Bill Kristol is funnier than Andy Kaufman

Ever since the Times picked him up as a columnist at the beginning of the year I've developed a weird compulsion to read right wing windbag Bill Kristol's column every Monday. At first I thought there might have been some deeper reason behind his selection than a feeling that the Times needed another conservative on its Op-ed page, but after just two or three columns the guy had completely outed himself as a political hack, obsessed with the glint and shine, and the feints and jabs of politics and not the actual engagement of ideas. At least Maureen Dowd has the good grace not to align herself with any one party or candidate, and spew her scorn pretty much everywhere.

I kept on giving the Times' editorial board the benefit of the doubt, that this guy was more than a weenie obsessed with politics as a popularity contest and actually had some kind of intellectual or ideological basis for his bullshit. Then a column in early June just blew me away, where he slammed Obama for a full column on being an elitist on the basis of a commencement speech he gave at Wesleyan. Bitteness? Guns? Clinging? Nope, Obama had extolled community service as a way to serve one's country, but hadn't mentioned the military.

Unfortunately Kristol spent his youth as neither a community organizer OR as a volunteer in the military, but at that elite-iest of East Coast elite institutions, where he received both his B.A. and his Phd. Sigh.

And as a recent New Yorker article revealed, in addition to being "Dan Quayle's brain", this guy was one of the people largely responsible for pushing Sarah Palin into the VP spot. Oh yeah, and he loves Fred Thompson.

So what would Kristol's sage advice to the conservative movement be after the electorate soundly rejected the Republican party on Tuesday? How can they now adequately reconcile the social conservatives with the fiscal conservatives and policy hawks, who all seem to be at one another's throats? How can conservative free market ideology reconcile itself to the bailout? How can conservative ideology best improve the economy and advance US foreign policy?

Any of these would be ripe topics for a column from a conservative pundit after Tuesday, but instead Bill Kristol gave us 800 or so words on why Obama's public choice of a puppy for his daughters is his greatest political coup, and may ensure Democratic dominance for eight years.

I get it. Bill Kristol is living performance meta-comedy on a level that even Andy Kaufman couldn't conceive of. He is just throwing out the most ridiculous shit ever, just waiting for someone to call him on it, just toe-ing on the inside of apparent sanity so people will take him seriously. He got me. So if you'll excuse me I think I'm gonna go read Paul Krugman's ideas on how to fix the economy.