Why Is Bill Kristol Still Taken Seriously?

When a pundit has repeatedly been proved wrong, why do they continue to show up on TV? Bill Kristol has more pundit lives than a cat. Kevin Drum of The Washington Monthly has a post on a segment of Charlie Rose where Richard Holbrooke and Bill Kristol were the guests:

Holbrooke is a guy with a ton of credibility. When he says that diplomacy has to be backed up by a credible threat of force, he obviously means it: he recommended military action twice in the Balkans during the 90s. At the same time, when he says it should be a last resort, he obviously means that too: he devoted uncounted thousands of hours to serious, toughminded diplomacy during the same period. Some of it worked and some of it didn't, but his dedication to the cause is hardly questionable.

And despite his continued unwillingness to flatly face the reality that we can't afford to stay in Iraq any longer, he had by far the better of the argument when the subject turned to Iran. Diplomacy is not, he reminded Kristol, in and of itself a sign of weakness. Of course we should be willing to talk directly to Syria and Iran, rather than leaving the job to third parties that we don't really trust to represent our interests in the first place. Kristol could do little more than splutter that there was no point since these countries already knew what we wanted and should just go ahead and knuckle under right now. It displayed an appreciation of human nature and the realities of foreign affairs that a junior high school student would have gotten low marks for.

I'll take Richard Holbrooke over Bill Kristol any day. Holbrooke, however, represents a kind of foreign policy expert that we've seen for decades now that have fallen into something of a policy trap. This is because he has three primary audiences:
a) The American foreign policy community.
b) The world.
c) The voters.

Sometimes, large segments of our foreign policy community knows what needs to be done but they have to worry about how the other segment of the foreign policy community can manipulate the voters with nonsense about the danger of showing American weakness. If a superpower cannot admit mistakes and therefore correct those mistakes, we just go down a road of making more mistakes and undermining our security and position in the world. The Soviet Union has blazed the trail on that route and it doesn't take much thought that maybe following in the footsteps of the Soviets is not such a great idea.

Holbrooke is one of the best, but we need to break our own self-imposed foreign policy trap. Even if we set aside the domestic side of Bush's policies, Bush is, by far, the most incompetent foreign policy president this nation has seen since before World War Two. We as a nation simply have to deal with the fact of Bush's mismanaged foreign policy.