Kristol’s Cone of Silence

Surprise, Surprise!

In his much awaited Monday column in the New York Times, “Showdown at Saddleback,” Bill Kristol declares John McCain the winner at Saddleback’s Cone of Silence event.

In addition to his unbiased verdict on the Saddleback Church “debate,” made scrupulously fair because Obama went first and McCain second after having been “safely placed in a cone of silence,” Kristol tells us that the cone of silence event yielded three conclusions for him:

“First, Rick Warren should moderate one of the fall presidential debates.” Hopefully without cone of silence charades.

“Second, it was McCain’s night.” Wow, what an unexpected “conclusion,” cone of silence and all.

“Third, Obama and McCain really do have different ‘worldviews,’ to use Rick Warren’s term.”

For a change, Kristol is dead-right on this (third) one—cone of silence or not. Am I glad that Obama does have a different worldview than “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” McCain.

For much of the rest of his enlightening revelations, Kristol fixates on the “evil” thing—remember, the “evil” that brought us Iraq and took our eye off the real evil in Afghanistan and elsewhere—and says:

It’s nice to see a liberal aware of the limits of good intentions — indeed, that the road to hell is paved with them. But here as elsewhere, Obama stayed at a high level of abstraction. It would have been interesting if Warren had asked a follow-up question: Where in particular has the United States in recent years — at home or especially abroad — perpetrated evil in the name of confronting evil? Hasn’t the overwhelming problem been, rather, a reluctance to effectively confront evil — in Darfur, or Rwanda, or pre-9/11 Afghanistan?

As for how McCain would confront evil, Kristol says: “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb evil.” No, not quite. According to Kristol:

McCain asserted that ‘of course evil must be defeated,’ and he put ‘radical Islamic extremism,’ Al Qaeda in particular, at the top of his to-defeat list.

I assume “radical Islamic extremism” and “Al Qaeda” must have been on top of McCain’s list when he gung-ho cheered-on the invasion of Iraq and we took our eye off the real radical Islamic extremism and off the real Al Qaeda.

As for the alleged “cone of silence,” Kristol must have been in his own cone of silence and not read the same-date article in the Times, “Despite Assurances, McCain Wasn’t in a ‘Cone of Silence’,” because his only mention is:

Now I’m not entirely unbiased (!), so I don’t quite trust my initial judgment in such matters. But it was confirmed the next morning. NBC’s Andrea Mitchell reported on “Meet the Press” that “the Obama people must feel that he didn’t do quite as well as they might have wanted to in that context. … What they’re putting out privately is that McCain … may have had some ability to overhear what the questions were to Obama.” There’s no evidence that McCain had any such advantage. But the fact that Obama’s people made this suggestion means they know McCain outperformed him.”

I am sure we’ll hear much more about the “cone of silence,” unless McCain and his crowd are able to put a bigger and better cone of silence over this leaky one–the one that McCain jokingly (?) said, he was able to hear through the wall.