Kristol Exudes Wrongness

Via Think Progress, we learn of Bill Kristol's quest to become the wrongiest pundit ever to sail the wrongy seas...

On Tuesday night, while the G.O.P. Congressional candidate was losing in a Mississippi district George Bush carried in 2004 by 25 points, Barack Obama was being trounced in the West Virginia Democratic primary — by 41 points. I can’t find a single recent instance of a candidate who ultimately became his party’s nominee losing a primary by this kind of margin.

Oh, mercy. As Room Eight says, it's not hard to come up with examples. It's not even hard to come up with examples from the last four months. Feb 5th, the GOP primary in Utah:

Romney 255,218 90%
McCain 15,264 5%
Paul 8,295 3%
Huckabee 4,054 2%

That's an eighty five point loss. That's not even a loss -- that's political composting. Utah mulched their gardens with the shredded detritus of McCain's campaign efforts.

Now, I'll admit. I don't have a column in the New York Times, which means that America is not obligated to listen to my every utterance as if it meant something. But when Kristol is not just wrong, but spectacularly wrong, and about something that, as a political pundit opining about the state of politics, he most certainly should be expected to know -- what the hell? Does he have no editors? Do his editors not care? Is being a movement conservative something like having a license to kill, so that anyone with the proper conservative credentials can wander the countryside, strangling wayward facts with piano wire?

How do you get to the point where you can just say things that are stubbornly, muleheadedly wrong -- that go against facts that anyone, anywhere can look up with little effort -- and manage to make yourself a tidy living being a professional pundit?

As Think Progress also points out, that wasn't even the only such loss McCain suffered on that very Tuesday. He also lost by over forty points in Arkansas and Colorado. Now, we could take the opportunity to mock Kristol for that -- managing to achieve three strikes of wrong in a single wrongy, wrongy phrase, but I'd rather use the opportunity to reflect on how wildly unpopular McCain was/is among some GOP constituencies.

While we've had months of handwringing about Obama and Clinton fighting it out, and how that core dissent is fracturing the party, McCain's the one with the fractured party. Most of the GOP activists hate him. The evangelicals hate him. McCain is inextricably tied to Bush policies, especially the Iraq War. His base is about as energized as a roadkilled raccoon with a triple-A battery up its -- well, you get the picture.

At the same time, Obama can stage rallies and have 75,000 people show up. So if Kristol intends to paint Obama as the weak and damaged candidate, he's going to have to step his flagrant butchering of reality up yet another notch or two. After all, being a conservative pundit -- even one at the supposed upper echelons of the profession -- means never having to succumb to actual facts when made-up nonsense will do just as well.