So, if I follow Krauthammer’s thinking here, a politician must be unaware of an associate’s criminal connections if he continues to promote that associate for higher and higher posts on the assumption that the politician “is not an idiot.”  That assumption might need some examination. 

In short, trying to promote someone tied to the mafia is automatically self-exonerating so long as you claim that you didn’t know about the mafia ties (in spite of evidence that you did know).  If only we had known the rules were so simple.

Not even Kondracke is willing to swallow that tripe.

Via Sullivan

I confess that I am probably more surprised than most that the National Right to Life Committee is set to endorse Fred Thompson.  It’s good news for Thompson, obviously, but a bit remarkable given his Meet the Press appearance that was supposed to alienate so many pro-lifers.  It’s also remarkable since the man couldn’t even be bothered to show up at the NRLC annual convention this summer, sending in a video message instead.  He was otherwise occupied that week–he was busy giving a bad foreign policy speech in Britain.  It seems to me that this endorsement is an announcement that the NRLC finds all of the other leading candidates so unappealing that they will settle for the one who is least objectionable.

How are the mighty fallen! President George Bush, the crusader king who would draw the sword against the forces of Darkness and Evil, he who said there was only “them or us”, who would carry on, he claimed, an eternal conflict against “world terror” on our behalf; he turns out, well, to be a wimp. A clutch of Turkish generals and a multimillion-dollar public relations campaign on behalf of Turkish Holocaust deniers have transformed the lion into a lamb. No, not even a lamb – for this animal is, by its nature, a symbol of innocence – but into a household mouse, a little diminutive creature which, seen from afar, can even be confused with a rat. ~Robert Fisk

It is still a little strange to find myself agreeing with Robert Fisk as often as I have in recent years, but on the subject of the Armenian genocide he has been absolutely right.  Fisk makes many of the points that I did in my column on the genocide last month (10/22 issue).  We have all heard the arguments claiming that “no one denies” that what happened to the Armenians was genocide (I have heard another one of these today), when there is a small industry dedicated to just this kind of denial and our government evidently cowers in fear of them.  Some people, who have gotten their history from some of the denialist historians, come to the debate misinformed and so react very strongly against charges of denialism, since they think (erroneously) there is some legitimate doubt about what happened.  There really isn’t.  Some who are better-informed, but apparently still unaware of the denialists, think it is redundant to say yet again what they believe everyone already acknowledges.  Yet the absurdity of the situation is clear: if “no one” denied the genocide, there would be no controversy over acknowledging it as genocide, since no one would have any stake in preventing recognition.  Clearly, some interested parties are very intent on preventing that recognition, or else there should scarcely have been much attention paid to a House non-binding resolution. 

Speaking of the Turkish threats against our supply lines, Fisk correctly notes: “In the real world, this is called blackmail…”  Exactly so.  And the administration yielded to it without hesitation.

But we will not do it under anyone’s instruction. I want to tell both our friends and ill-wishers – I will not take orders from anyone. Because I have responsibility not towards a foreign minister of any foreign country, but I have responsibility for the country’s future historical legacy for the next thousand years [bold mine-DL]. ~Mikhail Saakashvili

It’s tough out there for a egomaniacal demagogue.

Update: Here is some loyalist propaganda for the glorious leader, emphasising his courage!

But McCain-Lieberman, Thompson-Lieberman, Romney-Lieberman, Huckabee-Lieberman–those sound like winning tickets to us [bold mine-DL]. It’s true, given the behavior of the congressional Democrats, the GOP nominee might well win with a more conventional running mate. But why settle for a victory if you can have a realignment? ~Bill Kristol

This seems unhinged to me.  Realignment?  Because of Joe Lieberman?  In the context of a presidential election, realignment implies a landslide with 40+ states lining up behind a ticket, a dramatic, sudden shift in the balance of power from one party to another.  1932, 1968, 1980 are often given as the elections where major realignments occurred, which involved the building of broad electoral coalitions.  What Kristol proposes is that nominating Lieberman would create the conditions for such a massive victory for the Republicans, when the woes of the latter are closely tied to the foreign policy decisions that constitute the chief reason why Kristol admires Lieberman and thinks he should be a VP nominee.  In short, the very things that make Lieberman attractive to interventionists in the GOP are the things that make the rest of us want to run screaming from the room.  Adding Lieberman to a ticket that already included a candidate who blathers about “Islamofascism” or takes an ueber-hawkish line on Iran would be the closest thing to a deliberate act of self-destruction by a party that we would have ever seen.

On another note, I look forward to Fred Hiatt declaring his outrage at the fraudulent democracy in Georgia, since he was so deeply concerned about Kocharian’s one-man rule in neighbouring Armenia that he felt the need to trivialise the Armenian genocide and efforts to recognise it for what it was.  Hiatt’s enthusiasm for Caucasian democracy being what it is, I’m sure the ringing denunciations of Saakashvili will be forthcoming any day now.  Still, somehow I don’t think that’s going to happen, since the Post was nearly as egregious in its Saakashvili-boosterism in the past as the WSJ has been.

While I’m thinking about Georgia, readers will remember that Saakashvili, the demagogic despot who had civilian protesters beaten and power-hosed down in Tbilisi last week, was an occasional contributor to The Wall Street Journal‘s op-ed page, and the editors of the WSJ were ardent supporters of Saakashvili’s government.  The editors of The Wall Street Journal have so far stayed unusually quiet about the embarrassing antics of their favourite Caucasian strongman over the past few days, and it’s no wonder.  Just four weeks ago they named him on their list of deserving recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize:

Or to Presidents Viktor Yushchenko and Mikheil Saakashvili who, despite the efforts of the Kremlin to undermine their young states, stayed true to the spirit of the peaceful “color” revolutions they led in Ukraine and Georgia and showed that democracy can put down deep roots in Russia’s backyard [bold mine-DL].

