Unconventional Wisdom

From the Washington Note.

Not sure how much turmoil there is but it bothers me how they titled this post.

There is a race currently underway between different flanks of the administration to determine the future course of US-Iran policy.

On one flank are the diplomats, and on the other is Vice President Cheney’s team and acolytes — who populate quite a wide swath throughout the American national security bureaucracy.

The Pentagon and the intelligence establishment are providing support to add muscle and nuance to the diplomatic effort led by Condi Rice, her deputy John Negroponte, Under Secretary of State R. Nicholas Burns, and Legal Adviser John Bellinger. The support that Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and CIA Director Michael Hayden are providing Rice’s efforts are a complete, 180 degree contrast to the dysfunction that characterized relations between these institutions before the recent reshuffle of top personnel.

However, the Department of Defense and national intelligence sector are also preparing for hot conflict. They believe that they need to in order to convince Iran’s various power centers that the military option does exist.

But this is worrisome. The person in the Bush administration who most wants a hot conflict with Iran is Vice President Cheney. The person in Iran who most wants a conflict is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Quds Force would be big winners in a conflict as well — as the political support that both have inside Iran has been flagging.

Multiple sources have reported that a senior aide on Vice President Cheney’s national security team has been meeting with policy hands of the American Enterprise Institute, one other think tank, and more than one national security consulting house and explicitly stating that Vice President Cheney does not support President Bush’s tack towards Condoleezza Rice’s diplomatic efforts and fears that the President is taking diplomacy with Iran too seriously.

This White House official has stated to several Washington insiders that Cheney is planning to deploy an “end run strategy” around the President if he and his team lose the policy argument.

The thinking on Cheney’s team is to collude with Israel, nudging Israel at some key moment in the ongoing standoff between Iran’s nuclear activities and international frustration over this to mount a small-scale conventional strike against Natanz using cruise missiles (i.e., not ballistic missiles).

This strategy would sidestep controversies over bomber aircraft and overflight rights over other Middle East nations and could be expected to trigger a sufficient Iranian counter-strike against US forces in the Gulf — which just became significantly larger — as to compel Bush to forgo the diplomatic track that the administration realists are advocating and engage in another war.

Sounds to me like someone needs to slow down a little bit.

It was just announced by FOXNews in an email alert. It follows directly on the heels of the what you saw in the video I posted a couple of days ago.

You know I just saw this part of the article from FOXNews.com and how Donald Trump even interjected himself into this new controversy. As most of you may have heard he’s been engaged in a nice public back and forth with Rosie stemming from the Miss USA pageant. His quote doesn’t make him look very good…

O’Donnell’s nemesis Donald Trump naturally weighed in on Wednesday’s war of words between Hasselbeck and O’Donnell, surprisingly taking O’Donnell’s side while still managing to insult both co-hosts.

“On this one I think Rosie should win, but Rosie is not much herself. I think anybody that’s against the war in Iraq is the winner of the fight, because to justify the war in Iraq — only an imbecile could do that,” he told “Extra.”

About Hasselbeck’s political views, especially on the war in Iraq, he added, “Elisabeth is not a very smart person, she’s one of the dumber people in television. To see that she supports the war, and she’s solidly behind the war, give me a break.”

Trump later told reporters that Hasselbeck was “probably the dumbest person on TV.”

This video was from BreitBart.tv from The View where Rosie O’Donnell gets into it with her co-host Elizabeth Hasselback. It was a verbal brawl going back and forth. This was a virtual catfight, but I’ll let you decide who won.

You’re are now reading this blog over at dedicate webspace over at the Refugee Camp. So I have made one step to doing something different over here.

This blog is one excuse to look at national and world events as opposed to my very first blog which does look at national and world events except that these days it’s mostly local in nature. I hope to get back to that here and provide for more of an interesting blog in the process. We’ll see how far it goes.

I’m the main one writing this blog. This blog has two other writers although one just provides the technical support that I don’t have a clue about. He helped to upload this blog up to RefugeeCamp. The other is a great gatherer of political news so that’s his job.

Anyway let’s have a discussion.

Uh-oh!!! Let’s check out this article by Jonah Goldberg…

Most fair-minded readers will no doubt take me at my word when I say that a majority of Democrats in this country are out of their gourds. But, on the off chance that a few cynics won’t take my word for it, I offer you data. Rasmussen Reports, the public opinion outfit, recently asked voters whether President Bush knew beforehand about the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. The findings? Well, here’s how the research firm put it: “Democrats in America are evenly divided on the question of whether George W. Bush knew about the 9/11 terrorist attacks in advance. Thirty-five percent of Democrats believe he did know, 39 percent say he did not know and 26 percent are not sure.”

