On “Fox News Sunday,” Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol echoed an editorial he wrote this week slamming Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul for suggesting at the Conservative Political Action Conference that the “GOP of old has grown stale and moss-covered.”
“I think it is the Republican Party, to the degree that it has been a successful party and an important party and a contributor to American well-being over the last 50, 60 years, has been so in large part because it has been the party of strong national security,” Kristol said. “Republicans were not — you can say they are moss-covered, but some of us are proud to have come to Washington to work in a very minor role for Ronald Reagan, and some of us are proud to have supported the Bush administration after 9/11, and fighting our enemies.”
Kristol had previously labeled Paul, who went on to win the CPAC presidential straw poll on Sunday, the “Code Pink faction” of the Republican Party.
“So if Rand Paul wants to run to the left of the Obama administration, he’s free to try that in the Republican primary,” Kristol said on Sunday. “And maybe there is more support for that than I think, but I’m pretty doubtful that there really is.”