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Surely our inaction with respect to Syria is a poor precedent if we're fighting a war on terror.
Bill Kristol
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Since Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, conservatives of various sorts, and conservatisms of various stripes, have generally been in the ascendancy. And a good thing, too! Conservatives have been right more often than not - and more often than liberals - about most of the important issues of the day.
Bill Kristol
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I'm choosing not to accept the Trumpification of the GOP as an irreversible fact.
Bill Kristol
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We're to blame for the 'bad blood.' Not Putin. The real meaning of America First is Blame America First.
Bill Kristol
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The idea that democracies could be vulnerable to demagogues is not a new notion.
Bill Kristol
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If the American people really come to a settled belief that Bush lied us into war, his presidency will be over.
Bill Kristol
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Power tends to corrupt - so we should, in both the public and the private spheres, be on guard against, and erect sturdy guardrails against, the corruptions of power.
Bill Kristol
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I think the failures of Republican governance led to a distrust of Republican elites, which is fair enough.
Bill Kristol
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No one can change the definition of what behavior is presidential because that definition fundamentally depends on what our form of government requires, not on what one individual prefers.
Bill Kristol
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American history has always had elements of what we now think of as Trumpism - Joe McCarthy, George Wallace, Father Coughlin. It's not as if these things haven't always existed, and they were powerful. The big difference is Trump is president.
Bill Kristol
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Patriotism is an indispensable weapon in the defense of civilization against barbarism.
Bill Kristol
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The average GOP presidential vote in these last five elections was 44.5 percent. In the last three, it was 48.1 percent. Give Romney an extra point for voter disillusionment with Obama, and a half-point for being better financed than his predecessors. It still strikes me as a path to narrow defeat.
Bill Kristol
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It's not a serious document.
Bill Kristol
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So WE are to blame for the 'bad blood' with Russia. Not what Putin has done in Ukraine, in Syria, in the UK, at home, or with respect to our elections. Amazing.
Bill Kristol
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Well, Foley is responsible for it, and the voters in Florida, I guess, who elected him. Maybe they should have known better.
Bill Kristol
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I personally - if I were designing the tax code - would have a tax code in which Mitt Romney paid more than 13 percent, given what I know about the kind of investments he made money from.
Bill Kristol
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Republican government presupposes decent and admirable qualities among its citizens - so we should be serious about strengthening character and inculcating virtue.
Bill Kristol
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If terror groups are to be defeated, it is national governments that will have to do so. In nations like India, governments will have to call on the patriotism of citizens to fight the terrorists. In a nation like Pakistan, the government will have to be persuaded to deal with those in their midst who are complicit.
Bill Kristol
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I'm absolutist on Trump. He shouldn't be president. We should limit the damage he can do as president. And we should try as hard as we can to prevent him from being renominated or reelected.
Bill Kristol
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Conservative policies have on the whole worked - insofar as any set of policies can be said to 'work' in the real world. Conservatives of the Reagan-Bush-Gingrich-Bush years have a fair amount to be proud of.
Bill Kristol
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A woman, like a man, should be treated with human decency, according to the rule of law, and free of the abusive, unjust exercise of power. And you don't need to have plumbed the depths of the female or male psyche to live in accord with these principles of civilized life and the maxims of a free society.
Bill Kristol
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The rule of law is crucial to a civilized society - so we should go out of our way to uphold and strengthen it to the extent possible.
Bill Kristol
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I'm trying to uphold what was true about conservatism. I consider myself a Reagan conservative.
Bill Kristol
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Isn't conservatism in part about resisting so-called new realities when you sense they might be questionable, even as people lecture you that you’ve got to get with the times?
Bill Kristol
