Talking Up an Iran-Al Qaeda Connection

I haven't read the new National Intelligence Estimate (as if! I'm on vacation), nor have I read much of the reporting on it. But the mainstream reports I've seen so far do not allude to the subject at the center of this article in the neocon New York Sun: an alleged link between Iran and Al-Qaeda. Sun correspondent Eli Lake says:

One of two known Al Qaeda leadership councils meets regularly in eastern Iran, where the American intelligence community believes dozens of senior Al Qaeda leaders have reconstituted a good part of the terror conglomerate's senior leadership structure.

I have no information to give context to this allegation, so I merely note it for the record, with the warning that we may end up hearing a lot more about this from Iran-warmonger types.

The Corner, for instance, is already flogging it.

Labels: Iran, Neoconservatives, New York Sun

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 12:00 PM 1 comments

  With You Shortly

So, Blogger seems to be crapping it up, again. We'll attempt to stay the course nonetheless. I'll be back later this afternoon with the long-awaited (by me, anyway) third part of the Republican Futures Past series, reporting from that brief time when we all thought the George W. Bush presidency wouldn't amount to much either way.

Meanwhile, as an amuse bouche, here's a taste of what our conservative friends are up to today:

This week's Hey You Kids Get Off My Lawn award goes to the Manhattan Institute's John McWhorter, whose op-ed in the New York Sun blames the various problem's of today's black youth - sexism, jaywalking, and the "stop snitching" thing - on LBJ and John Stewart. McWhorter argues that, back when they were oppressed, black folks were more upstanding. Truly, the past isn't what it used to be. Nor, apparently, is the present.

The editors of the National Review make a very good point about John McCain's apparently floundering campaign: there's an excellent chance he'll rebound thanks to the very reason he appears to be in trouble. How's that? Remember when we talked about conservative activists' perverse resentment of McCain's good relationship with the national media? Now that the media are saying he's in trouble, conservative primary voters are more likely to embrace the ex-"maverick":

The rest of McCain’s campaign — which he officially launched in New Hampshire yesterday — is likely to be characterized by a dissonance: Whatever turns off the press and prompts it to write about how much he is hurting himself will probably only help him among Republican voters.

McCain's "embittered ex-lovers" in the media may end up driving conservative voters into his arms.

Also at the National Review, Jim Geraghty brings us a trio of posts (the last of which is an interview) about Law & Order's Sam Waterson speaking about Fred Thompson and the 2008 election. Waterson's main subject is actually Unity 08, the group, with whom he is involved, seeking to draft a bipartisan independent ticket for the presidential election. I like Waterson, and I've always dug Jack McCoy, hard case though he is (did you know he's a fan of The Clash?), but man, that is one dumb idea.

And meanwhile, lurking in a distinctly candidate-like non-candidate-y way, Newt Gingrich flogs his "Green Conservatism" at the Australian (?) and the AEI website.

Right then. See you this afternoon.

Labels: 2008, John McCain, National review, New York Sun, Newt Gingrich, Presidential election

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 9:35 AM 0 comments

  Gunfoolery

As you might expect, the conservative noise machine barely paused to catch its breath before beginning its effort to spin the horrible events at Virginia Tech into political gold. Instapundit was among the first out of the gate, as this DKos diary noted. The New York Sun, to nobody's surprise, takes up the same talking points, couching them on a fluffy layer of righteous talk about how America caught "a glimpse of evil" yesterday. There's a certain kind of conservative who loves nothing more than an opportunity to crow about Evil. It allows him to trumpet his own Moral Clarity, the primary purpose of which is to aid in the process of simplifying and personalizing some difficult issue, and demonizing all those who point out that, by simplifying and personalizing it, the conservative has guaranteed that he will never do anything effectively to resolve it. Talking about "Evil," for this kind of conservative, is a ticket to a cartoon universe whose bright colors and vivid characters might just be enough to distract folks from noticing that such conservatives tend to be disastrously incompetent at dealing with problems in the real world. As for that Moral Clarity, count on it to be discarded the first time it becomes the least bit inconvenient.

But I digress. The Sun shines its dim light on the shootings in hopes of illuminating its argument about the actions of New York's own Mayor Bloomberg, who has continued Rudy Giuliani's strategy of cracking down on illegal guns. It's a strategy that has helped make New York the safest big city in America, but the balls-to-the-wall gun crowd, of course, don't care about that. The NRA has been demonizing Bloomberg for a while now, and the Sun's editors eagerly use the Va. Tech shootings as an opportunity to pile on:

The shooting erupted as a little noticed legal war was gathering between Virginia and New York over our city's legal maneuvering to stem the sale of what Mayor Bloomberg calls illegal guns. The smell of cordite hadn't cleared from the Virginia Tech campus when the declared candidates for president began addressing the shooting, ending, as Mr. Hope put it, "what had been seen as an unwillingness to fully address gun issues so far in the campaign."

