Ariel Sharon’s book, that is, if you can believe the unbelievable Dean Barnett.  Says Barnett of the war criminal’s autobiography:

A life story that is epic, noble and moving.

I know there is some sort of professional requirement for well-known Republican pundits to engage in egregious sucking-up to Likud, but surely there are some things that should never be said, no matter how low and servile one becomes.  One of those things would have to be the claim that Ariel Sharon, participant in the Qibya massacre of 1953 (among other such notable, better-known accomplishments of bringing death to refugees and civilians), had a “noble” life story.

In addition, you would think basic decency would prevent someone from saying something like this:

In Israel’s short history, Ariel Sharon has probably been the single truly indispensable man. His country could use him how. So could ours.

Who are the culprits? No one is yet saying that it was Muslim terrorists, and that’s because some of the victims were Pakistanis. Hindus have also perpetrated terror in the country. ~Marty Peretz

Given Marty’s impersonation of someone familiar with foreign affairs, you might think that he would make some effort to explain what on earth he’s talking about here, since he gives the impression that Hindu groups are also routinely setting off bombs around India.  Besides not making any sense, this also happens to be untrue. 

Does he mean here that Hindus were responsible for rioting in Gujarat in ’05 that resulted in the deaths of many Muslims?  He would be right, but then communal rioting, while undoubtedly terrifying and violent, is not exactly the same as blowing up parts of a train, especially when said train is a highly symbolic one representing cooperation and goodwill between India and Pakistan.  Is he reaching back even farther in time to the destruction of the Babri Masjid?  Well, the next time a mosque is unceremoniously dismantled by a mob, Peretz might have some reason to guess that it was a Hindu group that was involved.  Otherwise, we’ll have to be skeptical about these claims of past Hindu “terror.” 

Indeed, train bombings in India these days (think of the Mumbai blasts of recent memory) would appear to be the preserve of Pakistan-based jihadi groups.  Certainly these groups have every incentive to sabotage any potential Indo-Pak reconciliation.  This doesn’t require some deep insight into the affairs of the Subcontinent, but the most basic knowledge of what has been happening there for the last eight years.  I think this calls for Larison’s Third Law of Foreign Policy Commentary (see the First and Second Laws): no one should comment on a matter of foreign affairs if he has literally nothing even remotely interesting or insightful to say.  This would very likely ban all future statements by Marty Peretz on any and all foreign policy questions.

Why do you always want to know who did it? Well, it’s not the Buddhists. I know that the Lubavitcher have a Chabad House in Bangkok. But it’s certainly not them either. Do we have to play “twenty questions?” The beheadings are a clue.

By the way, “School arson and the assassination of schoolteachers have been a continuing tactic.” I suppose that, if Israel gave up the whole West Bank and Jerusalem, the unknown killers would give up their random killings. Isn’t that right? ~Marty Peretz

Oh, very droll, Marty.  Took the words right out of my mouth!  How many times have we talked about the abiding concern about Palestine in southern Thailand?  Too many, I’m sure.  Yes, of course, the attackers in question were Muslim.  This is hardly a secret, because anyone who knows the difference between the Liberal and Labor parties in Australia (i.e., those not named Marty Peretz) also probably knows that there has been a long-running insurgency among the Muslims of southern Thailand that the late, “great” government of Thaksin Shinawatra bumblingly tried to suppress.  It was the failed suppression of this insurgency that encouraged top military officers to launch the coup against the increasingly unpopular, corrupt demagogue to the general satisfaction of the Thai people.  Indeed, anyone with access to a newspaper over the last year would probably know these things. 

Hey, Marty, the loyal and patriotic Gen. Sonthi is a Muslim, too–can your small mind cope with the strange and terrible contradictions contained in that statement without making some tired reference to Israel?  Somehow, I doubt it.

