Never Trumper dead-ender William Kristol isn’t about to go quietly into the good night. With numerous plots swirling in advance of next week’s big Republican party convention the smirking little neocon is still working on convincing Mitt Romney to saddle up and ride into Cleveland on his white horse. Mitt, like a bad case of genital Herpes just won’t go away although he lacked the spine or testicles to get into the race last year and compete for the nomination in an honest manner like 17 others did. Kristol would also settle for John Kasich, the Ohio Governor whose state that the event will be held in and who continues to refuse to back the presumptive nominee. The conditions may be right with a scheme by conniving cheesehead delegates led by Paul Ryan to overthrow the will of the people but they need an alternative.

Kristol tried to rally the opposition from his perch at the Weekly Standard in a plea entitled “As Convention Approaches, Will Romney or Kasich Step Up?”:

Any serious student of the theory and history of the Republican National Convention knows the delegates to that convention are unbound and free to exercise their judgment. If this were not the case, why did the Gerald Ford forces think it necessary in 1976 to move to explicitly bind the delegates for that year (and that year only)? The presumption is and has always been that delegates are free to use their judgment. Normally, when there is a respectable and consensus nominee, they do little more than ratify a judgment reached in state primaries and caucuses.

But this year is not normal, with a leading contender who has won a minority of the popular vote in the primaries and who is ever-more-obviously unfit to be president. In these circumstances, the delegates have a right they have a duty, to act as delegates (not human rubber stamps) at a convention (not a coronation) with the obligation to decide on a nominee for a political party (not merely an assemblage of voters).

Most of the delegates to the 2016 Republican Convention know this. Many want to exercise their judgment. One concern that is holding some back is a sense that if Donald Trump falls short on the first ballot, there will be chaos—and that this could be even worse for the party than nominating Donald Trump.

I think the worry about chaos is overdone and that a series of ballots that would follow a failure by Trump to prevail on the first ballot would be exciting, invigorating, and likely to produce a strong consensus nominee. But there is a lot of (understandable) sentiment that you can’t jump off one horse without another at the ready, that you shouldn’t abandon one ship without another seaworthy vessel at hand.

AND

But the easiest outcome would be for Romney and Kasich, who agree that Donald Trump should not be the nominee of their party, to take the next step. They need to have a conversation very soon and agree that one of them will announce this week that he is willing to compete for the nomination after the convention has disposed of Donald Trump. It’s even conceivable both could announce their willingness to serve, and that they intend to let the delegates choose between them and anyone else who chooses to compete. All that Romney or Kasich has to say is this: “I am announcing today that I am willing to serve as the 2016 Republican nominee if the delegates wish to choose me for this responsibility and honor.”

Kristol is counting on efforts to “unbound” the delegates from their commitment to back the person who received the most votes (democracy?) working but if enough R.A.T’s can be convinced to jump ship then they need another one as a destination. This is why even at this late stage that Kristol is calling for Romney to save the day by derailing Trump. Forget about the general election, Kristol and his fellow neocons like Robert Kagan are already well on their way back to rejoining the party that puked them up back in the 1970’s and Hillary will welcome them with open arms as well as give them the wars upon which they feed. She is the establishment’s chosen one but the key is to sabotage Trump and demoralize those who follow him so as to leave the GOP a divided, smoldering wreck that will represent no threat to Clinton in 2020 either.

Kristol is the equivalent of Benedict Arnold and yet still enjoys considerable clout with conservatives who can’t see through his act.