In his New York Times column earlier this week, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol decried Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-IL) now-infamous “bitter” comments as being “disdainful of small-town America.” “What has Barack Obama accomplished that entitles him to look down on his fellow Americans?” questioned Kristol.

But on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show yesterday, Kristol himself appeared quite “disdainful” of the majority of Americans who are weary of the war in Iraq, implying that many of them are neither “decent” nor “serious,” but rather “feckless”:

KRISTOL: Every time there’s a little flare up, even if the flare up turns out to be for the better, which is what happened in Basra over the last few weeks, and none the less they go, “oh my God, can’t we get out of this.” So there’s a real weariness. Even amongst some decent people of just you know, it seems kind of there’s no end, there’s no clear, there’s no clarity. … And are we going to be such a feckless country, frankly, that we’re going to waste the sacrifices that have been made, snatch defeat and retreat out of the jaws of success and victory. … I’m moderately hopeful that the country gets beyond the kind of weariness and annoyance about the war and gets serious about the world we live in.

Listen here:

A poll released today by ABC News and the Washington Post, found that “views on the Iraq war have…turned more negative, with six in 10 now rejecting the notion that the United States needs to win there to effectively battle terrorism.” Apparently to Kristol, these 60% of Americans are “feckless,” which is defined as either “ineffective; incompetent; futile” or “having no sense of responsibility; indifferent; lazy.”

Additionally, the poll — which was conducted “after congressional testimony about the war” by Gen. David Petraeus and Amb. Ryan Crocker — found that the majority of Americans, including an increasing share of Republicans, “say the United States should withdraw its military forces to avoid further casualties”:

Moreover, while Bush remains committed to keeping more than 100,000 U.S. troops in Iraq through the rest of his presidency, 56 percent of Americans say the United States should withdraw its military forces to avoid further casualties. This has been the majority view since January 2007.

On several measures, the poll finds Republicans inching away from support for the war. Among them, a sense that progress in Iraq has stalled has increased 13 points from early March, and the percentages who prefer withdrawing troops over risking more casualties (30 percent) and who think that the battle against terrorism can be a success without victory in Iraq (39 percent) are each at new highs.

Perhaps the question should be asked: What has Bill Kristol “accomplished that entitles him to look down on his fellow Americans?”

According to a new Reuters/University of Michigan survey, 41 percent of homeowners report “that their home had lost value during the past year, compared with 36 percent the prior month, the highest level since the late 1980s when the question was first asked. A year ago, only 20 percent said their homes had lost value.” Just 18 percent anticipate home values increasing over the next year.

Yesterday, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich visited Drew University in New Jersey, where he took questions from 20 political science majors there. When one asked him how the government could justify stripping rights from Americans in such pieces of legislation as the Patriot Act, Gingrich said that the government has a “right to defend society,” and when under threat, “people will give up all their liberties“:

“If there’s a threat, you have a right to defend society,” Gingrich said. “People will give up all their liberties to avoid that level of threat.“

Gingrich is directly contradicted by Benjamin Franklin, who rejected the notion that one should give up one’s liberties out of fear:

Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

This disagreement is significant, because Gingrich considers Franklin one of his heroes. He prides himself on his Pennsylvania upbringing, where he says “it was easy…to imbue a deep sense of the freedom that is at the heart of the American tradition,” and he frequently invokes Franklin to buttress his conservative claims about individual responsibility and religion in public life:

“Only Franklin personified the striving, ambitious, rising system of individual achievement, hard work, thrift and optimism found at the heart of the American spirit. Only Franklin worked his way up in the worlds of business and organized political power in both colonial and national periods. Only Franklin was a…creator of the American mythos of the common man.” [LINK]

“During the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Benjamin Franklin (often considered one of the least religious of the Founding Fathers) proposed that the Convention begin each day with a prayer. … [T]he Founding Fathers, from the very birth of the United States, saw God as central to defining America.” [LINK]

“Franklin, who was quite old and had been relatively quiet for the entire Convention, suddenly stood up and was angry, and he said: I have lived, sir, a long time, and the longer I live the more convincing proofs I see of this truth, that God governs in the affairs of men, and if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it possible that an empire can rise without His aid?” [LINK]

Gingrich accuses “the secular Left” of trying to rid religion from public life, thereby “distorting the Constitution to achieve a goal that the Founding Fathers would have found to be a fundamental threat to liberty.” Yet it his own cavalier subordination of civil liberties in the name of national security that would truly offend the Founders.

Last night, Bill O’Reilly offered the newest definition of Fox News’s “Fair and Balanced” slogan: Bring on guests who hate both Sens. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and Barack Obama (D-IL). Following a segment with Karl Rove — who trashed Obama — O’Reilly introduced conservative pundit Dick Morris to trash Clinton:

O’REILLY: OK now, Karl Rove doesn’t really like Barack Obama as a political figure in this country. It’s obvious. And you really don’t like Hillary Clinton as a political figure in this country. So we figure we’d balance off the debate.

Watch it:

Of course, neither Rove nor Morris said anything about Sen. John McCain (R-AZ).

Kevin and Ezra note that Hillary Clinton seems to have made a huge tactical error by directly inserting herself into the “bitter” controversy.

I think this is a misreading of the situation. It’s almost impossible for Clinton to win the nomination at this point. She can’t afford to “do the smart thing,” help her campaign do a bit better, and then lose anyway. She can’t afford to let the game come to her. If she’s not going to drop out (which is what she ought to do), then she needs to push everything as hard as she can. She needs to make long-odds plays, because only long-odds plays have any chance of resulting in a Clinton win. It’s smart, disciplined, rational politics. It’s also extremely selfish, but that’s another matter.