American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson once said that “a foolish consistency is a hobgoblin of inferior minds.” Unfortunately, Republican pundits and politicians have proven that inconsistency is just as big a problem for inferior minds.
Consider: Numberous Republicans have spent the past five years screaming that anyone who questions Bush’s leadership or decisions is “emboldening” the terrorists. Yet when Bush and Cheney last year started saying that a Democratic-controlled Congress wouldn’t have the stomach to keep fighting in Iraq, nobody on the Republican side objected that Bush was emboldening the insurgents and encouraging them to keep fighting (”The president said it himself—now that the Democrats are in power, we just have to fight until they withdraw! Victory is in our grasp!”).
Then we have Michael Ledeen, a conservative pundit who not only endorsed the Iraq invasion, but also wants us to attack Iran, which he stated recently “declared war on us in 1979 and has been waging it ever since.”
Trouble is, Ledeen was an active participant in the Iran-Contra affair in which the Reagan administration sold weapons to the Iranian government in return for their releasing some hostages. As blogger Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, if Ledeen seriously believes Iran was at war with us during the Reagan era, doesn’t selling them arms mean he—along with Oliver North and Reagan himself—committed treason?
I look forward to hearing the neocons who favor an attack on Iran denounce Ledeen as they denounce all other traitors, and casting him out from their number. After all, it’s not like such fine, honorable, principled people would use charges of treason as an insincere way to smear their political opponents while giving their allies a free pass, is it?

This entry was posted on Monday, October 29th, 2007 at 10:06 am and is filed under Politics, Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.