I found it somewhat ironic that the narrowness of the range of permissible thought and political speech among Republican standard-bearers these days would actually be "Maoist" were it to be imposed by a government, rather than the proprietary hallmark of the not-very-loyal opposition."

"To appreciate this crowd’s spotless record of failure, consider its noisiest standard-bearer, John McCain. He made every wrong judgment call that could be made after 9/11. It’s not just that he echoed the Bush administration’s constant innuendos that Iraq collaborated with Al Qaeda’s attack on America. Or that he hyped the faulty W.M.D. evidence to the hysterical extreme of fingering Iraq for the anthrax attacks in Washington. Or that he promised we would win the Iraq war “easily.” Or that he predicted that the Sunnis and the Shiites would “probably get along” in post-Saddam Iraq because there was “not a history of clashes” between them.

What’s more mortifying still is that McCain was just as wrong about Afghanistan and Pakistan. He routinely minimized or dismissed the growing threats in both countries over the past six years, lest they draw American resources away from his pet crusade in Iraq.

Two years after 9/11 he was claiming that we could “in the long term” somehow “muddle through” in Afghanistan. (He now has the chutzpah to accuse President Obama of wanting to “muddle through” there.) Even after the insurgency accelerated in Afghanistan in 2005, McCain was still bragging about the “remarkable success” of that prematurely abandoned war. In 2007, some 15 months after the Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf signed a phony “truce” ceding territory on the Afghanistan border to terrorists, McCain gave Musharraf a thumb’s up. As a presidential candidate in the summer of 2008, McCain cared so little about Afghanistan it didn’t even merit a mention among the national security planks on his campaign Web site.

He takes no responsibility for any of this. Asked by Katie Couric last week about our failures in Afghanistan, McCain spoke as if he were an innocent bystander: “I think the reason why we didn’t do a better job on Afghanistan is our attention — either rightly or wrongly — was on Iraq.” As Tonto says to the Lone Ranger, “What do you mean ‘we,’ white man?”

Along with his tribunes in Congress and the punditocracy, Wrong-Way McCain still presumes to give America its marching orders. With his Senate brethren in the Three Amigos, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, he took to The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page to assert that “we have no choice” but to go all-in on Afghanistan — rightly or wrongly, presumably — just as we had in Iraq. Why? “The U.S. walked away from Afghanistan once before, following the Soviet collapse,” they wrote. “The result was 9/11. We must not make that mistake again.”

This shameless argument assumes — perhaps correctly — that no one in this country remembers anything. So let me provide a reminder: We already did make that mistake again when we walked away from Afghanistan to invade Iraq in 2003 — and we did so at the Three Amigos’ urging. Then, too, they promoted their strategy as a way of preventing another 9/11 — even though no one culpable for 9/11 was in Iraq. Now we’re being asked to pay for their mistake by squandering stretched American resources in yet another country where Al Qaeda has largely vanished."

By the way, I am not a conspiracy theorist and saw nothing "sinister" in McCain's remarks, just ironic. As the "winkie" intended to indicate, the piece was written as a humour piece, making a mischievous association between "red states" and Mao's "Little Red Book."

That said, thank you for being civil in your comments. We can agree to disagree without being disagreeable.

Susan Glasser, its Executive Editor, used to be Asst. Managing Editor for national news at the Washington Post. Besides redesigning its outlook section, Glasser also reported from Afghanistan and Iraq, and previously ran the Moscow bureau with her husband Peter Baker, who write for the New York Times. So Foreign Policy has very much been recreated in WaPo's image.

While the site hosts progressive bloggers like Stephen Walt, "The Shadow Government" is largely neocon and anti-Obama. Its senior editor is Christian Brose, Condoleezza Rice's longtime chief speechwriter, and most frequent Obama-bashing blogger of late is White House advisor Peter Feaver, who was Bush's special advisor for strategic planning and institutional reform on the National Security Council. Feaver also served as Director for Defense Policy and Arms Control during the Clinton administration.

Bloggers like Walt keep Foreign Policy out of the crosshairs of Media Matters, but in point of fact, Foreign Policy is very much of a piece with, at peace with, neocon journalism. So why would such a publication NOT give a forum to Steve Rosen?

However, I feel it only fair to point out to him, and to anyone else interested, that I have empirical evidence of a direct correlation between monster hurricanes hitting Miami and my freezer being full, particularly with expensive stuff like meat.

I had just filled before leaving for a wedding in Duluth, Minnesota in August 1992, when Hurricane Andrew hit in 1992. I phoned my neighbors who had our key) to get the meat out when the storm stopped and have a block barbeque with it. They did. After Andrew, we didn't have electricity for nearly a month.

It took me over a decade to actually notice the connection between my freezer and tropical weather patterns, and realize that my shopping habits were causing hurricanes.

In late August 2005, I again gone meat shopping and my freezer was full. A few days later, Katrina blew into town. Another month without electricity, and goodbye roof.

Although hurricane season ends at the end of November, by mid-October I figured it was safe to celebrate my restored electricity by again going shopping. Ha! Along came Wilma. You guessed it--another month without electricity!

It was then that I realized the cause of hurricanes hitting us. Me. And that there might even be a secret of avoiding them. Me.

For the past three years, from May to Dec., I've been trying to keep my freezer as empty as possible. So far it seems to be working--not a single hurricane has come our way. The verdict of the empirical evidence seems clear. I don't want to be responsible, or even complicit, in bringing the next hurricane to our shores. I am willing to do my share to ward off catastrophe.

I do have concerns that, as soon as I write this, a tropical wave will immediately form in the Caribbean, evolve into a hurricane and head straight at us. Call it fear of the "evil eye" or perhaps "hubris." Then again, what's more arrogant--claiming my shopping habits have the power to attract or deflect storms, or Guv Charlie's boast of his direct line to the Almighty?

;-)

"Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state or shall require the Members to submit such matters to settlement under the present Charter."

I've been monitoring this saga as it unfolds, and have very little doubt that Shimon Peres' subversion of Obama's Nowruz message was as deliberate as it was destructive. It is also obvious that Peres' surprise address to Iranians to overthrow their elected leaders while blessing them for the new year was no sooner done than said.

It's remarkable how fast AP (which seems to have its own hawkish foreign policy towards Iran--its version of the Obama Nowruz video was interspersed with footage of ground to air missiles taking off and scenes of Khamenei and Ahmadinjad) got the Peres story, and how quickly so many US news sources, including the NY Times, Forbes, were both able and all too willing to lump Obama's video message with that of Peres! Ron Kampeas of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency actually made Peres' Nowruz broadcast the main subject of the article and Obama's video greeting the also-ran.

More about my take on this in my TPM blog....