Let us put this as plainly as possible. William Kristol is a coward. When his own country needed soldiers to fight in the jungle, he was too busy at Harvard. For that matter, I don’t believe he has volunteered to fight the “civilizational struggle” in Israel, either, as some Americans have done. He at least could have hoisted his entitled ass out of his sinecure and lived in a West Bank settlement for a few years. One thing he hasn’t done is earned the right to denigrate the president’s record of service by comparing it to Netanyahu’s. He wasn’t decent enough to have emulated the former, nor courageous enough to have emulated the latter. A lot of institutions need a few good men. William Kristol never has been either one.

—The inimitable Charlie Pierce on the waste of protoplasm, and searing indictment of nepotism, that is Bill Kristol

One wonders how someone so consistently repugnant, and even more consistently wrong, is still viewed by the establishment as a serious thinker.