1 Boring Old Man

Kristol: ‘Dick Cheney, Most Valuable Republican.’
ThinkProgress
May 16, 2009

While many Republicans are trying to ditch the legacy of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, one pundit is still clinging to the previous administration. In a column today titled “Don’t Wince. Fight!,” Bill Kristol offers a full-throated defense of Cheney, writing that Republicans cringing at the re-emergence of the former vice president have a “juvenile understanding of political dynamics.” Kristol then prescribes that to regain power, the GOP needs to embrace Bush’s policies and listen to Cheney:

The real question any Republican strategist should ask himself is this: What will Republican chances be in 2012 if voters don’t remember the Bush administration–however problematic in other areas–as successful in defending the country after 9/11? To give this issue away would be to accept a post-Herbert-Hoover-like-fate for today’s GOP. That’s why Republicans should listen carefully when Cheney gives a speech this week in which he’ll lay out the case for the surveillance, detention, and interrogation policies of the Bush administration in the war against terror.

Kristol concludes, “Dick Cheney probably won’t be the glamour quarterback of the Republican comeback. But he’s proving to be a heck of a middle linebacker…”

Bill Kristol is a brilliant guy by report. He was a star in college and holds a prestigeous Harvard Ph.D. where he now teaches Xenophon and Socrates. But his writings run along the lines of this piece, monotonously. He’s the erudite arm to O’Reilly, Hannity, and Limbaugh – to name a few. Somewhere along the line, whatever propelled him to academic stardom became subsumed under "Kristol then prescribes that to regain power, the GOP needs to embrace Bush’s policies and listen to Cheney." Everything he writes is aimed at the consolidation of power.  Here, he’s advertising Cheney’s next move, "a speech this week in which he’ll lay out the case for the surveillance, detention, and interrogation policies of the Bush administration in the war against terror." One wonders what leads someone with his brainpower to become a cheap and predictable publicist for the likes of Bush and Cheney. Could it have been Xenophon that lead him down this path? Like Kristol, Xenophon is mostly remembered for preserving the sayings of others. Xenophon was a particular favorite of Leo Strauss, the Neocons favorite Muse:

Xenophon’s standing as a political philosopher has been defended in recent times by Leo Strauss, who devoted a considerable part of his philosophic analysis to the works of Xenophon, returning to the high judgment of Xenophon as a thinker expressed by Shaftesbury, Winckelmann, and Machiavelli. Strauss’s reading has been heavily criticized, notably by classicist Myles Burnyeat, as attempting to force Socrates into the mould of Strauss’s own philosophical views.

Strauss taught that liberalism in its modern form contained within it an intrinsic tendency towards extreme relativism, which in turn led to two types of nihilism. The first was a “brutal” nihilism, expressed in Nazi and Marxist regimes. In On Tyranny, he wrote that these ideologies, both descendants of Enlightenment thought, tried to destroy all traditions, history, ethics, and moral standards and replace them by force under which nature and mankind are subjugated and conquered. The second type – the "gentle" nihilism expressed in Western liberal democracies – was a kind of value-free aimlessness and a hedonistic "permissive egalitarianism", which he saw as permeating the fabric of contemporary American society. In the belief that 20th century relativism, scientism, historicism, and nihilism were all implicated in the deterioration of modern society and philosophy, Strauss sought to uncover the philosophical pathways that had led to this situation. The resultant study led him to advocate a tentative return to classical political philosophy as a starting point for judging political action.