The Jeane Kirkpatrick Analysis Award

As promised in my last post, I am hereby awarding the 2008 Jeane Kirkpatrick Analysis Award. The late Jeane Kirkpatrick, like Paul Wolfowitz, was a neoconservative with a Phd. in Political Science who has brought shame on the discipline. Like Wolfowitz, she was a neoconservative who held a high position in a conservative Republican administration (Reagan's Ambassador to the United Nations). Also like Wolfowitz she had a knack for taking spectacularly wrong positions on important international issues. She favored U.S. intervention in the Lebanese Civil War in 1982 that led to the death of over 200 marines from a truck bomb and a withdrawal from a mission that achieved nothing positive. She also supported the Iran-Contra deal which, in addition to being bad policy, was also illegal. However, the position which has earned her everlasting discredit, in my opinion, came in the Falklands War between Great Britain and Argentina. She actually believed that the United States should support the Argentinians, then ruled by a brutal military dictatorship which would be thrown out of office shortly thereafter, instead of our closest ally, Great Britain. I still find this so incredibly stupid that 20 years later I have difficulty believing that someone with even a scintilla of knowledge about foreign affairs could take such a position. Thus, the Jeane Kirkpatrick Analysis Award is for the person who advocates a policy so incredibly stupid that they should lose all credibility and never be paid attention to again.

There are many deserving recipients of this award thanks to the Bush Administration's abject failure in almost all aspects of foreign policy. The aforementioned Wolfowitz, for example, was wrong in just about every prediction he made about the Iraq War. Other neoconservatives such as Douglas Feith and Richard Perle also belong in this category. I am bypassing these deserving candidates because they have largely been discredited. However, there is a neocon who has managed to continue to have influence despite voicing the same stupid blather about Iraq as Wolfowitz, Perle, and Feith. Not only that, he comes across as arrogant and smarmy. Why he still has a forum is something I find difficult to understand. The Award for 2008 goes to William/Bill Kristol, editor the the Weekly Standard. Since he has his own publication, one can understand how he remains in print. However, that does not explain why in the last few years he has managed to get gigs writing regular columns for Time magazine and the New York Times. Gee, if I am spectacularly wrong on the most important issues of the day, will someone pay me to write my opinions, too? I don't know if I could be as consistently wrong as Kristol has been, but if the price were right, I could try. Let's see, the best way out of this recession/depression is to cut government spending, reduce government intervention in the economy and let the free market recover on its own. It worked for Herbert Hoover, didn't it. Now will someone pay me for this opinion?