So, one in three Democrats believes that Bush was in on it somehow, and a majority of Democrats either believe that Bush knew about the attacks in advance or can’t quite make up their minds. There are only three ways to respond to this finding: It’s absolutely true, in which case the paranoid style of American liberalism has reached a fevered crescendo. Or, option B, it’s not true and we can stop paying attention to these kinds of polls. Or there’s option C — it’s a little of both.
…
We don’t know what kind of motive respondents had in mind for Bush, but the most common version has Bush craftily enabling a terror attack as a way to whip up support for his foreign policy without too many questions.

The problem with rebutting this sort of allegation is that there are too many reasons why it’s so stupid. It’s like trying to explain to a 4-year-old why Superman isn’t real. You can spend all day talking about how kryptonite just wouldn’t work that way. Or you can just say, “It’s make-believe.”

Similarly, why try to explain that it’s implausible that Bush was evil enough to let this happen — and clever enough to get away with it — yet incapable either morally or intellectually of doing it again? After all, if he’s such a villainous supergenius to have paved the way for Sept. 11 without getting caught, why stop there? Democrats constantly insinuate that Bush plays politics with terror warnings on the assumption that the higher the terror level, the more support Bush has. Well, a couple of more Sept. 11s and Vice President Dick Cheney will finally be able to get that shiny Bill of Rights shredder he always wanted.

And if Bush — whom Democrats insist is a moron — is clever enough to green-light one Sept. 11, why is Iraq such a blunder? Surely a James Bond villain like Bush would just plant some weapons of mass destruction?

No, the right response to the Rosie O’Donnell wing of the Democratic Party is, “It’s just make-believe.” But if they really believe it, then liberals must stop calling themselves the “reality-based” party and stop objecting to the suggestion that they have a problem with being called anti-American. Because when 61 percent of Democrats polled consider it plausible or certain that the U.S. government would let this happen, well, “blame America first” doesn’t really begin to cover it, does it?

So then there’s option B — the poll is just wrong. This is quite plausible. Indeed, the poll is surely partly wrong. Many Democrats are probably just saying that Bush is incompetent or that he failed to connect the dots or that they’re just answering the question in a fit of pique. I’m game for option B. But if we’re going to throw this poll away, liberals need to offer the same benefit of the doubt when it comes to data that are more convenient for them. For example, liberals have been dining out on polls showing that Fox News viewers, or Republicans generally, are more likely to believe that Saddam Hussein was involved in Sept. 11. Now, however flimsy, tendentious, equivocal or sparse you may think the evidence that Hussein had a hand in Sept. 11 may be, it’s ironclad compared with the nugatory proof that Bush somehow permitted or condoned those attacks.

And then there’s option C, which is most assuredly the reality. The poll is partly wrong or misleading, but it’s also partly right and accurate. So maybe it’s not one in three Democrats suffering from paranoid delusions. Maybe it’s only one in five, or one in 10. In other words, the problem isn’t as profound as the poll makes it sound. But that doesn’t mean the Democratic Party doesn’t have a serious problem.

This is for you partisan right wingers out there.

From the Chicago Tribune Washington Bureau…

As a Republican who was opposed to President Bush’s troop buildup in Iraq but voted against setting a timetable for withdrawal, downstate Rep. Tim Johnson finds himself in the cross hairs of a Democratic-leaning anti-war group.

Since last week, two retired Army generals have called on Johnson and seven other congressional Republicans in television advertisements aired in their districts to take action to wind down the war in Iraq. The television spots were paid for by the Democratic-leaning organization VoteVets.org.

The ads, featuring retired Maj. Gen. John Batiste and Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, criticize President Bush for not listening to commanders’ warnings about Iraq and are tailored for the six representatives’ and two senators’ home television markets.

All eight Republicans are up for re-election in 2008. A spokesman for VoteVets.org said they were chosen because they appear on the cusp of breaking ranks with Bush.

In one ad with Eaton that first aired in the Champaign-Urbana market on Tuesday, the general stands before a backdrop of a U.S. flag and a map of Iraq and says Bush failed to listen to commanders like him about the dangers of invading Iraq.

“Mr. President, you’re being told we need serious diplomacy, not escalation. And you’re still not listening. If the president won’t listen, Congress must,” said Eaton, who oversaw training of Iraqi troops in 2003-04. “Rep. Johnson, protect America, not George Bush.”

Television ads targeting Johnson with a similar message from Batiste, who commanded the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq, ran from May 10 to Monday in the Champaign area.

Jerry Clarke, Johnson’s chief of staff, dismissed the ad campaign as little more than political posturing and predicted that constituents would see it as such.

Clarke said his boss wants to see a responsible winding down of the war and has been talking with members of his caucus about ways to push Iraqi forces to take greater responsibility for the country’s security. But Clarke said Johnson believes a precipitous pullout would be dangerous for U.S. troops and he refuses to consider holding up funding for the troops.