The cowardice on display here is difficult to overstate -- and to behold without being ill.  I lived in Manhattan on 9/11 and for many years thereafter.  For weeks -- even months and years after that attack -- it was widely assumed that New York would be a likely target for another attack, but I never heard a single New Yorker -- not one -- talk about fleeing the city or hiding their family in some faraway place.  During the 2004 election, New Yorkers voted for the candidate who wanted to treat Terrorism like a law enforcement problem over the pseudo-tough-guy "war president" by a margin of 80-20.  The fears engulfing Bolton and which he's attempting to infect the country with are found almost exclusively among this species of war-mongers obsessed with flamboyant -- and very public -- rituals where they proclaim their own "strength" and "courage."

John Bolton and his comrades love to run around accusing anyone who doesn't want to wage more wars of being an "appeaser" and "surrendering" to Terrorists, but Bolton's cry here is the ultimate, definitive surrender:  I'm too scared of the Terrorists to go about my normal life.  I'm too petrified even to have my family in the same city as a terrorist trial.  We can't adhere to our normal political system because the Terrorists will kill us all.   Given Bolton's comments, this might be the most ironic and desperate book title in the history of publishing:

All over the world, countries have put terrorists on trial in their largest and most important cities -- London, Madrid, Mumbai, Denpasar (the capital of Bali).  That's because their countries weren't flooded by meek, frightened little men like John Bolton who want to send their fellow citizens to bomb and invade as many countries as they can find in order to conceal and compensate for the suffocating cowardice revealed by both his life and these comments.  It's a natural human instinct to try to prove to the world that one possesses exactly those characteristics which one most lacks -- which is why right-wing warriors of the type represented by John Bolton are so desperate to prove their Churchillian courage and resolve, always from the safest and most risk-free distances.

* * * * *

Quite related to all of this, Brad at Sadly, No examines what he calls American elites' "nationalist narcissism. They believe not only that America has the right and the duty to be the 'dominant' country in the world, but that every other country in the world should be talking forever about how wonderful we are."  It's not hard to understand the source of their need to constantly have affirmed what Newsweek's Howard Fineman this week calls "our special destiny" as he frets that Obama is failing to salvage it by not keeping the U.S. at the Center of the World.  It's the same need that makes John Bolton and his comrades endlessly try to prove to the world how tough and brave they are even as they hide from and cower before Terrorists.  There are many reasons why America is a country perpetually at war, but this warped and broken psychological state -- weak and frightened individuals cheering on faraway wars as a means of feeling tough and strong, all justified by our own Supreme Specialness -- is one of the leading causes.

 

UPDATE:  As he does on a virtually daily basis, Glenn Beck today perfectly illustrates this syndrome (h/t Atrios):

 

UPDATE II:  An email I received from Jesse Levine, counsel in New York City's Law Department:

All of your recent posts have been on the mark, albeit depressing. Today's Bolton post resonates most with me, because on 9/12 I started working in the Emergency Command Center as I did for the next several weeks. Apart from working on the supply logistics (I was in a different agency then), I attended incident command meetings, which included new rumors of threats and assessments. When the Law Department formed the World Trade Center Unit, I became Assistant Chief and besides my litigation responsibilities, I prepared witnesses for the 911 Commission and NIST investigations. I also supervised the evidence gathering team that was documenting the City's response to the disaster. Through all of that I marveled at the bravery of the unsung heros of the response and aftermath, and not just the uniformed forces. I also saw the bravery of thousands who flocked to the City from all over the country to help.  For a creep like Bolton to try to project his fears on the rest of us is disgusting.

That about sums it up.

Given the group’s principals, there should be little surprise about the main issues with which Keep America Safe is concerning itself. It’s basically your big neoconservative three: detention, torture and bombing. Nor is the argumentative style of the group and its members exactly a breath of fresh air. Bill Kristol explained the group’s purpose to Politico this way: “The Left has dozens of organizations and tens of millions of dollars dedicated to undercutting the war on terror. The good guys need some help too.” On Twitter, Michael Goldfarb wrote, “Why doesn't the left want to Keep America Safe...sort of surprised by all the hostility.”

