OVERREACHING OUTRAGE leads the day today. It began with Maureen Dowd’s column, when she got a little too close to the truth surrounding the right-wing foreign policy team of Mitt Romney.
Ryan was moving his mouth, but the voice was the neocon puppet master Dan Senor. The hawkish Romney adviser has been secunded to manage the running mate and graft a Manichaean worldview onto the foreign affairs neophyte.
A moral, muscular foreign policy; a disdain for weakness and diplomacy; a duty to invade and bomb Israel’s neighbors; a divine right to pre-emption — it’s all ominously familiar.
You can draw a direct line from the hyperpower manifesto of the Project for the New American Century, which the neocons, abetted by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, used to prod an insecure and uninformed president into invading Iraq — a wildly misguided attempt to intimidate Arabs through the shock of overwhelming force. How’s that going for us?
“Puppet master” has to some day mean simply manipulator behind someone who hasn’t the strength on the subject or the political power to object, which certainly describes Mitt Romney and anyone who’s been in the belly of the beast where Dan Senor has been. D’oh! Oh, geez, now I’ve gone and said “belly of the beast.” Where’s my frickin’ manual. Or maybe the New York Times is taking back the words and Jeffrey Goldberg is proving what he said on “Meet the Press” is exactly correct. Talking about the Middle East fury playing out right now, Goldberg said this morning, “people will be angry no matter what.”
Boy, you can say that again.
No political writer can win when openly tackling the truth, which isn’t anti-Semitic.
Dowd’s not a foreign policy analyst, but she is a master at concocting the plot line around political characters, which in this particular political play spares no one.
The caterwauling is now deafening.
Jennifer Rubin is flailing, but it’s hard to tell if it’s because Dan Senor happens to be Jewish or that this is the eve of Rosh Hashana or no opportunity to exploit the subject can be ignored.
Campbell Brown, who is married to Senor, does an Olympic style two and one-half twist, and like Rubin, ends the same place any man on their side would.
There’s nothing remotely anti-Semitic in Dowd’s piece, which strips the skin off the facade of Romney’s barely containable Cheney II foreign policy fantasies.
However, Democrats and others not on the right are already quickly jumping on Dowd to make sure their bona fides are covered (see Twitter).
The biggest mistake you can make is getting caught telling the truth on Israeli politics. But when you have the rhetorical strength to aim directly at the very people whose misadventurism caused what happened in Benghazi this week to originally take route you’ve ripped off the Bush-Cheney scab that should never have been left to heal.
It was under these “puppet masters” who are “slithering” back through Mitt Romney’s foreign policy ignorance, from Dan Senor to John Bolton, who caused America’s world wide disgrace when we went from 9/11 to Iraq to torture. George W. Bush’s “crusade” begat Abu Ghraid that begat torture that begat pictures of Muslims being degraded, all of which sparked public opinion that Obama was hopefully going to turn around. Unfortunately, Obama’s own foreign policy follows Bush’s so closely, even to wider extremes on drones, the reversal hoped for from him when he came into office hasn’t materialized.
Rule of thumb on this stuff. If someone is being called an anti-Semite, it’s very likely they hit their mark.
Both Rumsfeld and Bush were secret Jews, I believe.
huh? For a crazywomen Ms. Dowd sounded very sane in her piece today and I think her characterization of poor hapless George was spot on…and I loved her calling out Senor by name. It annoys me everytime Joe and Mica treat him like a “serious person”.
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Rule of thumb on this stuff. If someone is being called an anti-Semite, it’s very likely they hit their mark.
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Maybe, maybe not, but if what they’re saying doesn’t have anything to do with bigotry against Jews, then it’s certainly nothing more than an ad hominem. Dowd’s column isn’t about Jews, nor Muslims, for that matter. It’s about not getting involved in someone else’s war(s).
I saw this this morning and I figured there would be a big freak out on the right over it. I think the freak out is because she hit a nerve. Haven’t they noticed that Ron Paul has said some of the exact same things?
I think they have. He wasn’t invited to the convention, after all.
” Senor helped perpetrate one of the biggest foreign policy bungles in American history. The clueless viceroys summarily disbanded the Iraqi army, forced de-baathification, stood frozen in denial as thugs looted ministries and museums, deluded themselves about the growing insurgency and mislead reporters. ”
” Off the record, Paris is burning, ” Senor told a group of reporters a year into the war. ” On the record, security and stability are returning to Iraq. ”
Of course there was one ministry they did protect, the oil ministry. I’ve often wondered if they actually were the keystone cops they were made out to be. Perhaps chaos was the weapon of choice in their zeal to get the oil. As true neocons why would they give a damn about Iraq as a country, or it’s people; and then there is that embassy.
I’m inclined to think Taylor Marsh’s “rule of thumb” is a smart one.