Maybe he can call it "reinventing government", and then give out "hammer" awards to agencies or groups that show a great record of doing more with less money. Wait. Gore did that. Before the Bush gang of idiots broke the government again....

Is the New York Times struggling, or what?

Some people think reinventing government means putting it back to where it was before the Civil War.  Some think it means getting rid of corruption, etc., etc.  Others think it means get rid of Bush's folks.  The phrase has become meaningless by itself.  Kristal needs to open his mouth a bit longer about what he really means.

Ha Ha!  Nice try Bill, but it's nonsense on the face of it.  Kristol is just one of several William Buckley want-to-be morons.

I'm not so sure it's nonsense. I'm mean, from a content perspective it's nonsense -- is Kristol really sincere about a big government reform effort (as WaltB notes, whatever that means)? Was Bush ever a Compassionate Conservative? Of course not. But from a "let's brand McCain in a way that will sell" perspective it could be effective. Is reform the new change?

Wondering, though, whether all four branches of the service will agree with the assessment that Petraeus "changed the way the US military worked"?

Yes, David Petraeus could be called on to mount an assault on HHS and reform the hell out of this dinosaur. Why didn't I think of that?

Yep, it's just Kristol playing out his fantasy of a McCain-Petraeus ticket:

Blessed art thou, Petraeus, our Central Commander (in Chief)

Who hast delivered us from out of Iraq...

To which Barack responds:

Why have we set our bar so low so that we regard the surge as acceptable?

And yet the more tangible argument, of having a successful Petraeus, might ring louder with voters than an ideological position.

www.nytimes.com/.../10kristol.html

"Honor Diversity" is a nice concept for a dorm at one of the Seven Sisters, but on global battlefields--not so much. So, next time the need arises, can we finish the ethnic cleansing before we start the Surge? 'Cause it's obviously really handy--diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks, diff'rent 'hoods for diff'rent hoods. Like in gym class: skins (Mexican Mafia, Sunni) over there, shirts (Black Guerrila Family, Shia) over there. Tweeners we can just kill. That whole lion-lying-down-with-the-lamb definition of "peace" is soooo 20th Century.

Plus, having somebody else do the ethnic cleansing before the Surge Comes Marchin' In makes us look like military geniuses...not to mention peacemakers!

Who cares if, as a result, every international hotspot turns its back on democratic institutions in favor of medieval tribal/gang blood rivalries? And bribing the Muslim gangbangers, as we currently do, not to kill the guys we like or to kill the guys we don't like is just a line-item in a DOD budget request. It will never push the kidnapped blonde teenager off CNN's nightly rotation the way American GIs' brain pans blown all over Baghdad alleys occasionally do.

(Cynics may point out that, just a few years ago, the purported intent of our involvement in Iraq was to spread democracy whereas our recent actions actually *undermine* democracy. To which I say, lemme see your flag pin, pal!)

But I think Kristol is on to something. Plug a $, a 1 or a 2, and a dozen zeroes into each federal bureaucratic fiefdom. That should help a lot.