Bill Kristol’s Love for Sarah Palin Knows No Bounds

Since Friday, when Sarah Palin declared in a rambling, incoherent, borderline Dadaist speech that she would be stepping down as governor of Alaska only a year and a half into her first term, politicians and pundits of all political stripes have been trapped in a state of extended head-scratching. From Mike Huckabee to Maureen Dowd, from Keith Olbermann to Karl Rove, from Pat Buchanan to Andrew Sullivan, they’re all falling over one another to make sense of the completely nonsensical.

Was this a shrewd move, they wonder, one that would free Palin to spend the next few years traveling the country, earning money, meeting Republican party leaders, shaking hands in waffle houses, and generally prepping herself for a run at the presidency? Or was it an act of political suicide, damning her to a spot in the great book of political curiosities, someone we’ll all vaguely remember 30 years from now as being the woman who thought the best way to prove her bona fides as a resilient hard-working defender of freedom was to quit her elected office and leave her state high and dry?

What, in short, was she thinking?

The answer is: Who the hell knows? Not the pundits, not the Republican establishment, not even her own father-in-law. In fact, only two things were certain by the end of this weekend. The first is that Sarah Palin is a complete genius at speaking incomprehensibly (whoever can make sense of the following sentences will win two free tickets to the first annual Unfit Times Summer Sleep-Over Party: “So I choose for my state and for my family more freedom to progress all the way around.” “We know we can effect positive change outside government at this moment in time on another scale and actually make a difference for our priorities.” “And that is what I’m doing keeping our eye on the ball that represents sound priorities – remember, they include energy independence smaller government, national security, freedom! And I know when it’s time to pass the ball – for victory.”)

The second is that there is nothing Sarah Palin could ever do to make Bill Kristol not love her.

Since even before the Republican Convention and the rollout of the governor as John McCain’s running mate, conservative columnist and Weekly Standard founder Kristol has been singing the praises of Palin to anyone who would listen, calling her an “inspirational figure and a powerful symbol” and lobbying for her to be McCain’s choice. “There she is,” he wrote in his most gob-smacked prose in September, as if he were Bert Parks singing to the newly crowned Miss America, “a working woman who’s a proud wife and mother; a traditionalist in important matters who’s broken through all kinds of barriers; a reformer who’s a Republican; a challenger of a corrupt good-old-boy establishment who’s a conservative; a successful woman whose life is unapologetically grounded in religious belief; a lady who’s a leader.”

Honestly, reading through Kristol’s writings from the last two months of the campaign is like reading the diary of a man in love. It’s like reading the libretto to an Italian opera. It’s like reading Dante on Beatrice.

And the love was clearly unconditional. Even as it started to become clear that Palin was wildly unprepared to be vice-president (see the Katie Couric interview or her debate with Joe Biden), even after the country had turned on her and the party faithful had become skeptical of her and she had become a drag on the ticket, still Kristol stood by her, like a lovesick puppy or a knight errant – loyal til the end.

Which is admirable in its way, I guess.

But here’s the problem with loyalty: Once you’re in, once you’ve declared that someone is your girl or guy, you can’t turn around and say you’ve made a mistake. Well you can, but not if you’re Bill Kristol, king of the East Coast Conservative Intelligentsia, who didn’t just throw his support behind a proudly uneducated, unrefined nitwit but actively advocated her being made the Republican vice-presidential nominee. Not when you stuck around like a fool when everyone else around you was rightly jumping ship.

No, Kristol is in with Palin all the way and until the end.

And he proved it again this weekend. Responding to Palin’s announcement on Fox News Sunday, he conceded briefly that the move was “strange” and “unconventional” (a not-so-subtle allusion to Palin’s own contention that the speech was more proof that she doesn’t go in for “politics as usual”) but then quickly moved back to more adulatory territory. First he said hopefully, “You know, maybe she’s crazy like a fox.” He then went on, “The more I’ve thought about it, the more I think it’s a pretty shrewd gamble” before finishing off with this masterpiece of sycophantic self-delusion: “I don’t rule out that it’s a stroke of genius.”

Genius. When even die-hard Palin supporters and family members are tempering their language, dodging reporters, and pleading ignorance, what can you say about a man so in the tank for Palin, so lost in love for Palin, and – most significantly – so unable to admit he may have actually been wrong in his original assessment of her, that he is able to force the word “genius ” out of his mouth while speaking about a charismatic mediocrity abandoning her responsibilities as governor?

I don’t know. All I can say is that the whole thing reminds me of Martin Scorsese.

Do you remember during the promotional run-up to the release of Gangs of New York, when Scorsese was comparing Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance to that of Robert De Niro’s in Taxi Driver? And we all thought he was talking crazy, and then we saw the movie and we knew he was talking crazy, that not only was DiCaprio not as good as De Niro in Taxi Driver; he wasn’t as good as the rest of the cast of Gangs of New York. But rather than admit he was wrong, that he was just talking up DiCaprio’s performance to sell tickets, Scorsese decided to stick by his claim in the hopes that even if we never thought that DiCaprio was as good as De Niro, at least we’d be convinced that he was convinced that DiCaprio was as good as De Niro. That way, instead of our thinking him foolish we would have to assume Scorsese – the great genius of the cinema – was seeing something we – decidedly not great geniuses of the cinema – were incapable of seeing. He had to keep up the appearance of continued conviction. So what did he do? He started to stick DiCaprio in every movie he could: The Aviator, The Departed, this fall’s Shutter Island, 2011’s The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, and on and on and on, til death do they part. Anything to spare himself the shame of saying he was wrong.

Mark my words, Martin Scorsese will make 30 movies with Leonardo DiCaprio before he admits he overstated things once at a press junket in a fit of enthusiasm. Movies that should star women, movies that should star kids, movies that should star animated chimpanzees – they will all star DiCaprio. And Scorsese will sing his praises as an actor who can play anything.

And so it is with Bill Kristol, who will go to his grave never having admitted that, consumed by his desire to see a Republican win the presidency in 2008, he forgot himself and backed a completely unprepared, unengaged, unworthy, unreasonable, possibly unhinged horse and then stuck with that horse long after it became clear she had no business being anywhere near a racetrack of any significance.

In this regard, I kind of respect Kristol. I’ve never felt that kind of devotion to anything in my life. I’ll throw someone under the bus if the mood strikes me or there’s money in it. It’’s not easy being principled. But Kristol is a different kind of man: a man of loyalty and of stubbornness, who refuses to take the easy way out, to go along with everyone else, or to go with the flow. Because, as we know now (thanks to the wise woman of Wasilla, Alaska), only dead fish do that.