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Someone needs to explain the definition of insanity to Bloody Bill Kristol. During a discussion on Fox' Special Report With Bret Baier, Kristol was asked about the Republicans and their recent efforts to "rebrand" the party, and it seems Kristol believes if they just start obstructing President Obama again and vote for things like repealing "Obamacare," they won't have to worry about how they look!

Of course, no one on the panel pointed out to him that that is exactly what they've been doing already for the last four years and it hasn't gone so well. Not that what the others want to do -- keep the same policies but just try to make them sound more palatable to the public -- is going to work, either.

And note to Kristol: Your party doesn't care about doing anything to improve access to health care, making it more affordable or regulating the banks. We don't need to hear their words or yours to know that. All we have to do is look at their voting records to see what their priorities are. The notion that the GOP has any alternatives to fixing anything that is not more of the same is laughable.

Here's more from Real Clear Politics: Kristol: GOP Should Worry Less About Looks; Act On Conservative Principles:

BILL KRISTOL, WEEKLY STANDARD: If I hear another politician talking about rebranding the party or changing the image, why don't they just advance policies? Republicans control the House of Representatives, right? They very much dislike Obamacare. Fine, pass a bill repealing Obamacare or delaying it and then pass a replacement. It's not going to pass the Senate, President Obama's not going to sign it, but it will show how Republican policies help.

Republicans dislike the financial regulations in Dodd-Frank, pass different regulations that help community banks. If you can't pass the whole thing, pass bite-sized pieces of legislation that would help the country. I mean, I really think they should talk less about rebranding themselves and actually pass some legislation, either big legislation or medium-sized bites that which embody conservative principals.

JOHN ROBERTS, FOX NEWS: Why have they been losing so badly on messaging, Bill?

KRISTOL: They haven't been losing that badly on messaging. They lost the presidential election by 3 points, they held the House of Representatives, the Democrats got 1 million more votes for the complete House out of 110 million cast, or something like that. And if they simply govern effectively, if they do their best in the House and they oppose President Obama, they'll do fine. They should worry less about how they look and they should just act according to conservative principles.

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After the outrage we saw from members on both sides of the aisle the evening House Speaker John Boehner cancelled the vote on hurricane Sandy relief and the subsequent displays by Gov. Chris Christie and Rep. Peter King, among others, leave it to Bill Kristol who has never seen a dime of military spending he didn't love, to come to the defense of John Boehner.

Sadly, as Media Matters noted, he wasn't alone. And his fellow guest on Bret Baier's Special Report, Charles Krauthammer was right there with him as well. The excuse given by Kristol and Krauthammer here was primarily based on concerns that the bill was larded up with some pork that the House didn't have sufficient time to look at, even though the Senate had passed their bill a week before they were asking for this vote to be taken in the House. If that was a real concern, apparently it doesn't matter much now, since Boehner caved to the political pressure and is going to have the House vote "to shore up the National Flood Insurance Program on Friday and will vote on another $51 billion Sandy spending package on Jan. 15."

Whatever the excuses, it seems they were more than happy to give cover to Boehner and the House Republicans for being incapable of being responsible and caring about doing the job of actually governing this country, rather than continued political brinksmanship we've seen from the House and John Boehner and his cohorts taking their vacation time around the holidays, instead of tending to the needs of those suffering in the aftermath of that storm.

Here's more from the Media Matters post on Kristol:

Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol: "I Think The Speaker Was Entirely Right To Pull The Bill." During an appearance on Fox News' Special Report, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol said, "I think the Speaker was entirely right to pull the bill." He added: "$60 billion is about one-tenth of this year's federal domestic discretionary nondefense spending. This is not like, gee, a couple hundred million dollars for some really important, urgent thing." [Fox News, Special Report with Bret Baier, 1/2/13]

Kristol never seems to have those same concerns about our military industrial complex. That's the only jobs program that Republicans seem to support and I've never heard Kristol express any concern over what the waste there is contributing to our budget deficit. Unlimited funds for the Pentagon. Hurricane victims, well you can wait. And don't dare include any pork in that spending because lord knows we can't have that as long as it's going for people who just had their homes destroyed in a storm and to help their state's infrastructure recover.

