2008 election

Tuesday

Cockburn

Bill’s shattered Kristol ball

Bill Kristol suggested that to get rid of Trump Republicans, it might be necessary for anti-Trumpers to be “with the Democrats for a while.” In a chat with Politico this weekend, the Weekly Standard founder proposed a Gretchen Whitmer-Abigail Spanberger ticket, in what would be a perfect combination of TikTok mom-schmaltz and Beltway hackery. Luckily, though, Kristol’s prediction record is — to put it nicely — lacking. Let’s start in 2008. Kristol was a huge proponent of then-Alaska governor Sarah Palin for John McCain’s vice presidential pick, saying, “Go for the gold here with Sarah Palin.” McCain and Palin lost by 10 million votes and received only 173 electoral votes to Obama and Biden’s 365. It’s not like Kristol was just a decade too early, either.

bill kristol the weekly standard

Tuesday

Francesca Peacock

A.M. Homes’s state of paranoia

When reading A.M. Homes’s fiction, you’re never quite sure what to expect. In 1996, she made waves with the publication of her “vile and perverted” novel The End of Alice: a none-too-edifying tale narrated from the perspective of an imprisoned pedophile and child-killer, who spends the book in correspondence with a nineteen-year-old girl about how to seduce a twelve-year-old boy. In a rare instance in which the UK was more prudish than the United States, a large chain of British booksellers refused to stock the work. More recently, her 2012 novel May We Be Forgiven — for which she won the 2013 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction — features a fatal car accident, a psychiatric hospital, an extramarital affair and a homicide. And that’s all within the first chapter.