Newsweek really screwed up when it misidentified the cast of characters serving on Rudy Guliani’s foreign policy team, and Daniel Pipes, the hard Zionist American propagandist, took it to task on his own site:
The subsequent correction warrants a place in Guinness World Records.
Editor’s Note: In our print edition, several captions for the photographs accompanying this report were inadvertently transposed. Martin Kramer’s photograph is identified as Norman Podhoretz; Daniel Pipes’s photograph is identified as Kramer; Peter Berkowitz’s photograph is identified as Pipes; Nile Gardiner’s photograph is identified as Berkowitz’s and Podhoretz’s photograph is identified as Gardiner’s. NEWSWEEK regrets the errors.
Comments: (1) There are six pictures in all on the page and five of the six captions are wrong; only that of Robert Kasten is correct. Aggregating so many errors at once takes real talent – but count on Newsweek.
It only goes to say, you really can’t tell one Neocon from the next. They all think alike anyway. But Daniel Pipes is such a hard line embarrassment to any political candidate, it is not surprising that when consulted, he first denied his role as a Guliani advisor.
The original Newsweek article by Michael Hirsh about the Giuliani campaign, was titled, Would You Buy a Used Hawk From This Man?
The article, More on Giuliani’s Advisors from Harper’s Ken Silverstein explains more:
I reported in late August that hardliner Daniel Pipes was advising Rudy Giuliani’s campaign. Since then, a number of other outlets, including the New York Times last week, have identified Pipes as numbering among Giuliani’s hawkish advisers, along with Norman Podhoretz and Martin Kramer.
Today, Eli Lake has a story in the New York Sun saying that Giuliani’s campaign has told him that it was angered by a “series of inaccurate articles summing up the candidate’s foreign policy brain trust as a collection of particularly hawkish neoconservatives.” Charles Hill, Giuliani’s chief foreign policy adviser, told the Sun that Pipes is not an official adviser, saying, “He is invited to send things to the campaign. We have not announced him, he has no formal role in the advising of the campaign.” Pipes told Lake, “I am not supposed to talk about this. They have not formally announced my name.”
I got the distinct sense from reading Lake’s piece that Giuliani’s campaign is simply seeking some distance, albeit artificial, from its controversial advisors. For example, Podhoretz told the Sun, “I have told a million people that I don’t speak for Giuliani. I express my views mainly through email communications to the foreign policy team. Rudy is free to accept or reject them.” In other words, he advises the campaign.
As to Pipes, I contacted him in late August and asked him if he was advising Giuliani’s campaign, as a source had told me. He denied it and so I left him off my original list of Giuliani advisors. The next day Pipes emailed again to say that he had, just that day, joined the Giuliani campaign, which is when I wrote a follow-up item saying so.
So they just send emails once in a while.
Except that Hillary, the lead Democratic presidential candidate, has also embraced the Neocon vision with her Iraq “stay the course” screw up and hostile Iran rhetoric, one would have to conclude that the Neocons will not disappear from the scene after the 2008 election, whether a Democrat or a Republican is elected. And with Daniel Pipes getting into the act, especially if Rudy becomes the Republican’s presidential candidate, we all know that Hillary will strive to steal Rudy’s agenda, the opposition’s positions, which is the kernel of Bill Clinton’s political genius. The Neocons, in spite of the Iraq debacle, will continue to influence American foreign policy perhaps for decades to come.
How does one get rid of Neocons? That is the question facing America today.
