Who knew?

[elfs]

Someone took me to task this weekend for being excessively gleeful at the passing of Irving Kristol. It's hard for me to care, really. Kristol felt no pain at my distaste for him in life -- he apparently wallowed in his opponents' dislike of his life's work -- and he's hardly about to care in death.

But I never realized he was quite so cavalier in his evil:

Among the core social scientists around The Public Interest there were no economists... This explains my own rather cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit and other monetary or fiscal problems. The task, as I saw it, was to create a new majority, which evidently would mean a conservative majority, which came to mean, in turn, a Republican majority - so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government.

In other words, it didn't matter if the country plummeted toward economic disaster, so long as in the meantime his tribe managed to buy off the "docile masses" and establish that Legendary Permanent Republican Majority.

Kristol was one of those people about whom there is an old and probably apocryphal tale of a politician and one of his constituents: "Sir, if you maintain your current policies, you'll rule over nothing but ruins."

"Yes," said the politician, "But they'll be my ruins!"

Comments

[tagryn]

I guess you don't see that wishing your opponents dead pretty much means you have no credibility when you do your posts about how crazy the Right has become, because you're exhibiting exactly the same behavior, just from the opposite political spectrum?

No, I suppose not. sigh.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I never wished him dead. I regret the death of even a poisonous animal, but I'm certainly glad the poison has stopped.