The Politico article on the group also highlights a two-minute promotional video that it produced. You won’t exactly be enlightened by the content, which is a series of intensely misleading half-truths. The basic gist is, to paraphrase Goldfarb, that President Obama doesn’t want to Keep America Safe. 

So here's a quick breakdown of the video’s claims. Thanks goes out to “Keep America Safe” for the “rhetoric vs. reality” format, which I will shamelessly appropriate:

• Keep America Safe rhetoric: Barack Obama gives a good speech.
• Reality: Okay, this one is basically true.

• Keep America Safe rhetoric: Obama is scrapping the European missile shield, creating an opening for Iranian missiles to pour into Europe.
• Reality: Unmentioned, naturally, is the fact that Obama junked the plan in order to secure Russian cooperation in pressuring Iran.

• Keep America Safe rhetoric: Obama isn’t interested in protecting the CIA; you can tell this because his attorney general is investigating possible violations of the law by interrogators, which past CIA chiefs dislike.
• Reality: This is, strictly, true. However, it neglects to point out that we do not traditionally rely on the chiefs of an agency to determine whether lawbreaking by their subordinates should be punished. We -- typically -- count on the judiciary for that instead.

• Keep America Safe rhetoric: Obama promised to send more troops to Afghanistan, but hasn’t done it yet.
• Reality: The military has already significantly enlarged its presence in Afghanistan, technically fulfilling the president’s campaign promise. Further, it came out recently that Obama quietly sent 13,000 new troops to Afghanistan. But yes, he’s still considering sending tens of thousands more, and on that front, he is taking a bit of time to think over his options.

• Keep America Safe rhetoric: The president isn’t protecting the country because he’s slacking off, going on TV and golfing and vacationing and jet-setting to Copenhagen.
• Reality: The trip to Copenhagen took, like, a day. Obama was already in New York when he went on the Tonight Show. And as for the golf game, well, remember which president spent the most days on vacation? On a related note, do you really want to be criticizing presidents for spending too long thinking over whether and how to commit American soldiers to battle? (Maybe better not to answer that one.)

Here it might be instructive to go back to Center for American Progress for a moment. As it happens, Politico recently ran an article on Think Progress, a CAP-based blog. Among the people asked for a quote was none other than Keep America Safe’s Michael Goldfarb. Said Goldfarb, “They’re a shameless bunch of lying, distorting, propagandists, which I respect, and I don’t know what MSNBC would do without them. But I think the high watermark for Think Progress is long past.”

And with that, Goldfarb went back to his office in the Cheney administration in exile.

Historians of intellectual conservatism often claim that it consisted of three intellectual movements: the movement conservatism centered on Buckley's National Review, libertarianism and neoconservatism. I am not so sure that the first two qualify as intellectual movements. In the 1950s and 1960s National Review featured some brilliant mavericks like James Burnham, Willmoore Kendall and Russell Kirk, but for most of its subsequent history it was simply a partisan opinion journal. As for the libertarian intellectual movement, isn't that a contradiction in terms? How intellectual can a movement be, if it reflexively answers "the market!" to every question of domestic and foreign policy, before the question is even asked?

That leaves neoconservatism. But in its origins neoconservatism was a movement of the center-left, not of the right. Here is Nathan Glazer, co-editor with Irving Kristol of the Public Interest, in that magazine's final issue in spring 2005, recalling the origins of the journal in the 1960s: "All of us had voted for Lyndon Johnson in 1964, for Hubert Humphrey in 1968, and I would wager (?) that most of the original stalwarts of The Public Interest, editors and regular contributors, continued to vote for Democratic presidential candidates all the way to the present. Recall that the original definition of the neoconservatives was that they fully embraced the reforms of the New Deal and indeed the major programs of Johnson's Great Society ... Had we not defended the major social programs, from Social Security to Medicare, there would have been no need for the 'neo' before 'conservative.'"

