And Iran . . .

A lot has been said about the Wikileaks cable dump. Bill Kristol, the dumbest smart guy on the planet, even said:

Why can't we use our various assets to harass, snatch or neutralize Julian Assange and his collaborators, wherever they are? Why can't we disrupt and destroy WikiLeaks in both cyberspace and physical space, to the extent possible?

Sounds like movie tough guy talk for kill Assange.

Funny though, Kristol also says this:

Yesterday on Fox News, top neocon Bill Kristol broke through all the media noise about WikiLeaks’ release of U.S. diplomatic cables and came up with his top headline: that the U.S. should forget about Middle East peace and attack Iran.

KRISTOL: The world really did not want Iran to get the nuclear weapons and Iran’s neighbors in particular don’t want Iran to get nuclear weapons and they’d like us to act to prevent it.

They’re not worrying about Israeli settlements on the West Bank or the Arab street disliking an attack on Iran. They understand that Iranian nuclear weapons would change the balance of power in the Middle East and call them to go nuclear. It would be an incredible setback for all American efforts to check the spread of radical Islam and terror and further nuclear proliferation in Middle East and around the world. That’s the headline.

Iran is a country with a special relationship with the US that too many too often forget. It didn't start with the hostages in '79. In fact, that, and virtually every gesture made by them toward us stems from this little event that Juan Cole discusses:

It should be remembered that then Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh angered Washington in the early 1950s by nationalizing Iranian petroleum. Eisenhower slapped sanctions on Iran and destroyed its economy. Washington at that time thought Mosaddegh was a pinko, though in fact he was a relatively conservative aristocrat. At the height of the crisis, Mosaddegh wrote a letter to Eisenhower, which was ignored. Ike had the CIA overthrow the elected, parliamentary government of Iran and install the Shah as a megalomaniacal dictator. So the tradition of letter-writing by Iranian leaders at times of tensions with Washington isn’t replete with successes. Of course, the Iranians took revenge for the heavy-handed US interference with their form of government. They made an Islamic Revolution in 1978-79, and more recently elected Ahmadinejad. What Washington wouldn’t do to have that nice Mr. Mosaddegh back.

In-freakin'-deed. That's some modest diplomacy right there.

And now the obligatory Flock of Seagulls Youtube. I worked a show with them in '83, the were charming, funny, a joy to work with. And Mike Score, the dude with "the hair" was the nicest of the bunch.

Written In Blood

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the New York Times has contracted William Kristol to begin penning some sort of advice column to lovelorn conservatives in the new year - The Miss Cleo of the NeoCons.

What...You didn't think he was going to offer fact-based screeds on 'events of the day', did you?
After all, this man has been an aggressively ambitious shill for every greed-soaked policy concocted by neoconservatives, and has been demonstrably wrong with every prediction made...Yet he shrugs it off nonchalantly, even insouciantly, for those who suffer as a result of his mendacity are not those who matter to him or those he serves.

He doesn't even like the newspaper that has offered to take up the slack in his wallet created by his earlier cashiering from Time magazine - Thus, how much credibility does this situation offer either party... Exactly?

Obviously Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. needn't hire Kristol to hew closely to established truths, by dint of the fact that empirically received wisdom is so 'twentieth century' now...Strictly for geeks and squarebritches.

We find ourselves living in the New Unreality - Whatever one chooses to believe in the grip of their fever dreams is real, because they believe and declare it so, thus no further proof need be offered, and the world has no choice but to accept this unquestioningly...And should the world be so unwise as to refuse acceptance, extreme force is perfectly justifiable when brought to bear on such recalcitrance.

This is yet another example of civilization's early onset dementia, the return to a Darker Age as critical thinking and logical analysis of data is subsumed by infantile wish fulfillments metastasized into the public discourse and accepted as factual perceptions by the mass.
There is no more objective reality, a shared group of non-fictive truisms that can be reliably verified...Only the grasping Id of the empowered forcing whatever catches their fancy upon the powerless.

And it will go on without end, unless and until people reject the use of relative morality and situational ethics as convenient solutions to complex issues, and embrace the concept of enlightened interdependence practiced on a scalable level in all affairs.

Meanwhile, I'm sure there are bird cages in need of lining somewhere...But the rancid scribblings of William Kristol are not even fit for that type of deployment.