Dogs Of War

What happens when the Windy gives the staff a day off? I wake up at 6:30. At least it’s a Monday, so I can read my Bill Kristol column. Today Kris gives us last week’s unpersuasive assessment of the electorate — "it is still a center-right country," except when it isn’t — before bizarrely sweating Barack Obama’s promise of a new dog for his girls. It’s true: 365 electoral votes, 65 million regular votes, 53 percent of the popular vote — the largest of any Democrat since LBJ — the flipping of traditionally-red states like Virginia, North Carolina, Indiana and it’s the dog that’s got him shook.

(If one were being churlish, one might say that it was typical of a liberal to promise the dog before delivering it. A results-oriented conservative would simply have shown up with the puppy without the advance hype.)

Perhaps, but a contemporary conservative would have misrepresented the evidence that there were ever dogs to be had, implied that those who question the existence of those dogs were dog (and maybe people?) haters, produced a dead dog and claimed vindication, and then gotten Bill Kristol to claim that none of this ever happened until an unexpected litter of puppies compelled him to write a column saying he was pro-puppy all along and nothing before the litter appeared truly mattered. Meanwhile, the country really wanted cats all along.