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Surrender w/o Redemption
Comment on Kristol's Bulwark Comment 
2025.06.30

Just one short observation that this is the first post in more than 2 months and only the second in 3 months, since we returned from Prague.  No apologies needed, I know.  Nevertheless, I will take the opportunity to note that I've been consumed with gardening, and with local politics in my role as Chair of the Waterford, NY, Democratic Committee.  I love the gardening.  I am ambivalent about the political work.  I'd love to turn it over to somebody younger.  But since there is nobody willing to take over at this point, I'll keep it up until such time as somebody steps forward.  Meanwhile, taking a step down the good-intentions paved road to hell, I'll throw out that, inspired by my son. Kelly, and his attentiveness to his music and comments blog, I DO feel inspired to get back to this page that almost nobody but me looks at.  Kelly's is much more popular.  Check it out, and read his quirky comments and listen to some of his awesome tunes.

Happy July, Everybody!

 

I've made mention on a couple of FB posts and one previous post on this site that if there is a poem for our time, it has to be WB Yeats' “The Second Coming,” published 106 years ago, in 1919. Some of the best thinkers I know make frequent reference to that poem. And now, even the last line, “slouches toward Bethlehem to be born” has greater meaning, as the majority of Christians in a sense slouch toward Gaza to kill.
 
But most thinkers and pundits who bring up the poem's imagery reference the first desperate lines of the poem, rather than the cynical surrender of the approaching end.
 
In his commentary today, once arch-conservative William Kristol, now converted to staunch anti-magat, chooses the line “the centre cannot hold.” Very appropriately. Specifically referencing Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska and Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, both of whom recently announced they will not seek reelection.
 
A silver lining on the clouds of doom is that their surrender is good news for the US and World, because there's a good chance a Dem can win these races. But Kristol does not let them off the hook, either for their cowardice or their past record of groveling to the golden cow of populist rightwing idiocy before evolving into the “mere anarchy” identified by Yeats. They are, clearly, among those whom Yeats describes in the last lines of the first verse, “The ceremony of innocence is drowned; / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”
 
As Kristol notes, their political history places them firmly among “the worst.” That they have surrendered to the magat dogs by lying down and letting them take a triumphant piss on the shards of their dignity does not redeem them. As Kristol puts it in the last couple paragraphs of his piece today:
 
” … the centrists aren’t fighting. On Friday, Rep. Don Bacon, one of a few non-MAGA Republicans in the House, a supportive voice for Ukraine, announced he was retiring. And on Sunday, Sen. Thom Tillis, one of two Senate Republicans who voted against cloture on the budget reconciliation bill, also announced that he won’t be running for re-election.
 
“But, in truth, their legacies are, to say the least, problematic. Except in the case of Ukraine, has Bacon ever cast an important vote against Trump? Tillis, of course, voted for Pete Hegseth and Pam Bondi and Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And he voted against convicting Trump after January 6th.
 
It seems harsh to say, but it’s true: Decline has been the choice of these two decent men as well.”
 
And only time will tell if Kristol himself has achieved a level of redemption by fighting evil at the end of his life.