much want to remove President [Barack] Obama.
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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
I like [ Rick] Santorum personally and respect him, but you wouldn't say that he was really that strong of an opponent. At the end of the day it wasn't like [Ronald] Reagan running against [George] Bush, or [George W.] Bush against [John] McCain, even. It's sort of surprising that Romney had as much trouble as he did, and I think it shows a weakness in appeal to those voters.
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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
I'm disappointed, depressed, and demoralized. [...] It is very hard to avoid the conclusion that President Bush flinched from a fight on constitutional philosophy. Miers is undoubtedly a decent and competent person. But her selection will unavoidably be judged as reflecting a combination of cronyism and capitulation on the part of the president.
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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
I mean, obviously, one of the strongest arguments against evolution and selection of the fittest and progress, which is part of evolution, is the current field of the presidential candidates. We started off with Washington and Adams and Jefferson and then we had Lincoln, and now we moved ahead and look where we are now.
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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
I'm happy to have interns at The Weekly Standard and happy to have readers of The Weekly Standard, but if you all tell me that you were busy reading Plato and [Lev] Tolstoy and playing violin in the orchestra, I'd say that was great. I wouldn't tell you to take time out from that to get involved in political journalism.
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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
In any case, decisions on troop levels in the American system of government are not made by any general or set of generals but by the civilian leadership of the war effort.
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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
In any case, open-seat presidential elections like 2008 just are different in character from incumbent reelects, and I think that's the most important thing about this election - is that once there's an incumbent running for reelection, most of the debate is about, "Has he [Barack Obama] done a good job?" Most of the judgment is, "Do you want to keep him or do you want to replace him?" Now, the opponent has to also be acceptable and has to make his own case.
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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
I personally - if I were designing the tax code - would have a tax code in which Mitt Romney paid more than 13 percent, given what I know about the kind of investments he made money from.
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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
I still would say generally that more people have access [to] and take advantage of more diversity of opinion than was once .
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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
I think [Donald Trump] will do something on immigration.
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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
I think it's fine that there are five million people who are watching [politics on TV], and obviously I'm happy they are since they're on the air, and there are a couple hundred thousand people reading The Weekly Standard online, and that's great too, but most Americans aren't engaged that intensely, and are much less partisan.
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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
I think reading intelligent expressions of different points of view is a good thing, and there is a way in which being in academia in a classroom at the University probably gives you, can give you an academic view of things, and reading actual real time debates about what should we do in Syria or the Buffett rule, budget issues...gives you a kind of sense that's hard to get in a classroom.
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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
I think that's what's - one of the things that is alarming to me is [Donald] Trump, and I think Trump supporters seem to believe, he won, huge upset, full credit to him, and has got the wind at his back. And Republicans on The Hill do want him to succeed, obviously, and they're deferring to him more than they deep down in private sort of wish - want to, but they are going to defer to him publicly for awhile. But I think that is going to run out faster than people think.
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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
I think there was a moment in the middle part of the century into the 60s, 70s when at least elite journalism claimed to be non-partisan. You can go back and look at it and wonder about how non-partisan it was.
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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
I think the whole dynamic is different. Whereas in [Barack] Obama's case, even though there was no incumbent, he was able to run against eight years of Bush-Cheney and a Republican Congress, and everyone was tired of everything. He was able to benefit from that.
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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
[I]t's up to Republicans to expose the bureaucracies and criticize the orthodoxies - to ask why visas for travel to the United States are still being issued in West Africa and why American military forces are being deployed there without a workable plan or intelligible purpose, why CDC spending priorities are so skewed and CDC management so weak, and why here at home routine police powers aren't being used and routine public health measures aren't being implemented.
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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
It will be an unusual dynamic [in Congress]. It won't be like the rallying behind President [Barack] Obama in 2009 or behind President [George W.] Bush, even at the beginning of his presidency, or even [Bill] Clinton in '93, when he got his budget through on a partisan vote.
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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
I was "Never Trump." But it turned out never republican was really the theme of this election.
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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
Leo Strauss's discoveries in the history of political philosophy had the effect of liberating his students from the yoke of contemporary thought.
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By AnonymWilliam Kristol
Lest conservatives be too proud, it's worth recalling that conservatism's rise was decisively enabled by liberalism's weakness.
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