It’s true that the polls mean Romney’s religion is a legitimate news angle for political and religion reporters, but I think there might be something to Kurtz’s criticism. Sure, Romney faces some hurdles because of his religion. But at this point in the race, most of those polls are meaningless — imagine what a similar poll would have indicated about John Kennedy’s prospects in 1959. ~Mollie, GetReligion

But this is quite wrong.  Not only do we have reason to believe that the poll cited here is underreporting the level of anti-Mormonism among likely voters, but speculation has been focused heavily on whether Romney could somehow even manage to win the nomination of his own party because opposition to a Mormon candidate is so intense among evangelicals (Rasmussen claims 53% against).  In 1959, no one doubted that a Catholic could theoretically win the Democratic nomination, since ethnic Catholics made up a significant part of the party, they controlled party machinery in some states, and Al Smith had previously won the nomination (before going down to rather ignominious defeat in the general).  What fires the media coverage of Romney’s Mormonism (besides the relative novelty, unfamiliarity and potential for conflict, plus the “religion divides Republicans” angle) is the evidence that key voting blocs in his own party apparently cannot stand the idea of someone from his religion as President. 

Some hurdles?  Yes, I suppose Romney faces “some hurdles,” in the same way that Barack Obama has received “a little bit” of favourable media coverage.

Rep. Ron Paul’s exploratory committee website is up and running.  At last, a candidate who not only says that he respects the Constitution but who has spent his entire political career living up to that commitment!  Dr. Paul is pro-life, opposed to illegal immigration and one of the last of the true small-government conservatives.  Of course, he has opposed the Iraq war from the beginning.  If nothing else, he will challenge the frauds and usurpers who have made a travesty out of conservatism and who have betrayed at every turn the constitutional republic.  In this case, I would even be willing to register with the dreadful Red Republicans to vote in the primary for him.

Seriously: “The 1/2 Hour News Hour” is so unfunny as to be affirmatively insulting. Do the programmers at Fox really think that we their viewers are this dumb? ~David Frum

This is what’s so amusing about Surnow’s little project.  Indeed, it is probably the only amusing thing about this project.  Yes, they think their conservative viewers are this dumb and easily amused because, well, FoxNews’ entire portrayal of what passes for conservatism operates at a pretty low, visceral level–and their viewers apparently can’t get enough of it.  They just aimed a little too low in this case, but in the world of Idiocracy (which is effectively the ideal world as imagined by FoxNews pundits 500 years from now with a Costco as large as a lake and a President who fires off a machine gun during his State of the Union) it would be the perfect fit.  That’s it–Surnow was just ahead of his time!  This is a depressing phenomenon to observe, but what it isn’t is surprising.  This is the same audience that regularly tunes in to hear Bill Kristol’s thoughts on foreign policy, which they apparently must regard as informed and interesting, so how sharp could they really be?   

There is comedy in all of this–it just doesn’t come from the show’s own skits.  This show has been conceived by avowed torture-con Joel Surnow and Roger Ailes for the explicit purpose of providing the “conservative” fake news comedy we’ve all supposedly been dying to have, and it appears on FoxNews, where all good Republicans go to receive their reprogramming lessons.  Its pedigree as a product of the nightmare that is Murdoch’s empire is unsurpassed.  Its self-conscious pretensions to conservatism are at least as great and as false as those of David Frum himself.  And it is horrible!  Absolutely horrible!  So horrible that even Frum must turn away in disgust–now he understands how the rest of us feel. 

Frum’s review of the show reminds me of the suggestion that was made not that long ago that Michael Savage had to be some kind of double agent working for the left to make people on the right appear to be lunatics (in the same way, I suppose, that Cindy Sheehan and Michael Moore are actually secretly doing the bidding of Karl Rove, right?).  That his ranting performance has a fairly large and loyal following did not seem to shake the doubter’s view that Savage couldn’t really be what he claimed he was.  Apparently, the would-be high-brow set in the movement don’t get down into the muck of the madness that is lgf nor do they wade into the Freeper fever swamp very often.  This allows them plausible deniability: “No one on our side advocates torture!  That would be wrong!”

Amid a mounting campaign in Congress to limit Bush’s military options, conservatives led by talk show host Hugh Hewitt have created an advocacy group designed to counter the anti-war MoveOn.org. And its first round of targets will be the 17 GOP lawmakers who voted for last week’s Democratic resolution in the House opposing the troop increases. ~The Politico

Even though his “pledge” drive did not manage to intimidate the seven Senators that his earlier effort at inducing GOP political suicide tried to do (except for Specter, all of these had been targeted by Hewitt for “encouraging the enemy”), Hewitt pushes ahead to try whittle down that unseemly 202 number of GOP House members to a much more manageable 185.  Earth to Hewitt: pushing primary challengers against your own incumbents (especially weak incumbents in swing states) in a presidential election year that seems perfectly set up for the Democrats is a recipe for electoral disaster for your side.  In political duels, you do not shoot your own second and expect to win.  Hewitt here demonstrates all of the political judgement of the Netroots without possessing any of their subtlety.   