How are those deep roots looking now?  It’s not as if the WSJ couldn’t have known that Saakashvili’s rule was increasingly brutal, authoritarian and corrupt, since this has been a mark of his government for years.  Yet they published the cited editorial on October 14!

The point of the editorial was to complain about the awarding of the Noble Peace Prize to someone whom the editors believed undeserving.  The standard complaint on the right against the Nobel Peace Prize is that it always goes to someone undeserving, but this editorial takes the whining to a new level by proposing nominees for next year, which in this case reveals a lot about what the WSJ thinks peace, democracy and human rights mean: they mean whatever the editors want them to mean if they advance the editors’ preferred geopolitical goals. 

The company in which they lumped Saakashvili is notable for just how radically different they are from the megalomaniacal lawyer: Burmese monks, Morgan Tsvangirai, who has suffered torture and persecution for his resistance to a tyranny far more brutal than anything Saakashvili ever had to face, dissident Catholics in Vietnam, women’s rights activists in Saudi Arabia, Chinese bloggers, Ayman Nour and many others.  They also list that other WSJ favourite Kasparov, who has more right to be on the list than these two.  I don’t much care for Kasparov’s promotion of hostility towards his own country, nor do I find his political associations (both inside and outside Russia) of late terribly attractive, but even I would not class Kasparov and Saakashvili together in anything except their antipathy to Putin.  Even Uribe, whatever you think of his government, doesn’t deserve to be lumped in with such characters.  To include Saakashvili or the criminal oligarch Yushchenko with these others, most of whom really are genuine patriots and heroes, is an insult to all of the latter.  That the editors could seriously include Saakashvili on this list a mere four weeks ago shows how cynical their use of the causes of genuine dissidents and democrats actually is.

P.S. Here was another exercise in Journal agitprop for their boy, dated August 25 2007.  The Journal and its contributors were loyal Saakashvili-boosters until last month, despite the evidence growing over the past several years that he was not the democratic hero and Georgia not the “shining star” his apologists claimed.  One assumes that they have remained his supporters until now.  I expect that we can expect some two-faced editorial in the near future declaring their disappointment with Saakashvili, who supposedly had so much potential.  Here was an earlier contribution from the same Melik Kaylan, who was enthusing about the “Prague Spring”-like atmosphere of Tbilisi in those halcyon days following Mr. Bush’s insane Second Inaugural.  The folly of the democratists in this case is a matter of record.

Another reason the WSJ may be unusually reticent when they have an occasion to try to stir up anti-Russian hysteria as they like to do is the pending acquisition of DowJones by NewsCorp, which has just had one of its local networks shut down by the local tinpot dictator champion of freedom.  Murdoch and company may not be very happy with the situation right now.  Also, Patarkatsishvili, the co-owner of Imedi, the network in question, has been accused of being behind the alleged attempted “coup” against Saakashvili, which probably also doesn’t endear NewsCorp to the current government.  They probably don’t like having their business partners accused of treason.

This weekend, the Bush administration dispatched an envoy to Tbilisi to probe Georgia’s use of tear gas, water cannons, rubber bullets and truncheons to disperse demonstrators Nov. 7, its shutdown of two television stations and its imposition of a state of emergency that put troops on the streets of the Georgian capital. ~The Chicago Tribune

The cynic in me would say that the administration was looking for tips on how to handle the protests and media coverage at next year’s national convention. 

There was also this:

“I don’t feel any improvement; things have just gotten worse,” says Irina Khurashvili, a mother of two who makes about $300 a month selling clothes at a Tbilisi market. “Corruption is worse now than it was during Shevardnadze’s time. We weren’t satisfied with Shevardnadze, and Saakashvili has proved to be no better.”
   

As I have said before, Saakashvili and Putin share many things in common.  They seek to eliminate independent media, marginalise or jail opponents, cultivate nostalgia for the Soviet and pre-revolutionary past and generally govern in an authoritarian fashion. One difference is that hardly anyone in the West cared that Saakashvili was doing this until it became so blatant that no one could afford to ignore it, while Putin was supposed to be Stalin reincarnated, and another is that Saakashvili has been able so far to stay in the West’s good graces by adopting a “pro-Western” and explicitly anti-Russian stance.  All of this employs the logic of Cold War geopolitics, but without the overriding rationale of containing an actual threat.

Via Ross, here‘s the most cutting criticism of the quality of the characters in Lions For Lambs that I’ve seen so far:

These aren’t human beings; they’re sentient position papers.

Walter Shapiro reiterates this artificial division between the allegedly combative Obama of the Jefferson-Jackson dinner and the meek Obama of the following morning.  The differences between these two performances are deceptive.  Obama’s use of “code words” and circumlocutions to criticise his opponents is not really any more pointed or combative than what he said this morning.  If virtually the only people who understand Obama’s references are journalists and insiders, he has accomplished nothing, except to generate media coverage in which observers ridicule his supposed “uneven” and “zigzag” campaigning.  Instead of tearing down his opponents, he has simply exposed himself to another round of critical commentary and missed another opportunity to wear down Clinton’s lead.