Bill Kristol lost the last presidential election; and the one before that. He was responsible in part for fomenting the Iraq War (and still doesn't take any personal responsibility for the catastrophe and countless innocent deaths that war led to) – and president Obama is president in part because he opposed it. Kristol believes in torture; president Obama ended the war crimes of his predecessor. Kristol believes Greater Israel should always be backed by the US – including its neo-fascist ethnic social engineering on the West Bank, now once again put on steroids by its unhinged prime minister, essentially ending any pretense of good faith with its European allies. President Obama supports the long-standing US view that there should be a two-state solution, along 1967 lines with land swaps. Kristol supports illegal settlements.
So why does Kristol merit any conceivable interest in a re-elected Obama's cabinet appointees? Why are we even talking about someone who has done so much damage to his own country and so much damage to Israel internationally, a man who has the blood of thousands of innocents in Iraq on his hands and appears to feel not a twinge of conscience, let alone introspection?
And yet here we have this ad, seen above, and an orchestrated campaign (you think Hiatt didn't get the memo or didn't even need to?) to dictate the policy and cabinet picks of the newly elected president. You ask: where do they get the gall? The "Emergency Committee For Israel", which sponsors the ad, contains in its very name a distillation of the paranoia and fantasy that is undermining a sane foreign policy for the United States, while supporting every suicidal, tribal, fundamentalist tendency in an increasingly isolated and fundamentalist Israel. Politico helpfully reminds us that
ECI was among the most aggressive conservative voices against Obama during the 2012 presidential campaign.
So why does he think he can get another scalp from yet another smear? And the answer is, as they say, "in front of one's nose." Because he operates on the premise that policy toward Greater Israel is not something that a president should have any serious control over. Policy in that respect is set in Congress aided and abetted by AIPAC and batshit crazy Christianist Zionists. Like the NRA, this lethal lobby will destroy any politician it can who stands in its way. It will also try to destroy the careers and reputations of any who criticize it. Nothing exemplifies this more clearly than the chilling, and repulsive headline in Kristol's own magazine when launching this character assassination:
What more, really could be said, about the poison these people traffic in?
The Dish 