The "neoconservatism" of the 1990s, defined by support for the invasion of Iraq and centered on Rupert Murdoch's magazine the Weekly Standard, edited by Irving's son William Kristol, had little to do with the original impulse, as Glazer points out: "There is very little overlap between those who promoted the neoconservatism of the 1970s and those committed to its latter day manifestation." While Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz set aside any differences with the Republican right by the 1990s, other first-generation neocons like Glazer and the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan remained true to their New Deal/Great Society principles. Several of them told me over the years that they thought of themselves as "paleoliberals," not "neoconservatives," a term that was coined as an insult by the socialist Michael Harrington and embraced as a badge of honor by Irving Kristol.

In its origins, neoconservatism was a defense of New Deal/Great Society liberalism at home and abroad, both from the radical, countercultural left of the era and from its own design defects. The early neocons were Kennedy-Johnson liberals who believed that liberal reform should avoid naive utopianism and should be guided by pragmatism and empirical social science. The '70s neoconservatives were so focused on the utopianism of the '60s campus left, however, that most paid too little attention to a far greater threat to their beloved New Deal tradition, the utopianism of the libertarian right. Ultimately Milton Friedman and other free-market ideologues did far more damage to America than the carnival freaks of the counterculture.

But the early neoconservatives were right to defend mainstream liberalism against countercultural radicalism. Like today's right, the '60s and '70s left was emotional, expressivist and anti-intellectual. (One of its bibles was Abbie Hoffman's "Steal This Book!") Like today's right, the '70s left favored theatrical protest over discussion and debate. The prophets of the Age of Aquarius and the "population explosion" were every bit as apocalyptic as Glenn Beck. And just as today's right-wing radicals play at Boston Tea Parties, so Abbie Hoffman dressed up as Uncle Sam. The teabaggers are the Yippies of the right. 

Boomer nostalgia to the contrary, in the case of practically every domestic issue disputed by the counterculture and the original neoconservatives the mainstream progressive position today is that of the neoconservatives of the '70s. While the neoconservatives of the Committee on the Present Danger in the 1970s exaggerated Soviet power, the kind of muscular liberal internationalism that Pat Moynihan defended against the left in the 1970s and against Reaganite unilateralism in the 1980s is today's progressive grand strategy. Neoconservatives like Moynihan were denounced as racists in the 1970s for saying the same things about the importance of law and order and functioning families that Clinton and Obama have been able to say without controversy. The original neoconservatives like Moynihan and Glazer sought to help the black and Latino poor by means of universal, race-neutral programs instead of race-based affirmative action, which, they warned, would spark a white backlash to the benefit of conservatives. They were right about the political potency and longevity of that backlash, too, even though today's progressives still refuse to admit it.

The enduring legacy of the original neoconservatives is less a matter of policy positions than a particular intellectual style. David Hume defined the essayist as a messenger from the realm of learning to the realm of conversation. Between the late '60s and the mid-'80s, the public intellectuals of the neoconservative movement shuttled between the two realms, writing essays with academic rigor and journalistic clarity for the general educated public in Commentary, edited by Norman Podhoretz, and the two quarterlies that Irving Kristol founded, the Public Interest and the National Interest. Here are a few of the essays in the inaugural issue of the Public Interest in fall 1965: Daniel Patrick Moynihan on "The Professionalization of Reform"; Robert M. Solow, "Technology and Unemployment"; Jacques Barzun, "Art -- by act-of-Congress"; Nathan Glazer, "Paradoxes of American Poverty"; Daniel Bell, "The Study of the Future." The journal in its ecumenical first issue included Robert L. Heilbroner from the left and Robert A. Nisbet from the right. If you were interested in the scintillant collision of philosophy, politics and policy, bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. In an era as inhospitable as our own to the essay as a form, it is encouraging to see an attempt by conservatives to revive the Public Interest under the name of National Affairs. The influence of the neoconservative style of informed debate is evident as well in the flourishing new liberal quarterly Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.