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A revealing snippet from Romney. Fox's Bret Baier queries Romney on why he didn't mention the troops or the war in his speech at the Republican National Convention.

via Fox News

BAIER: A few more things, Governor. To hear several speakers in Charlotte - and I don't think this is jump (?) - they were essentially saying you don't care about the U.S. military because you didn't mention U.S. troops and the war in Afghanistan in your nomination acceptance speech. (....) Do you regret opening up this line of attack, now a recurring attack, by leaving out that issue in the speech?

ROMNEY: I only regret you repeating it day in and day out. (LAUGHS)

BAIER: Well I mean, what just came from Charlotte -

ROMNEY: Because when you give a speech, you don't give a laundry list. You talk about the things that uh you think are important.

I've cut him off right there, deliberately. Romney would go on to give the lamest of excuses, that he had indeed mentioned the military in his speech, that he'd visited an American Legion the day before, and that he absolutely opposed cuts in military spending, and so on. A better answer -- and a better man-- would have just owned up to this error, admitted it, and perhaps gotten some props for honesty. But that man wouldn't be Willard Mitt Romney.

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Lawrence O'Donnell hit Ayn Rand fan-boy and now Mitt Romney presidential running mate Rep. Paul Ryan for his romance with Rand that he's been trying to run away from for some time now. As O'Donnell noted, there are two reasons for Ryan trying to distance himself from his hero. One is the Catholic Church going after him for supporting her philosophy and the other was the fact that he was being considered as a running mate for Romney.

O'Donnell went after Ryan for trying to play dumb during his interview with Brit Hume on Fox News this Tuesday evening on Baier's show. During his time with Hume lobbing softballs at him, Ryan pretended he was a fan of Rand's, until he realized what her philosophy was. As we've shown here in post after post and as O'Donnell pointed out, that change had to have happened very recently because as late as 2009 he was still singing her praises: Paul Ryan Tries Keeping Up With Etch-a-Sketch Mitt By Pretending His Ayn Rand Fandom Is an 'Urban Legend'.

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When asked why the Republicans' presumptive presidential nominee Mitt Romney was having a bit of trouble with the voters out there and why he might look just slightly out of touch to a lot of people he's supposed to be representing, Fox regular Charles Krauthammer responded by seeing how many lies he could pack in to his minute and a half response to guest host John Roberts.

How many lies did Krauthammer just tell here?

ROBERTS: You, know Charles, Romney was handed a home run ball, right there, straight across the plate today, right in the sweet spot. He hit the ball pretty hard, but for some reason, he cannot get the type of traction he needs to on the economy to make it stick to President Obama, and raise his profile. Why?

KRAUTHAMMER: It's I think incomprehensible. This is the one big issue, it's the one issue that affects everybody, it's number one on people's list and he's got all the arguments. Ironically what's happening is in states like Ohio, the President is running an ad campaign, which talks about Romney at Bain being an outsourcer in chief. The implication is, and it's a clever one, it's actually working in the polls, that somehow this minor employer, Bain Capital, headed by Romney, operating more than ten years ago, because of its outsourcing, is somehow responsible for the unemployment and the misery of people today.

Where as it's quite obvious that the economy has been in the hands of Obama for three and a half years, spending a trillion dollars, increasing our debt by five trillion dollars and getting us nowhere. He promised in fact at the time that our unemployment rate today would be 5.6 percent. It's at 8.2.

And Romney's inability to bring home the argument that it's that that's responsible and not, you know, the crisis in Europe, the tsunami in Japan, who knows, earth quakes and tsunamis all over the world, and the outsourcing by Romney in the 1990's is simply incomprehensible. If you can't make the argument he doesn't deserve to win the election.

I caught a few. Feel free to help me out with any I missed in the comments section. One, no one in the Obama campaign is claiming that Mitt Romney and Bain are personally or solely responsible for the unemployment numbers today. They are claiming that the practices they employed which have been used by so many other firms as well are a part of the reason for that misery, and that it calls into question Romney's claim that he was a "job creator."

The economy has not "solely" been in the hands of President Obama for the last three and a half years and Republican governors who are laying off public sector workers, busting unions and giving tax breaks to corporations are responsible for our economy, along with the Republicans in Congress who have refused to go along with anything the President has tried to do which would create jobs.