Besides being absurd for its obsessive devotion to the administration line on Iraq, this zeal for the “surge” invests this one plan with an importance that is frankly unfair to Gen. Petraeus and the soldiers being asked to carry it out.  This ought to trouble someone like Hewitt, who seems to take the words of Gen. Petraeus as divinely inspired.  At best, the surge cannot begin to achieve anything like the “victory” being associated with it by the radio demagogue.  It might marginally improve the situation and buy more time, but it simply will not provide the kind of results that its ignorant boosters are implicitly promising everytime they talk about Victory. 

Hewitt gives the impression that support for this plan is the litmus test for whether someone wants “victory,” but every one of the Republican opponents of the surge in the Senate and most of the Republican House opponents all want victory and all remain depressingly pro-war.  He is effectively helping to split off his own political allies and force them into opposition to the administration’s management of the war over disagreements about tactical deployments.  He is helping to hasten a complete loss of confidence in Mr. Bush’s leadership among many Republicans by reflexively endorsing whatever bad idea Mr. Bush happens to like and making agreement with that bad idea an absolute requirement of party discipline.  Mr. Bush has had four years of reflexive, unswerving deference and loyalty from the members in Congress; it has actually been disgusting and appalling.  The idea that they cannot now strive to put some distance between themselves and the administration after the powerful electoral shellacking they just took is preposterous. 

The Hewittian mantra, “victory is more important than party” only makes sense if you actually think that the path to victory is assured and that you are culling people from your party who are obviously against whatever you think victory is.  If you are wrong about any one of these things (and I assume Hewitt is wrong about all of them), you will simply be helping to do the Democrats’ work for them and thus ensure that those you regard as being “anti-victory” will triumph in spectacular fashion.  If you regard the Democrats as poorly as Hewitt obviously does, this is not simply a mistake, but borders on the irrationally self-destructive.  It is all the more irrational when you consider that the majority of the country now opposes the war–Hewitt is making it a matter of party loyalty to actively ignore what the majority of Americans thinks about Iraq.  Given his track record of impotence in influencing elections, he will probably not do much actual damage to the GOP, but merely in the attempt he reveals himself and his allies in this weird purge (remember when the jingoes complained in such outraged voices about how the Netroots folks were “purging” Lieberman?) to be ignorant of their own best political interests and oblivious to the realities of the politics of this war.  Worse still, they are proud to be oblivious to these realities, because they think it proves they have conviction.  It doesn’t.  It just proves that they will blindly follow Mr. Bush no matter how much damage he does to this country, the military or their party.  It is pathetic, but I must confess deriving a certain entertainment of watching these awful people charging off the edge of a cliff.

MR. RUSSERT: You mentioned Ronald Reagan. Vice President Cheney invoked Ronald Reagan about you in Newsweek magazine. “I believe firmly in Ronald Reagan’s 11^th Commandment: Thou shall not speak ill of a fellow Republican. But it’s very hard sometimes to adhere to that where Chuck Hagel is involved.”

SEN. HAGEL: Well, I can’t answer for the vice president’s comments, but I do find that a bit puzzling, because I noted two weeks ago, Congressional Quarterly rated the 100 United States senators on their support of the Bush administration’s policies in the Senate last year, 30 votes. The senior senator from Nebraska was the number one supporter of George Bush’s policies in the Senate last year. Now, my friend Jack Reed will move further away from me hearing that. But I can’t answer to the vice president. I certainly never said anything about him or anyone else, I don’t get personal and that’s the way I leave it. ~Meet The Press

It’s true about his voting with the White House more than anyone else in the Senate.  So let me see if I understand the supposedly bold, “maverick,” wild-eyed “antiwar” hero Chuck Hagel here.  He wants to have a debate, he resents the claims that he doesn’t support the war effort or that he is “less than enthusiastic” about the war, and he now boasts that he was the Numero Uno Bush lackey in the Senate in 2006.  You can hear him saying, “I’m not some anti-Bush wacko…like all those people who have been saying nice things about me are wackos!  Please, Dobleve, take me back!  We can pass amnesty together!”  Can someone explain to me how things have reached such a sorry state that anyonemistakes this man for some champion of the antiwar cause?  How about boosting real antiwar candidates, whether Democratic or Republican?  It’s easy to spot who they are: they’re the ones who are saying that they are against the war.  Just to be clear, these antiwar candidates do not include those who say they are for the war.   