In the 1950s, Irving Kristol, with the British poet Stephen Spender, had co-edited Encounter. In my view Encounter was the best magazine in the English language ever (sorry, Addison and Steele). Here is an anthology of the best of Encounter, including essays and poems by W.H.. Auden and Daniel Bell and Isaiah Berlin and short stories by Nadine Gordimer and Edmund Wilson. There was a scandal in 1965 when it was revealed that this transatlantic journal of ideas was secretly funded as part of the cold war of ideas by the CIA (both Spender and Kristol claimed to have been deceived). Never was CIA money better spent.

Irving Kristol; his wife, the distinguished historian Gertrude Himmelfarb; and many of their friends and allies had begun on the anti-communist left, battling Stalinists in the U.S. and Europe on the intellectual front of the Cold War. Because Soviet-controlled communists in Western democracies set up cultural and intellectual front groups to battle for public opinion, the anti-Stalinist left decided to fight fire with fire by setting up its own network of front groups and publications, often funded, as in the case of Encounter, by the CIA. This kind of Leninist popular-front strategy, using little magazines, committees and manifestos like the Committee on the Present Danger and the Project for a New American Century, was the organizational contribution of the neoconservatives in the 1990s to their creationist and libertarian allies in the Republican right. But by the time Kristol fils had succeeded Kristol pere as the new godfather of neoconservatism, most of the public intellectuals of the first generation like Moynihan, Bell and Glazer had distanced themselves from Neoconservatism 2.0.

The sins of the sons should not be visited upon the fathers. I hope that, in the judgment of history, the "paleoliberal" neoconservatism of the 1970s will overshadow the crude, militaristic neoconservatism of the 1990s and 2000s. For two decades, between the Johnson years and the Reagan years, neoconservatism really was the vital center that Arthur Schlesinger had called for in the late 1940s. A robust new liberalism, if there is to be one in the aftermath of the opportunistic triangulations of Clinton and Obama, cannot leapfrog back to the Progressives or New Dealers, but must begin closer to home, with the early neoconservatives, who had learned from the failures and mistakes as well as the successes of the Progressive Era, the New Deal and the Great Society. 

Since 1928, the average Jewish vote for the Democrat in presidential elections has been an amazing 75% -- far higher than that of any other ethno-religious group.

Yet there were reasons to think that it would be different in 2008. The main one was Israel. Despite some slippage in concern for Israel among American Jews, most of them were still telling pollsters that their votes would be strongly influenced by the positions of the two candidates on the Jewish state. This being the case, Mr. McCain's long history of sympathy with Israel should have given him a distinct advantage over Mr. Obama, whose own history consisted of associating with outright enemies of the Jewish state like the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and the historian Rashid Khalidi. . . .

In 2008, we were faced with a candidate who ran to an unprecedented degree on the premise that the American system was seriously flawed and in desperate need of radical change—not to mention a record powerfully indicating that he would pursue policies dangerous to the security of Israel. Because of all this, I hoped that my fellow Jews would finally break free of the liberalism to which they have remained in thrall long past the point where it has served either their interests or their ideals.

Apparently, The Godfather of Neoconservatism believes that American Jews do -- and should -- base their political beliefs not on what is best for their own country, but on what is best for a foreign country (Israel).  According to him, even though Obama shares most of their views on political matters ("on abortion, gay rights, school prayer, gun control and assisted suicide, the survey data show that Jews are by far the most liberal of any group in America"), American Jews should have nonetheless voted for McCain because of McCain's alleged "long history of sympathy with Israel."  Isn't this the "dual loyalty" argument that nobody is allowed to make upon pain of being accused of all sorts of bad things -- that the political beliefs of some American Jews are shaped primarily or even exclusively by loyalty to Israel?  Yet here we find not Walt and Mearshimer or Chas Freeman making this claim, but Norman Podhoretz. 

