“When intellectuals cannot do anything else,” Dissent founder Irving Howe once quipped, “they start a magazine.” Similarly, when hawkish, predominantly Jewish foreign policy experts who are friends with or indeed are Bill Kristol cannot do anything else, they start a think tank. You can trace this back pretty far—to 1993’s New Citizenship Project (chaired by Kristol), which gave birth to the Project for the New American Century (also chaired by Kristol); he didn’t found the Ethics and Public Policy Center, but he serves on its advisory board, as well as that of Elizabeth Cheney’s Keep America Safe.
Which brings us to March of last year. Then, Kristol co-founded the Foreign Policy Initiative, whose goal is to promote, among other things, “robust support for America’s democratic allies and opposition to rogue regimes that threaten American interests.”
Which brings us to yesterday, when—who else?—Kristol co-founded the Emergency Committee for Israel, which “seeks … to educate the public about the serious challenges to Israel’s security and about what elected officials in this country are doing,” which is to say, it seeks to support a democratic ally and oppose the rogue regimes that threaten it.
It sounds like Kristol is a pretty busy guy! Plus, he’s also a Fox News contributor and the editor of The Weekly Standard (which he also founded, natch), which you know has to take up a few hours each week. The only way he can pull it off, I guess, is there’s probably a little bit of overlap among his various assignations? More than anything else, though, in his overcommitment and obsession with extracurricular activities, this Baby Boomer seems positively Millennial-esque!
Group To Oppose President Obama’s Mideast Policy [Politico]
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