Thursday, October 11, 2007

GIULIANI: CHENEY IN A YANKEES CAP

An announcement on the Giuliani campaign site names several members of his foreign policy team -- and I can't help noticing, with some trepidation, that the "Senior Terrorism Advisor" is a guy named Thomas Joscelyn.

Joscelyn has collaborated with Stephen Hayes on articles for The Weekly Standard alleging that connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda were more significant than you've been led to believe. (Hayes, of course, wrote a widely panned book making this same allegation -- and was apparently rewarded for doing so by Dick Cheney, who then cooperated with Hayes on his subsequent biography of the VP.)

More recently, Joscelyn has fixated on Iran, particularly on what he claims is Al Qaeda's significant toehold there. As Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, Joscelyn's work is cited by Michael Ledeen as evidence of "Iranian domination of al Qaeda" -- and possible Iranian involvement in 9/11.

Yet another sign that a Giuliani presidency would be the Bush presidency on crack.

Oh, and one of Giuliani's "Senior Foreign Policy Advisors" is David Frum, the guy who coined two thirds of the phrase "Axis of Evil." And a member of his "International Law and Organizations Advisory Board" is Dr. Ruth Wedgwood, a decidely right-leaning academic who's been affiliated with Benador Associates, where the "experts" are a who's who of paranoia and imperial hubris: Laurie Mylroie, James Woolsey, Richard Perle, Victor Davis Hanson, Charles Krauthammer, Amir Taheri, Dennis Prager, and David Gelernter, to name a few.

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On a lighter note, here's the funniest Giuliani blog post ever.

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