This extreme and flagrant double standard has been permitted for a long time now.  Neocons arrogate unto themselves the right to make appeals to what they believe is the "dual loyalty" of American Jews -- most of whom, in fact, reject their radical ideology -- when trying to coerce support for their agenda.  Podhoretz's Commentary Magazine convened a "symposium" of some of the nation's most typical war-loving neocons to discuss his new book, and virtually everyone of them argued that American Jews should shift their political loyalties to the Right because the Right is "better for Israel" -- as though considerations of what's best for a foreign country is how most American Jews (rather than just neocons) decide how they vote in American elections.  Neocons have long gotten away with this manipulative game: simultaneously demanding that American Jews support the Right on the ground that the Right is allegedly better for Israel (i.e., a "dual loyalty" appeal) while branding as "bigots" and "anti-Semites" anyone and everyone who points out that neocons think this way.

The reason why Podhoretzian neocons are so frustrated that more Americans Jews don't respond to their pressure tactics is because most don't think the way neocons do and don't have the same priorities.  Not only do the vast majority of American Jews reject virtually every core neocon tenet of American politics, but they also have the same priorities as Americans generally when it comes to deciding their political loyalties (the economy, health care, social issues -- not Israel).  In 2008, while most American Jews said they "care about" Israel in general, only 6 % identified "support for Israel" as the most important factor in determining their vote.  That's why Norm Podhoretz and his friends are so angry and confused.  Devotion to Israel is at the center of their political world-view -- it's what shapes their political beliefs.  One right-wing columnist actually complained that while Obama "may even be pro-Israel and pro-Jewish to an extent . . . to him America’s interests take precedence" -- as though that's a bad thing.  But that view -- that Israel's interests should predominate American politics -- is shared only by a small minority of American Jews (namely:  neocons), which is why their "dual loyalty" appeals fall on deaf ears.

There's an equally important factor driving the long overdue erosion of neocon influence among American Jews:  the collapse of their monopoly in defining what is "good for Israel."  This week's New York Times Magazine contains an excellent profile by James Traub on the emergence of J Street, the important and often courageous organization which is breaking the right-wing stranglehold of AIPAC and comrades when it comes to speaking for -- and defining -- American-Jewish political interests.  Amazingly, Traub explicitly endorses a central Walt/Mearsheimer argument:  that the AIPAC-led Israel Lobby -- until the emergence of J Street -- "had succeeded in ruling almost any criticism of Israel out of bounds, especially in Congress":

The idea that there is an "Israel lobby," with its undertones of dual loyalty, is a controversial notion. It has been around since the early 1970s at least, but it became a topic of wide discussion only after the publication of a notorious article in The London Review of Books in 2006 by the political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. The article, which was expanded into a book, infuriated many readers by its air of conspiratorial hugger-mugger; by its insistence that Jewish neoconservatives had persuaded President Bush to go to war in Iraq in order to protect Israel; and by the authors’ apparent ignorance of the deep sense of identification many Americans -- Jewish and gentile -- feel toward Israel.  But the authors made one claim that struck many knowledgeable people as very close to the mark:  The Israel lobby had succeeded in ruling almost any criticism of Israel out of bounds, especially in Congress.

"The bottom line," Mearsheimer and Walt wrote, "is that Aipac, a de facto agent for a foreign government, has a stranglehold on Congress, with the result that U.S. policy is not debated there, even though that policy has important consequences for the entire world." Mearsheimer and Walt also wrote that Aipac and other groups succeeded in installing officials who were deemed "pro-Israel" into senior positions. This is, of course, what effective lobbies do. The Cuba lobby, for example, long operated in the same way. But Israel is a much more important American national-security interest than Cuba. No country, whether Israel or Cuba, has identical interests to those of the United States. And yet mainstream American Jewish groups had implicitly agreed to subordinate their own views to those of the government in Jerusalem. The watchword, says J. J. Goldberg, editorial director of The Forward, the Jewish weekly, was, “We stick with Israel regardless of our own judgment.”

