Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun

I was going to do a bang-up piece last night, tearing apart this idiocy:

The only way to forestall these frightening developments is by the use of force. Not by invading Iran as we did Iraq, but by an air campaign against Tehran's nuclear facilities. We have considerable information about these facilities; by some estimates they comprise about 1,500 targets. If we hit a large fraction of them in a bombing campaign that might last from a few days to a couple of weeks, we would inflict severe damage. This would not end Iran's weapons program, but it would certainly delay it.

In which the writer evokes the usual conflated imagery:

After the Bolshevik takeover of Russia in 1917, a single member of Britain's Cabinet, Winston Churchill, appealed for robust military intervention to crush the new regime. His colleagues weighed the costs — the loss of soldiers, international derision, revenge by Lenin — and rejected the idea.

The costs were avoided, and instead the world was subjected to the greatest man-made calamities ever. Communism itself was to claim perhaps 100 million lives, and it also gave rise to fascism and Nazism, leading to World War II. Ahmadinejad wants to be the new Lenin. Force is the only thing that can stop him.

Of course, is compared to Lenin, because, you know, he can't be compared to Hitler because...

Never mind that the population of Russia at the time of the 1917 October Revolution was over 150 million, whereas the current population of Iran is about 68 million.

Oh and never mind what Seymour Hersh said in the New Yorker:

If the Democrats won on November 7th, the Vice-President said, that victory would not stop the Administration from pursuing a military option with Iran. The White House would put “shorteners” on any legislative restrictions, Cheney said, and thus stop Congress from getting in its way.

Idiot.

But that's not important right now. I was going to go back in history, find lots of quotes by hawks about how we should attack Iraq, and juxtapose them with current hackery demanding we attack Iran, like the tool quoted above.

I went to Andrew Sullivan, who Eric Alterman calls "Little Roy" Cohn, to see what his archives would reveal.

And was shocked, shocked!

He smacks down Hugh Hewitt, giving him a Faux Malkin Award:

Because of this supposed shared concern, Warren is ready to turn over the spiritual mantle to a man who represents the views of Satan at worst or progressive anti-God liberals at best in most of his public positions on the greatest moral tests of our time," - Kevin McCullough on Townhall.com, whose executive editor is Hugh Hewitt.

He speaks of tolerance and acceptance:

I'm just interested in being treated equally under the law, and letting others hate whomever they want to. And I'm interesting in holding leaders of churches to the same rules they apply to others. That's all. Have a great Thanksgiving.

He makes sense on Iraq:

It's hard to disagree with him. I'm afraid that the case for many more troops might have made sense two years ago, but makes much less sense today.

He makes sense on free markets and media responsibility and smacks down Rupert Murdoch:

With free markets comes great freedom but also some responsibility: to publish books worth publishing, to air TV shows actually worth airing, to care about content as well as ratings and sales. Those criteria are distinguishable from what the market will reward. That distinction has been lost in many places. It is not a criticism of the market; it is merely a reminder that markets also require integrity among those who work in them. That point deserves recovering.

Wow. Andy has had his face all over TeeVee lately, and it's a face I'm starting to grow fond of. He's still a conservative, and he still has never issued a personal mea culpa for the hateful attacks and hackery he spread in the run up to Iraq, but clearly he has grown.

Almost makes me fond of him.

Almost.

Oh, and Joshua Muravchik, writer of the first story quoted above, American Enterprise Institute über wanker?

Bastard!