And here the Sun goes on to make the utterly predictable, and mouth-frothingly insane, argument that the problem was about not enough people having guns. Virginia's legislature recently refused to overturn a ban on guns at college campuses. This, we're told, is why the death toll was so bad:

Today, however, the question hanging over this tragedy is whether the legislature acted wisely or whether, in fact, the campus would have been safer had the students and others been permitted to keep and bear arms in the dorms and on the greenswards. It's not a theoretical question. In 2002, according to a report on CNSNews.com, a disgruntled student at the Appalachian Law School, Peter Odighizuwa, allegedly shot and killed the school's dean, a professor, and a student on campus. He was subdued, CNSNews.comreported, only when two students reportedly ran to their cars to fetch their own guns and returned to confront the killer, who surrendered.

The Appalachian Law School shooting is a favorite canard of the all-guns-all-the-time people, who insist it proves their case that an armed society is a polite society, since the gunman was ultimately subdued by a pair of students with their own weapons. What goes unmentioned is the fact that he was only subdued after he had finished shooting and run out of ammunition, and that the students had not been armed at the time of the shootings, but had run over a hundred yards to retrieve their weapons, which begs the question of why the real lesson of Appalachian Law shouldn't be about the need for more effective policing.

The Virginia Tech shootings could have been limited to two victims if the university and its police force had effectively secured the campus during the two-hour gap between the first and second rounds of killing. But that's not the lesson gun extremists want you to draw. They want us to believe that our world would be a better place if everyone went to German class with a loaded handgun. If there are German classes in Somalia, I'm sure that's how they're conducted.

Personally I'm sort of a Federalist on gun laws. I see no need whatsoever to take away anybody's hunting rifle, and if a state doesn't think it can provide for adequate law enforcement and feels that somehow people are safer when everyone is armed to the teeth, that's their business. In New York City, though, that's a recipe for disaster, and every honest person knows it. Everybody but the editors of the New York Sun, for whom yesterday's events were nothing more than another twist in the plot for their cartoon world.

Labels: Guns, New York Sun

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 7:38 AM 0 comments

  Another Brilliant Neocon Idea

It's difficult to know what to say: The New York Sun wants Dick Cheney to run for president. Our catastrophically incompetent veep may have only a 34% approval rating, but the Sun's editors think he'd be a fine candidate. They make their case based on Cheney's "experience," and, somewhat strangely, on the assertion that "Lynne Cheney would make one of the greatest First Ladies in history." But their real interest seems to be in the notion that he would serve as some sort of rearguard defender of Dubya's presidency:

Were Mr. Cheney in the race, it's hard to imagine that the president's approval ratings would not be five or 10 points higher. The reason is that the administration would have a defender on the campaign trail as part of the public debate.

[...]

Lawrence Kudlow wrote a column a while back saying he hoped President Bush asked Vice President Cheney to run for president in 2008. It was a fine idea then and it still is — not because the current field is particularly weak, but because Mr. Cheney is so much more experienced and shrewd a figure, one who could help settle some of the arguments about the Bush years in favor of Mr. Bush. A White House aiming to get Mr. Cheney elected could also avoid some of the hazards that befall lame-ducks — drift, brain drain, irrelevance. Such a campaign might lift Mr. Cheney's own standing in the polls.

Given that Cheney already seems to spend a lot of time running around defending his Bush's policies - to no discernable effect - this seems like an odd argument. But hey, if the conservatives want somebody this weird and creepy representing them on the campaign trail, who are we to argue?

Labels: 2008, Dick Cheney, New York Sun, Presidential election

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 1:33 PM 2 comments

  Can We Call it a Civil War Yet?

Within the GOP, I mean. Apparently we can:

The first rhetorical shots of a Republican civil war will be fired Monday when the Senate begins debate on a resolution rebuking the president's plan to send an additional 21,500 troops to Iraq.

While Republican critics of the surge policy persuaded their Democratic colleagues to tone down a version of the resolution passed nearly along party lines in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week, those Republican senators who said they would vote for such a resolution are now under fire from the party's base.

I agree with Sen. Feingold: Warner-Levin is inadequate and maybe even counterproductive. But on a political level, it's still causing all kinds of trouble for the Republican leadership.

Now Hugh Hewitt has started a petition drive for conservatives pledging not to vote for or donate to any Republican who opposes the escalation - and that includes supporting Warner-Levin. I wish Mr. Hewitt the best of luck in his efforts.

The NRSC has taken it under advisement:

A spokesman for the committee, Rebecca Fisher, said via e-mail, "The online pledge has had significant support and we have certainly taken notice. While we respect the online community's right to petition their government, we also hope they realize that the NRSC has a job to do and that is to elect Republicans to the Senate in order to advance the principles of the party for the American people."

In other words: Hewitt can go surge himself.

David Frum argues that Republicans should fall in line behind Bush for the sake of the party:

"The reason Vietnam destroyed the Democratic Party was because it shattered the party's internal consensus," he said. "It may be that a strong defense of the president's policy will hurt the Republicans in 2008. But the mutiny against the president's policy, led by Republicans like Senator Hagel, follows the same path that discredited the Democrats for a generation."

So according to Frum, the GOP has two options: get on board with the disastrously unpopular war and ride it into 2008, or destroy effective party unity for a generation.

If you all stop reading me because of this pun, I won't blame you, but the GOP really is between Iraq and a bloody hard place.

Labels: David Frum, Hugh Hewitt, Iraq, New York Sun, Republicans

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 9:27 AM 0 comments