William Kristol

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with William Kristol about Stephen F. Hayes's new piece, The Benghazi Talking Points. 

Are you alarmed by the counterterrorism failures increasingly evident as we learn more about the Boston terror attack? Don’t be. Former CIA director Michael Hayden has helpfully explained, “This tragedy is the new normal.”

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with William Kristol on the future of the GOP. Hosted by Michael Graham.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with William Kristol on the future of the GOP. Hosted by Michael Graham.

The boss, sitting alongside Kirsten Powers and Charles Krauthammer, made the case on Special Report Friday that Mitt Romney should raise the issue of Barack Obama's failure to be forthright on the September 11, 2012, terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya. Watch the videos below:

"Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us,” we are told. So we take this occasion to praise three admirable individuals who died in the past two weeks. Each of them was extraordinary in his or her own right, but each of them also exemplified the virtues of a remarkable generation.

In his interview on ABC's This Week, Bill Clinton blames--well, I would say credits--the boss for killing Clintoncare in '93-'94. See the 1:30 mark of this amusing video:

TAPPER:  When you were watching healthcare reform finally pass after having tried it yourself, did you -- did you see it as something like, "I'm glad we stormed the castle in ‘93-‘94, because that paved the way for this?"

After his 1851 coup d’état, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of the real Napoleon, pronounced himself Napoleon III. It was the rise to power of this great-man-wannabe that prompted the famous opening of Karl Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis-Bonaparte: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice.

From the New York Times website:

A SENIOR WHITE HOUSE OFFICIAL spoke privately the other day about dramatic progress in the Middle East. Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds have broken an impasse and are on the verge of a historic compromise on a new Iraqi constitution. It mandates a pluralistic, democratic Iraq when the United States hands over sovereignty on June 30. Meanwhile, as a consequence of American intervention in Iraq, reformers have been strengthened in other countries throughout the region. In Pakistan and elsewhere, official support for Islamic radicalism--and official tolerance for terrorism--are on the wane.

TWO BIG DATES are coming up in the presidential campaign: The Iowa caucuses will take place on January 19. The New Hampshire primary follows on January 27. But the key date in the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination may well turn out to have been October 10, 2002. On that day, Senators Joseph Lieberman, John Edwards, and John Kerry joined most of their Democratic colleagues, and a large majority of the Senate, to vote to authorize President Bush to use force against Saddam Hussein.

WE DON'T CLAIM to understand the mind of Howard Dean. With back-room assistance from a small army of Democratic party foreign policy brahmins, Dean recently produced a long, formal speech on "Meeting the Security Challenges of the New Century." The speech was advertised as a reassuring demonstration that Dean's overall thinking about world affairs, notwithstanding the spicy antiwar rhetoric that has propelled his campaign so far, lies safely within the bipartisan consensus that's governed American politics for 50-plus years.