Wednesday, September 12, 2007

The Podhoretz Plague

In 1967, he wrote a book confessing he craved “money, power and especially fame.” Norman Podhoretz got all three but, at the age of 77, he wants more and this time his attention-getting devices are to call for bombing Iran now and starting a world war against “Islamofascism.”

Such Neo-Con nuttiness would be pitifully laughable if it weren’t influencing George Bush, who this year gave Podhoretz the Medal of Freedom, and Rudy Giuliani, who has taken him on as his foreign policy adviser.

Far be it for me, of all people, to denigrate senior sages, but Podhoretz sticks in my aged craw. Here he is, on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal this week, calling anyone who disagrees about Iraq part of a liberal cabal going back to the 1960s with "faith in America the ugly."

Here is Podhoretz aboard the recent National Review cruise, as described by a British journalist:

“Today, he is a bristling grey ball of aggression, here to declare that the Iraq war has been ‘an amazing success.’ He waves his fist and declaims: ‘There were WMD, and they were shipped to Syria ... This picture of a country in total chaos with no security is false. It has been a triumph. It couldn't have gone better.’ He wants more wars, and fast.”

If this is Rudy Giuliani’s gray eminence on foreign policy, prayers for Fred Thompson may be in order.

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