Those are some pretty amazing words to find in The New York Times Magazine.  But numerous American Jewish groups have been challenging the hegemony of AIPAC, and J Street has been most successful of all in gradually highlighting how unrepresentative Norm Podhoretz, Bill Kristol, AIPAC and friends are when it comes to understanding the views of American Jews and even "the interests of Israel."  As Traub notes, when AIPAC and other traditional Jewish groups threatened to target Rep. Donna Edwards for her blasphemous decision to vote "present" rather than "yes" on a House Resolution unequivocally supporting the Israeli war on Gaza -- how dare this American Congresswoman fail to show full-fledged fealty to Israel -- J Street raised a substantial amount of money for Edwards and made clear it would support her in the event AIPAC targeted her for defeat.  That is changing the nature of what it means to be "pro-Israel" and allowing an expanded scope of opinion on matters relating to Israel.

For that same reason, the AIPAC/neocon effort to bully Obama out of applying true pressure on Israel is failing as well.  When Obama recently met in the White House with the heads of American Jewish groups, he notably invited J Street's Executive Director, Jeremy Ben-Ami (which, according to Traub, caused "some of the mainstream groups [to] vehemently protest" his inclusion), and this is what happened:

In July, President Obama met for 45 minutes with leaders of American Jewish organizations. All presidents meet with Israel’s advocates. Obama, however, had taken his time, and powerhouse figures of the Jewish community were grumbling; Obama’s coolness seemed to be of a piece with his willingness to publicly pressure Israel to freeze the growth of its settlements and with what was deemed his excessive solicitude toward the plight of the Palestinians. During the July meeting, held in the Roosevelt Room, Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, told Obama that "public disharmony between Israel and the U.S. is beneficial to neither" and that differences "should be dealt with directly by the parties."  The president, according to Hoenlein, leaned back in his chair and said: "I disagree. We had eight years of no daylight” -- between George W. Bush and successive Israeli governments -- "and no progress."

The anti-neocon view -- that blind, uncritical American support for anything Israel wants and does is not only bad for the U.S., but also for Israel -- is gaining widespread acceptance among American Jews.  As Traub notes:

As Martin Indyk, a former American ambassador to Israel and now the director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, puts it, "In the Bush years, when Israel enjoyed a blank check, increasing numbers of people in the Jewish and pro-Israel community began to wonder, If this was the best president Israel ever had, how come Israel’s circumstances seemed to be deteriorating so rapidly?" Why was Israel more diplomatically isolated than ever? Why had Israel fought a savage and apparently unavailing war with Hezbollah in Lebanon? Why were the Islamists of Hamas gaining the upper hand over the more moderate Fatah in Palestine? "There was kind of a cognitive dissonance," Indyk says, "about whether a blank check for Israel is necessarily the best way to secure the longevity of the Jewish state."

The self-pitying, angry lament of Norm Podhoretz that most American Jews reject what he has to say is understandable.  He's right:  they do, and that's becoming increasingly apparent.  But if Podhoretz wants to run around insisting that American Jews should decide their political loyalties based on the interests of a foreign country (even though most don't), then it shouldn't be impermissible to point out that this is how he and his neoconservative allies think.  There are still a lot of highly critical issues even beyond Israel over which this faction is attempting to exert influence -- beginning with Iran and Afghanistan -- and keeping a light on what they really are, and are not, is vitally important.

 

UPDATE:  In a scathing review of Podhoretz's "dreary" book in The New York Times, the New Republic's Leon Wieseltier writes that Jewish-Americans' "steadfast allegiance to the Democratic Party, Podhoretz insists, now flies in the face of Jewish interests. . . . The Jewish interest that makes Podhoretz most desperate for a Jewish defection to the Republicans is Israel."  Attributing that view to neocons (that they shape their political beliefs based on Israel) is exactly what has led neocon critics, in the past, to be smeared with accusations of "dual loyalty" defamation and even anti-Semitism.

