Uncharacteristic Sense From Bill Kristol

The trouble with conservatives has often been that they are reflexively-biased against change: even potentially-good change. Shortsightedness and fearfulness are often their characteristic weaknesses. That weakness carries over into their analyses of international developments.

Apparently Glenn Beck has been sounding the alarm lately about Egypt, and even William Kristol's own pet project, Sarah Palin, has been echoing Beck. Kristol points out, with regard to Egypt, that opposition to developments there, just for the sake of opposition, isn't enough:

When Glenn Beck rants about the caliphate taking over the Middle East from Morocco to the Philippines, and lists (invents?) the connections between caliphate-promoters and the American left, he brings to mind no one so much as Robert Welch and the John Birch Society. He’s marginalizing himself, just as his predecessors did back in the early 1960s.

Nor is it a sign of health when other American conservatives are so fearful of a popular awakening that they side with the dictator against the democrats. Rather, it’s a sign of fearfulness unworthy of Americans, of short-sightedness uncharacteristic of conservatives, of excuse-making for thuggery unworthy of the American conservative tradition.