The President's staff believed unemployment would be lower than it is now, but that was before they realized just how badly the economy had fallen off a cliff, thanks to Krauthammer's buddy, he that shall never have his name spoken, George W. Bush.

And speaking of Bush, that deficit he's complaining about is primarily due to Bush's policies, and not Obama's. And sorry Charles, but the stimulus spending worked and brought us back off of that cliff Bush left us hanging on when he left office, despite the fact that conservatives forced it to be watered down.

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Hey what do you know, it looks like even the stopped clock Bloody Bill Kristol has this one right. Mitt Romney is way too anxious to make political hay out of everything the Obama administration does and it's already coming back to bite him today.

Kristol: Romney’s Attacks On Obama For Handling Of Chinese Dissident Are ‘Foolish’:

Yesterday Mitt Romney attacked President Obama over the administration’s handling of Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng. Citing “very troubling developments,” Romney said yesterday was “a dark day for freedom and it’s a day of shame for the Obama administration.”

Last night on Fox News, Bill Kristol advised Romney to stand down on the Chen case, calling his attacks on Obama “foolish”:

KRISTOL: I’m happy to be critical of the Obama administration as anyone is, but I think this is fast moving story. And if I were advising Governor Romney, I’d say you don’t need to get in the middle of this story. If this turns out badly, and it would be a terrible thing, it will turn out badly. People will know. … To inject yourself into the middle of this way with a fast moving target I think is foolish. [...]

There is no need to butt into a fast moving story when the secretary of state is in Beijing with delicate negotiations and say it’s a day of shame for the Obama administration. Hillary Clinton is waking up right now. Let’s see if she can pull this off in the next 12 hours or so.

And fast forward to today and Romney is already trying to clean up his comments -- Romney softens tone on U.S. handling of Chen Guangcheng:

A day after Mitt Romney spoke of a "day of shame for the Obama administration" for its role in protecting a dissident in China who sought shelter at the American embassy, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee on Friday appeared to be softening his words about the handling of Chen Guangcheng.

"Some recent reports coming from China suggest we may not have been as effective in protecting his freedom as we should have been and if those reports are true that would be a very dark day for freedom, but let's wait and see what those reports finally show,” Romney said on the Fox & Friends show on Fox News. "Hopefully we can get security and freedom for this gentleman and for his family and colleagues."

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Here we go again with some "fair and balanced" reporting from what is supposed to be one of their "straight news" shows, as opposed to what they admit is opinion during their evening lineup on Fox. Every time President Obama takes any vacation time in Hawaii, this is the kind of "reporting" we end up with from Uncle Rupert's stenographers.

From Thursday night's Special Report with Bret Baier, guest host Chis Wallace and Fox reporter Doug Luzader do their best to spin President Obama as some out of touch "elitist" because... get this... they might have spent as much at $260 at a Hawaiian restaurant to feed a family of four. OMG!! Hell, that's almost $100 less than Paul Ryan's now infamous bottle of wine, but I don't think Fox bothered to tell their viewers about that. What's worse is it was immediately followed by them showing a clip of Mitt Romney on the campaign trail hammering President Obama for being out of touch. Yeah, that man of the people, Mitt Romney.

Here's more from our friends at News Hounds -- Fox News Hypocritically Uses Jobless Claims To Play Class Warfare Against President Obama:

Once again, those Fox News hypocrites who complain the left plays class warfare jumped at the chance to do so themselves for the sake of swiping at President Obama. In a Special Report segment today that purported to be about “rough economic news,” reporter Doug Luzader gratuitously mentioned that the Obama’s spent more on dinner last night than most others in Hawaii can afford. Then he immediately moved on to suggest that Republican presidential candidate – and Mitt Romney, of all people - is more in touch.

Luzader said,

“Even here in the Aloha state, they’ve said hello and good-bye to jobs. The unemployment rate here is on the rise again. Not many can afford the $260 that the President and First Lady are believed to have spent on dinner at this island restaurant last night.” [...]

Luzader didn’t mention that Romney has far more money than Obama. Nor did he mention where the Romney family goes out to eat.

Fox News, we distort, you decide. It's only fair to call someone an out of touch elitist if they've got a "D" behind their name and they're not one of those "job creators" don't you know. Otherwise as always, the rule is IOKIYAR.