Amid all the blather about "teachable moments," I don't recall anyone else making this simple but profound observation: "You can't have a teachable moment if it's based on a lie." Another way of putting it might be to say that it's not a "moment" that's teachable, it's the truth that's teachable.

So a moment in which everyone colludes to obscure the truth (which seems characteristic of most "teachable moments" in contemporary America) is not a moment of teaching; it's a moment of deception, of misdirection, of obfuscation. Call it an obfuscatable moment.

It's hard to remember a statement in American politics as deceitful and obfuscating as this one from Bill Kristol, pretending to condemn politically-motivated lies.  It's not hyperbole to say that the central political tactic of neoconservatism is the "noble lie" -- exactly what Kristol self-righteously condemns here.  The political philosopher most revered by neoconservatives, Leo Strauss, explicitly advocated such lies, as Philosophy and Political Science Professor Shadia Drury documented:

[Strauss] therefore taught that those in power must invent noble lies and pious frauds to keep the people in the stupor for which they are supremely fit. . . . Like the Grand Inquisitor, he thought that it was better for human beings to be victims of this noble delusion than to “wallow” in the “sordid” truth. And like the Grand Inquisitor, Strauss thought that the superior few should shoulder the burden of truth and in so doing, protect humanity from the “terror and hopelessness of life.

Though that may be a bit of an oversimplification of Strauss' views, Kristol's dad, Irving, the so-called Godfather of Neoconservatism, was a devout follower of what he understood to be Strauss' belief that feeding lies to citizens is necessary for good political ends:

Kristol has acknowledged his intellectual debt to Strauss in a recent autobiographical essay. "What made him so controversial within the academic community was his disbelief in the Enlightenment dogma that 'the truth will make men free.'" Kristol adds that "Strauss was an intellectual aristocrat who thought that the truth could make some [emphasis Kristol's] minds free, but he was convinced that there was an inherent conflict between philosophic truth and political order, and that the popularization and vulgarization of these truths might import unease, turmoil and the release of popular passions hitherto held in check by tradition and religion with utterly unpredictable, but mostly negative, consequences."

Based on that understanding, Irving Kristol explicitly advocated that ordinary citizens be lied to for their own good and the good of society:

There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people.  There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn't work.

As Professor Drury notes based on Bill Kristol's writings on such topic, Kristol himself, just like his dad whose life he followed, is a "Straussian clone."  That's why Bill Kristol's public career is filled with too many lies to count.  Lying is a justifiable tactic to them, which is what explains typical Kristol statements like this:

What the Bush administration did say--and what so many reporters seem to have trouble understanding--is that Iraq and al Qaeda had a relationship that, by its very existence, posed a potential threat to the United States.

Another by-product of Kristol's fervent belief in political lies was when he pretended to support evangelical Christians in the Terri Schiavo travesty (Straussian neoconservatives love to manipulate and inflame mass religious beliefs, especially Christianity, feigning sympathy with it, as the ultimate form of control) and said this:

After all, we are a "maturing society," as the Supreme Court has told us. Perhaps it is time, in mature reaction to this latest installment of what Hugh Hewitt has called a "robed charade," to rise up against our robed masters, and choose to govern ourselves. Call it Terri's revolution.

This is what was always most striking (and revealing) about The New York Times' hiring Kristol as a columnist (and The Washington Post's immediately swooping him up after he was let go by the NYT):  Kristol is someone who not only lies constantly, but who quite obviously believes in lying as a legitimate and important political weapon.  In general, there are far too many instances of extreme hypocrisy and deceit in our political culture to bother noting them when they arise.  But reading Bill Kristol -- the living, breathing embodiment of deceitful propaganda -- condemn the use of lies for political ends is really too much to ignore. It would be exactly like reading Saddam Hussein condemn human rights abuses or Dick Cheney condemn torture or George Bush condemn lawbreaking or Michael Gordon condemn mindless, government-serving stenography or Cokie Roberts condemn conventional-wisdom-spouting punditry, etc.

