Pennsylvania’s Rick Santorum has arrived at the strangest and most geographically dislocated analogy ever for the War on Terra®: it isn’t World War II or the Cold War, but the War of the Rings. There’s no way to do justice to his remarks, so we’ll let them speak for themselves.
“As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else,” Santorum said, describing the tool the evil Lord Sauron used in search of the magical ring that would consolidate his power over Middle-earth.“It’s being drawn to Iraq and it’s not being drawn to the U.S.,” he continued. “You know what? I want to keep it on Iraq. I don’t want the Eye to come back here to the United States.”
Iraq must be Gondor, then, which makes sense because it’s the cradle of mortal civilization. Mordor must be Pakistan, since that’s where bin Sauron is holed up, except Sauron’s eye was distracted from Mordor and Santorum wants to keep it distracted from us, which means we must be Mordor, which is confusing because we’re a simple, decent country much like the Shire; this demented tool can’t even get his fictional geography straight. But it’s all good, because we know how it ends: we win, and nobody we really care about dies. The only real question is casting …
Santorum’s colleague, Pennsylvania Congressman Curt Weldon, seems equally adrift if less creative in casting about for a way to explain his personal apocalypse. Weldon is under investigation for influence peddling and perhaps other iniquities and he’s blaming his problems on leeebruls, including but not limited to former Clinton national security advisor Sandy Berger, former Clinton justice department honcho Jamie Gorelick, and, most prominently, former Chuck Schumer aide Melanie Sloan, who now heads Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington (CREW). But Washington reporter Laura Rozen suggests Weldon may have left one important name off his list.
But a Washington lobbying expert who asked to speak on background has another theory: someone cooperating with the Justice Department on another matter might have tipped them off to Weldon. That person: Jack Abramoff.“I think that Abramoff told them that his Russian clients told him this Russian company [Itera] had an in with Weldon,” he said. “The info provided by Abramoff would have been sufficient for the FBI to get a warrant for the wiretaps.”
It should be recalled that Abramoff’s then-lobbying firm Preston Gates had among its clients another shady Russian energy firm, Nafta Sib. In February 1999, eleven months before Preston Gates’ political action committee contributed $500 to Weldon’s campaign, Weldon seemed to do Nafta Sib a favor. He entered praise of Nafta Sib and its chairman Alexander Koulakovsky into the Congressional Record. On the face of it, that potentially looks like the kind of arrangement engaged in by Representative Bob Ney of Ohio, who has just pled guilty to corruption charges. Abramoff might have been able to tell the Justice Department whether it actually was such an arrangement.
Jack Abramoff, the gift that keeps on giving up Republicans …
Bush family fixer and occasional public servant James Baker is heading up the Iraq Study Group, which proposes to find a way to, well, fix the mess created by the younger Bush, who once dandled on Baker’s knee back when Republicans could safely play with youngsters. Cynics have described Baker’s recent talk show tour as “clearly pushing a partisan agenda during the last lap of the election campaign for the Congress,” albeit one that might result in actual policy change; the less cynical refrain from speculating on Baker’s motives while at the same time noting that whatever formulation Baker’s group arrives at, “[i]t’s not clear how willing Bush is to alter his strategy.” No one seems to combine the two takes into the most likely one, which is that Baker is out signalling a change is gonna come in order to boost the GOP’s electoral prospects and there’s not a chance in hell Bush will make any substantive changes in his Iraq policy, whatever it may be …
New York Republican Peter King is having none of this “change the course” stuff: he says Baghdad is a lot like Manhattan, with “bumper to bumper traffic, talking about shopping centers, talking about restaurants, talking about video stores, talking about guys selling [roses] on the street corner, talking about major hotels.” Talking about two hours of electricity and 100 murders a day, talking about death squads, talking about ethnic cleansing, talking about firefights, talking about bombs sewn into dead dogs … if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere …
(Hat tip to Carmelita at the Smirking Chimp for Santorum’s meltdown)
