Kristol on Barbour: 'Childish, slightly offensive'

It's not yet totally clear who Haley Barbour's base winds up being, but it's pretty clear who it's not:

His case for cutting defense spending was more political than substantive—"We can save money on defense and if we Republicans don't propose saving money on defense, we'll have no credibility on anything else,"—and not very smart politics, either. What's more, according to Kasie Hunt's report, "After the speech, Barbour told reporters that he couldn't identify specific programs that should be cut from the Pentagon budget." Barbour's only substantive argument seemed to be this: "Anybody who says you can't save money at the Pentagon has never been to the Pentagon." This is a) childish, b) slightly offensive, and c) raises the question of how much time Barbour has spent at the Pentagon—apart from time spent lobbying for defense contractors or foreign governments.

Kristol, who also has high praise for Tim Pawlenty, writes that -- as it seems to me to -- Barbour is "seeing an opening for a defense-cutting, Afghanistan-skeptic candidate in 2012:

Polls suggest he may be right—however irresponsible Barbour's pandering to these sentiments may be—though history also suggests that so far Republicans have been inclined to nominate a foreign policy hawk, not an advocate of U.S. retreat.