Can I finally call him a paleocon now?

In his latest conflation of the torture issue and opposition to the war in Iraq, Mark links approvingly to a list of alleged GOP failings, some of which I agree with, others of which I do not, which claims that the neocons tried to turn the GOP into "a Trotskyite party." If Mark is going to start flinging around these charges seriously, he needs to start putting up or shutting up. When last I checked, slander is still a sin, though maybe he considers it necessary to "enter into evil" so that good can result on this one.

Now assuming he is interested in actually knowing the facts of the situation as they relate to the Iraq war, he can consult the Butler Report, the Senate Select Intelligence Committee report, the Robb-Silberman Commission, or the Duelfer report. In keeping with his tradition of adhering to the worst forms of demagoguery, Mark is attempting to argue that because Bush was lying when it came to Rumsfeld's future either last week or this week that he was lying when it came to WMDs. Well, one of the things you do when you think that somebody might be lying about an issue of fact is that you try to get a second opinion and in this case we happen to have not one, but four. So if Mark is actually interested in discerning the actual truth here rather than wallowing in his ignorance, he can get off his ass and start reading through the relevant documents that millions of dollars of our tax money was used to research and produce. But I suspect he won't, either because he considers it too difficult for him to understand (in which case maybe he might want to tone down the volume of his sweeping denunciations) or because he was never interested in the truth on this one, just another rhetorical club from which to bash the war. When he starts endorsing these kinds of absurd slippery slope arguments, one wonders how soon Mark will start buying into all the charts that purport to show how the whole Iraq war was really nothing more than a neocon plot staged solely to benefit Israel.

Finally, I mentioned my thoughts yesterday on the removal of Rumsfeld. As I said then, I have little liking for the man's policies and am glad that he is gone but his successor looks to be even worse. Not surprisingly, our enemies see this as well and are likely correct in their assessment, not that it'll matter that much to people like Mark as eager as they are to sell the Iraqi people that they profess to care so much about as individuals (at least, in Mark's case, if they're Chaldeans) down river.