Liberals lie without a thought, don't they?
What does his scholarship have to do with anything? Alger Hiss was no doubt a gifted scholar as well.
I am more than willing to give Israel the benefit of the doubt, but it makes me more suspicious when I see this kind of pre-emptory disingenuousness.
Every nation in the world has spies in the US. They would be fools not to. That said, when we catch someone in the act, we must do everything in our power to punish him.
David Frum had a great piece on this whole shoddy issue late last week on Natl Review Online...its his diary of Sept 10, entitled Blowback; skip down a bit to his section called Answers Please. This whole episode has smelled like a phony blame-Israel witchhunt to me from the start, and Frum [and many many others] agrees
here is a short excerpt:
"Answers Please
Finally, a footnote to yesterday’s thought experiment. I underscored the absurdity of the canard about an Israeli spy ring in the Pentagon by restating the same facts as they would appear if the allegations involved any other allied country: Japan, for example. Without the anti-Israel animus of some in the bureaucracy--abetted by the anti-Bush animus of many in the press--this whole story shrivels to nothing: just one official sharing his personal thinking in ways that may have broken rules about the handling of classified documents but that created no national-security risks and that involved nobody other than himself.
It’s now beginning to appear that many in law-enforcement are coming to see the so-called spy case in exactly the same way. There seems to be some reason to think that over the past week the whole demented investigation has fizzled out--and is about to be quietly shelved."
Frum thinks the investigation should not simply and quietly be "dropped" especially after the hyperbolic press coverage of the "leak" of the FBI's intent to maybe arrest someone for something which morphed into a Vicious Israeli Spy Ring in the press. Frum thinks the leakers and their motives need to be fully aired out for all to see.
here is the article: http://www.nationalreview.com/frum/frum-diary.asp
Hanson: I don’t know whether I qualify as a neo-conservative; I certainly was never a radical leftist who became disillusioned and went Republican. Mexifornia did not endear me to neoconservatives. If you look at books like Fields Without Dreams, The Land Was Everything, or Who Killed Homer?, instead I think you can detect a consistently socially conservative but still populist theme, whether wary of agribusiness subsidies, open borders, or elite academic culture.
I don’t feel comfortable in either New York or Washington and as someone who farmed for a number of years am no fan of corporate agriculture. You err when you employ the term “blind faith”—as if all these Bushites thought New England would sprout up in a few weeks outside of postbellum Baghdad.
Trying to offer reform in the wake of the war was the least bad of very bad alternatives. We left Somalia, fled Lebanon, let the fanatics take over Afghanistan, didn’t go to Baghdad in 1991 and ended up with rogue, failed states and September 11. Anytime we stayed on—Germany, Japan, South Korea, Panama, Nicaragua, or the Balkans the prospects were much better. Let us see what Iraq looks like in 3-5 years, versus what either leaving now or leaving Saddam in power might have been like.
I don’t want to get into Reconstruction, but someone like Grant, who was no wild-eyed liberal, felt that after a decade there of Federal troops there was gradual progress, and the election of 1876 was a travesty in American history, leaving a wound open that would not heal until the 1960s. There are no good choices when it comes to war and its aftermath, only bad and worse alternatives. We should remember that in Iraq and beyond.