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It must be hell, being an upper echelon American conservative.

You've been fighting the good fight, all through the hard decades before the Internet brought some balance to the Left vs. Right war, and you can justly claim some accomplishment- like Norquist's Angola initiative. And now the scales are finally tipping, and conservative activists are a dime a dozen, suddenly you find yourself being nipped again and again by your lessers- like a marlin, in a piranha tank. In some cases, like Horowitz, the teeth even belong to those who were on the other side of the barricades- back when the barricades were real.

And the piranhas bite faster.

It is not wise to rest on one's past accomplishments and engage in a cozy relationship with Islamic organizations.

Frank Gaffney was assistant Secy of Defense under Reagan and has a think tank for the study of foreign policy.

Well, it wouldn't be the first time that a solid conservative started to go whacky in one or another area. Consider Barry Goldwater, who, after his second marriage, became a gay rights supporter and opposed the pro-life movement. Are we to simply sit by because of past contributions? No.

Norquist appears to be WAY off on this. I haven't read the article, and will do so later today, but it is deeply troubling, they way Newt's treatment of his wife/ex-wife was deeply troubling.

What is your tortured metaphor disguising? Why don't you make a real argument? Why do you further assert that "we are going to have to get along with 1 billion Muslims" as though someone here or something in evidence contends otherwise?

It would behoove your credibility to make an open and sincere statement.

So because one has a past record in right-wing circles, that makes it OK to be in bed with Jihadist organizations?

Nice logic, fool.

the piranhas bite faster

Help me out with this. There is something really creepy going on here. It is deep and complex, and we are being fed a misdirection play.

I don't think Gaffney's attack on Grover Norquist is about Grover Norquist. I think it's an attempt by the national security apparatus to deflect attention away from some very hard questions concerning their own culpability in allowing a whole lot of things to go on that they have been watching for a long time.

Thanks to court documents that were released Thursday, we just found out that they've had wiretaps on Sami al-Arian since 1993. How did that guy get into the White House? Gaffney wants really badly for us to blame Grover Norquist for that.

Gaffney's all over the radio, howling to the Moon about the evil Norquist. But Grover Norquist hadn't been wiretapping anybody. How the Hell was he supposed to know? The White House didn't even know.

But the FBI knew. A whole bunch of spook agencies probably knew. Frank Gaffney's friends, in other words, knew. Maybe Frank Gaffney himself knew. What the Hell were they doing, laughing at Bush as he entertained this guy that they knew to be some terrorist poobah? What were they gonna do, slip the pictures to Howard Dean unless Bush approved their budget? What really is going on here?

Speaking of Howard Dean, he's getting crap for floating that stupid "Bush knew" rumor. Well, now we can be sure that's not true. Because if our national security apparatus had known, they wouldn't have told Bush, and we know that because they didn't tell him about this guy.

They let Bush have his picture taken with a guy they knew they were going to be arresting for some serious stuff. There is blackmail potential in that. There's all kinds of creepy potential in that. We have some cowboys out there protecting the Constitution from our elected officials, apparently including the President of the United States. That is scarier than hell.

And we're supposed to worry about Grover Norquist? I don't think so.

Here's Gaffney again:

...the lure of such political dividends induced Governor Bush to hold a meeting in his mansion in Austin on May 1, 2000, not only with Alamoudi and Saffuri, but with other, immoderate Muslims, as well.

In the next paragraph Gaffney is going to blame Norquist for that, but that's kind of a shot across the bow of the President, too, isn't it. The obvious question is, are we going to find out next that our Self-Appointed Constitutional Protectors knew about those two as well, and watched with more bemused detachment as the future President of the United States set himself up for... oh, whatever they decided to ask for? Perhaps they didn't get it, and that's why this is coming out now. Dean says, "Bush knew!" and here comes Mr. National Security, Frank Gaffney, to make it real clear that some people around here know about some potentially embarassing meetings that took place... meetings that might have been prevented, except that our Constitutional Protectors don't worry about protecting the President, they worry about protecting themselves... from the President.

I think Grover Norquist might just be standing in the wrong place at the wrong time when some pretty creepy people need to smash somebody to cover their own butts. I'll tell ya this: if I were Bush, and I found out yesterday, in the paper, that the FBI knew about this al-Arian guy and they watched me meet with the SOB, I would not be a happy man. I would think they set me up. And I would be pretty pissed about it.

I would also start to wonder who else they knew about. Did they know about Mohammad Atta? Are we gonna find out that they had him wiretapped too, and they didn't tell anybody? This whole thing about Norquist has struck me from the beginning as being too loud for what it is. Norquist can be flicked away from the White House thatfast, any time they think it makes sense. We do not need this public hanging that's going on. So all this noise must be about something else. I thought maybe it was just Gaffney with a hair up his butt about Norquist, until I saw that article about ten years of wiretaps on Sami al-Arian. Now it starts to make sense.

I think the hard questions are yet to be asked, and they are not about Grover Norquist. They are about "what did the FBI know, and when did they know it?" If they've been tapping Sami al-Arian for ten years, they know plenty.