 

UPDATE:  As CarolynC notes in Comments, the Straussian endorsement of "noble lies" is completely consistent with the two-tiered system of justice that dominates our political culture (the subject of today's first post), as only some people -- the elite -- are permitted to tell such lies, while ordinary citizens who do so must be punished.  From Harper's Earl Shorris in July, 2004:

For Strauss, as for Plato, the virtue of the lie depends on who is doing the lying. If a poor woman lies on her application for welfare benefits, the lie cannot be countenanced. The woman has committed fraud and must be punished. The woman is not noble, therefore the lie cannot be noble. When the leader of the free world says that "free nations do not have weapons of mass destruction," this is but a noble lie, a fable told by the aristocratic president of a country with enough nuclear weapons to leave the earth a desert less welcoming than the surface of the moon.

That Harper's article also notes that Bill Kristol, like his dad Irv, is a devoted Straussian. Indeed, when Kristol pretends to reject politically-motivated lies, that in itself is an example of a Straussian lie:   Obama should be condemned for "lying" because he's not noble, whereas Kristol and his comrades are free to lie because they are devoted to noble ends.

 

UPDATE II:  I'm well aware of, and explicitly referenced, the debate over whether Kristolian neoconervatives faithfully summarize Strauss' views or whether they distort them.  Contrary to the assertions of several commenters, that debate is hardly clear-cut.  In addition to the above-cited Drury and Harper's articles arguing that neocons reflect exactly what Strauss believed, here is a restrained and very well-informed condemnation of Strauss from Harper's Scott Horton.  Horton notes that "even among those who love him, there seems to be a very catty rage over just who are the proper 'Straussians'"; that "the Neoconservative movement [] properly claims roots in the writing and thinking of Leo Strauss"; and that Strauss, at least early on, "sees real appeal in fascism, Mussolini style."  Also according to Horton:

One of the pillars of liberal democracy is the embrace of the Rule of Law, and the notion that no one, even the king or Executive, stands above the law. For Strauss this idea was foolishness. . . . Strauss applies this criticism to law; law spells weakness; law is a trick of the weak to tie down the strong. Hence, Strauss applauds the decisive leader who acts outside of the law to achieve his goals. Nevertheless, the consequences of Strauss’ dismissive attitude towards the Rule of Law can be seen today in the Neocon advocacy of jettisoning traditional norms of the law of armed conflict and in allowing the president to operate outside of clear criminal statutes (like FISA) as an aspect of his war-making powers.

And see here for some short though seemingly incriminating Strauss quotes (citation is here).

As a former philosophy major, I could find that debate interesting if I wanted to, but it has little to do with anything I've written here.  As a contemporary political matter, that debate over Strauss matters little.  Leo Strauss isn't subsidized by Rupert Murdoch to spew propaganda on Fox News and at The Weekly Standard; doesn't write columns in virtually every major American newspaper and magazine; and doesn't exert substantial influence in our political debate.  Neoconservatives do.  What matters is how they understand and embrace Strauss, regardless of whether that interpretation is or is not faithful to Strauss himself.  As the excerpts from Irving Kristol make conclusively clear, neocons cite Strauss to support their belief that lies in pursuit of noble political ends are justifiable (indeed, Bill Kristol sits on the Advisory Board of the Leo Strauss Center at the University of Chicago, along with Harvard Professor and Machiavelli lover Harvey Mansfield, who explicitly rejects the rule of law as a constraint on Presidents, or at least on George Bush). 

That's what matters:  what neoconservatives believe.  And what they believe is the virtue of political lies when spouted by certain people (themselves) in service of certain goals (their own), and relatedly, the complete absence of any limits on what they can do in pursuit of those "noble" goals.