Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear…I do have a point to this if you’ll just bear with me for a few paragraphs. I promise!

When Bill Clinton was elected to the presidency in 1992, one of the big issues that helped him ride into office was healthcare. 

The previous year Harris Wofford had surprised many by making it the centerpiece of his campaign for Pennsylvania Senator, and he ended up defeating former governor Dick Thornburgh. 

So one of the first things Clinton did was put his wife Hillary in charge of a special task force to come up with a viable approach to universal healthcare for the nation.

She wanted the members of her commission to be able to speak freely and not worry about having their words taken out of context, so their initial meetings were conducted in secrecy. This did not go over well with the press who seemed to think it was their right to snoop into anything and everything that was said, wherever it was said, and that they had a mission to dissect the plan even before it was a plan. So there was non-stop bad press for Hillary Clinton’s task force right from the get go.

But eventually her commission came up with a plan and it was presented to congress and the public got a chance to inspect the details.

Senator Ted Kennedy, who had long advocated for universal healthcare himself, chaired the Labor and Human Resources Committee and that committee reported the bill out with one Republican, Jim Jeffords of Vermont, voting for it. Jeffords claimed that with a couple of amendments he felt that a few more Republicans could be convinced to vote for it.

Then along came Bill Kristol.

Bill Kristol had been the chief of staff for former Vice President Dan Quayle.

I know. Wouldn’t you just love to have that on your résumé? 

Anyway, Kristol put out a memo to all Republican leaders urging them to kill healthcare reform, because, he claimed, Republicans couldn’t afford to let anything pass. The success of healthcare reform would be a “serious political threat to the Republican Party,” but killing it would be a “monumental setback for the President.”

And that’s all Republicans cared about anymore. They didn’t care about legislating and compromising. They only cared about preventing the other party from being perceived as having any successes.

In short order Bob Dole, who had previously been willing to work out a compromise, announced that he would block any healthcare reform and make it an issue in the November elections in 1994. Then Newt Gingrich (remember him?) said that the Republican strategy was to make healthcare impassable by voting against improving amendments.

Basically Republicans killed healthcare reform simply for political gain. And they got it (political gain, that is) because the 1994 congressional elections went their way, which effectively blocked Clinton for the rest of his presidency.

And who did the press blame for the failure of healthcare reform?

Why Hillary Clinton, of course. For the rest of the 90s, practically every time her name came up in the media, there was a reference to the “mistakes” she had made that had caused the healthcare reform to fail.

Meanwhile, Bill Kristol thrived in Republican circles.

Bill Kristol is now editor-at-large of the center-right publication The Bulwark, which was formed specifically as an anti-Trump publication. Of course, if the GOP, under the leadership of assholes like Bill Kristol, hadn’t spent all those years trying to thwart everything Democrats did, and had instead done just a little bit of genuine compromising and legislating here and there, a demagogue like Trump never would have risen.

So Bill Kristol helped to create the Trump monster. Perhaps we should call him Dr. William Kristolstein.

Bob Dole towards the end of his life, did try to lobby in favor of passage of Obamacare, to no avail, of course. It ended up passing with nary a Republican vote.

Newt Gingrich, however, is still the same nutbag he’s always been. And always will be.

Meanwhile, at The Bulwark Bill Kristol can write (as quoted by John Gruber at Daring Fireball):

The American people have made a disastrous choice. And they have done so decisively, and with their eyes wide open.

Donald J. Trump will be our next president, elected with a majority of the popular vote, likely winning both more votes and more states than he did in his two previous elections. After everything — after his chaotic presidency, after January 6th, after the last year in which the mask was increasingly off, and no attempt was made to hide the extremism of the agenda or the ugliness of the appeal — the American people liked what they saw. At a minimum, they were willing to accept what they saw.

And Trump was running against a competent candidate who ran a good campaign to the center and bested him in a debate, with a strong economy. Yet Trump prevailed, pulling off one of the most remarkable comebacks in American political history. Trump boasted last night, “We’ve achieved the most incredible political thing,” and he’s not altogether wrong. […]

So: We can lament our situation. We can analyze how we got here. We can try to learn lessons from what has happened. We have to do all these things.

But we can’t only do those things. As Churchill put it: “In Defeat: Defiance.” We’ll have to keep our nerve and our principles against all the pressure to abandon them. We’ll have to fight politically and to resist lawfully. We’ll have to do our best to limit the damage from Trump. And we’ll have to lay the groundwork for future recovery.

To do all this, we’ll have to constitute a strong opposition and a loyal opposition, loyal to the Declaration and the Constitution, loyal to the past achievements and future promise of this nation, loyal to what America has been and should be.

Odd that he couldn’t be that reasonable 30 years ago.

Here’s my problem.

Should I be glad that Kristol has finally come around to a more sensible view, or should I be pissed as hell that he helped create the catastrophe that we’re living through right now?

To paraphrase Harlan Ellison, I have no words and I must scream.