In case anyone thinks I am giving Chuck too much grief based on ambiguous evidence, consider this:

MR. RUSSERT: Is there room for an anti-war candidate in the Republican primary field?

SEN. HAGEL: Well, I don’t, and wouldn’t, consider myself an anti-war candidate if I sought the nomination for president in the Republican Party [bold mine-DL]. It’s bigger than just the war. We’ve got entitlement issues, we’ve got tax issues, we’ve got environmental issues, health care issues.  

Apparently, on all these other “issues,” Hagel was a more reliable vote for Mr. Bush than anyone else, so what exactly would be the rationale for his candidacy?  He could rip off Hillary’s slogan and say, “Let the debate begin!” 

So, straight from the horse’s mouth: Chuck Hagel is not antiwar.  Can we conservatives and libertarians who are against the war in Iraq stop chasing wills o’ the wisp?  Can we stop valorising every two-bit politician or retired general who occasionally says something vaguely critical of the administration?  Are we interested in biting the bullet and backing actual antiwar candidates (Ron Paul is such a one) or are we going to let ourselves be held captive to media hype about absolutely conventional politicians whose independence from this administration is essentially non-existent? 

In fact, Congress needs to pass such legislation as soon as possible. The United States has no right to use nuclear weapons except in response to a nuclear attack. Nuking a nation that does not possess them, and has not attacked us, is in fact a war crime—the kind of crime for which we rightly hanged the Nazis at Nuremberg. (What a pity that we couldn’t have swung the Russians, too—and perhaps the Brits and Americans who ordered bombings like Dresden.) Israel might contemplate it, but if I might make a subtle point… the United States is not Israel. Nor is the converse true. They are… hold your breath, and listen carefully my friends: two… separate… countries. Got that? Try to keep in mind; it may turn out to be important.  ~Taki

Come to think of it, whatever happened to the absurd myth of Sam Brownback, Antiwar Candidate?  It was popular for a while, especially when Hewitt managed to persuade many people that even criticising aspects of the surge was tantamount to aiding the enemy.  Brownback probably managed to cripple his candidacy with war supporters without actually taking anything that might resemble a real stand against either the surge or the war.  Indeed, when it came time to put his money where his mealy mouth was, he voted against cloture again last Saturday and helped make sure that there would be no anti-surge resolution vote.  His chance to distinguish himself from the rest of the presidential field was there, and he ignored it.  Presumably that is because he really is as reflexively pro-war as he alwayshasbeen, just as I have been saying all along. 

Andrew Sullivan, always a keen observer of non-existent trends, was very excited about his “discovery” of the rise of the antiwar social conservative candidate.  For some strange reason, he has never gotten very excited about any actual socially conservative antiwar Republicans (such as Ron Paul) who have been opposed to the Iraq war all along, but he boldly predicted that Brownback’s alleged defection from the War Party represented the thin end of the wedge and marked the beginning of a GOP turn against the President.  The Republican backlash against the surge was on! 

Obviously, when only seven Republican Senators voted for cloture to allow a vote on the resolution, and Brownback was not one of them, there really is no general GOP backlash against the surge worth mentioning.  Certainly, Brownback’s foray into dissent on foreign policy in the Near East does not inspire much confidence in any constituency: for the neocons and Hewitts of the world, he is a little too shaky in his support (he even wants to talk to Syria!), while for sane people he is far too dedicated to the war.   

In fact, Sullivan was, as he often is, very, very wrong.  As I noted at the time, Brownback’s measly criticisms of the surge plan were rather half-hearted and his own quarter-measure proposal made the original half-measure of the surge seem ingenious by comparison.  As he said in his own announcement speech, he supports the war and wants to achieve victory.  Chuck Hagel he is not.  But, then again, Chuck Hagel isn’t really antiwar, either, but don’t get me started on that one…

Update: Samnesty explains how he still doesn’t think the surge will work, but says that he voted for cloture because the Democrats wouldn’t allow any GOP resolutions.  So he manages to offend just about everybody–no wonder Senators never get elected President!