I wonder how many people noticed Kristol’s presumably deliberate allusion to his dad in his op-ed piece. Kristol writes:

“There are plenty of legitimate grounds to criticize the Bush administration’s foreign policy. But the American people, whatever their doubts about aspects of Bush’s foreign policy, know that Bush is serious about fighting terrorists and terrorist states that mean America harm. About Bush’s Democratic critics, they know no such thing.

This tracks perhaps the most controversial thing his father ever wrote — given the time he wrote it. As a junior editor of Commentary in 1952, Irving Kristol wrote an article for that magazine, “Civil Liberties’ 1952: A Study in Confusion.” Pere Kristol made this observation — which has new relevance these days by the way — about the reigning anti-McCarthy hysteria:

“Perhaps it is a calamitous error to believe that because a vulgar demagogue lashes out at both communism and liberalism as identical, it is necessary to protect communism in order to defend liberalism. This way of putting the matter will surely shock liberals, who are convinced it is only they who truly understand communism and who thoughtfully oppose it. They are nonetheless mistaken, and it is a mistake on which McCarthyism waxes fat. For there is one thing that the American people know about Sen. McCarthy: he, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesmen for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing. And with some justification.”