Okay, too much silence around here might not be as spooky as too much silence about Iran, but enough is enough.
In the latest follow-up to all the stage-setting documented already below here in Montfort’s post on the administration’s warmongering toward Iran from about three weeks back, this morning’s salon.com has a few newly recounted pieces of the puzzle that is the Bush (/vs.) Cheney administration (or rather Cheney vs. Bush administration?)…
In an article titled “Why Bush won’t attack Iran,” Washington Note blogger Steven Clemons goes inside and anonymous-source to report the words of current and former Bushies and Cheneystas. (Check out as well this page of Clemons’ blog for a foreshadowing from this past May, as well as the hard-to-look-at but surely-most-honest photo of our impeachable VP in the archives of VPdom. Is that a Spiro Agnew-plus snarl of disdainful hatred or what?)
While I think the Juan Cole comparison of Bush and Napoleon in the Middle East, linked in Montfort’s post below, is unimpeachable, it is shuddering to imagine how history might have changed if, to boot, Napoleon had had a Cheney as his “VP.”
Clemons’ own conclusion — that war against Iran is not off the table but only because Cheney would corner Bush into it — hinges chiefly on this:
Continue reading Binary choices on Iran wherein Cheney does “end run” around Bush?
Columbia’s Bollinger slams Ahmadenijad: Bush’s contagious behavior?
Yes, I think that yesterday we saw a potent manifestation of the contagion of our era, a mode of how to comport oneself with others that is modeled (MBA-style?) by Mr. Insolence-in-Chief himself. It had the stamp of a particularly neoconnish brand of disdainful arrogance. And it wasn’t coming from the upstart of a world leader from Iran.
I was out of the loop, didn’t even know that Ahmadenijad was speaking at Columbia University yesterday until I heard an extended NPR report* on the event during afternoon drive-time yesterday. Complete with audio excerpts. And I was frankly appalled. Before I, the listener, like the actual live listeners in Columbia’s student audience for the event, even heard a word from the invited speaker, came an introduction by Bollinger that I’m guessing is almost without precedent in the history of guest-speaker introductions ….
Continue reading Columbia’s Bollinger slams Ahmadenijad: Bush’s contagious behavior?