I am beginning to wonder if it isn’t an act. Maybe Frank Gaffney is genuinely insane. He’s very well-educated. He has an undergraduate degree from Georgetown and a graduate degree from Johns Hopkins. Both degrees involved international affairs. He’s not ignorant. He’s got quite a strong neo-conservative pedigree, having worked on Scoop Jackson’s staff and served under Richard Perle in Ronald Reagan’s Defense Department. For a long time I just thought he was saying whatever would serve neo-conservative ends. But he’s now in an open rift with other neo-conservatives like Bill Kristol, who basically thinks that Gaffney and Beck have taken their Islamophobia to absurd and destructive lengths.
Gaffney has dabbled in birtherism, he’s accused the president for two years now of advancing the Muslim Brotherhood’s agenda, and he’s intimated that the president wants to install Shariah Law in the United States. And now he’s telling people that the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) has “come under the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is working to bring America under Saudi-style Shariah law.” He’s blaming Grover Norquist, of all people, of being a mole for jihadists.
For six years now Gaffney has been promoting bio-fuels and fuel-efficiency because he hates letting Muslims get any of our petrodollars. It’s nice to have an ally for combating climate change, but sheesh.
I think Chris Matthews should drop Gaffney from his Hardball rotation. If he needs a guest to come and talk out of his ass about the Middle East, I’m available. And I promise not to make anything up.
Well, the jihadists and Norquist would both like the see the US Government drowned in a bathtub. I see nothing in sharia law that would go against any of Norquist’s neo-fascist ideals. How far-fetched, really, is a conspiracy among those who work to destroy the USA?
Gaffney is either nuts or a con artist, but so is Norquest and his gang. There is no honor among thieves or sociopaths.
Is Frank Gaffney Legitimately Insane?
Couldn’t that go for about 95% of the GOP Congressional(meaning House and Senate combined) delegation, plus the GOP base?
You have a point. But the logic for Norquist is that his wife is a Muslim from Kuwait. And apparently someone thinks that Norquist was involved (or he was involved) with a think tank called the Islamic Free Market Institute. Now there’s four scary words for you. If true, Norquist seems to have been fishing for some foreign cash for his income. Do you smell some sandbagging of Norquist going on here?
So Gaffney takes this narrative and embellishes it the way he normally does stuff and starts peddling it in CPAC to gain attention. Remember the “conservative” analysts are competing on the crazy-loony scale. The crazier, the loonier, the more “counterintuitive” or “contrarian” the viewpoint (think Stossel on steroids), the more likely they are to draw a large conservative audience and large salaries. Maybe you’ve noticed this phenomenon. It trickles down all the way to local conservative “analysts” and “pundits”.
I suspect that like much Frank Gaffney does, his commitment to bio-fuels goes as far as the checks from the agri-business interests moving toward grain ethanol–absolutely the stupidest bio-fuel strategy around. Climate change? Pssshaw! With friends like that, those concerned about the environment don’t need enemies.
I hope Chris Matthews takes you up on your offer. It would improve his show immensely. Having you instead of Chris Matthews do the show would improve it even more.
And about….hum, 1/3 of dems have Cognitive Dissidence.
Maybe more.
They also vote against our interests for mythologies and fairy tales.
Great article:
It depends on what you mean by “principle”.
US foreign policy has operated with certain core principles; they might not be the principles that we would like to see, but they are relatively consistent over history.
One of those principles is to pursue US national interests. The reality is that domestic politics decides what those “national interests” are at any point in time. One current national interest is not to see the flow of oil transport interrupted. That means having at least one strong ally in the Middle East. If that ally happens to sit astride a major canal, all the better. As the Egyptian crisis moved forward, control of that canal changed hands.
Not that the kind words in Obama’s speeches were insincere. They most likely were sincere. But they were instruments of diplomacy, not statements of personal opinion. Ordinary citizens don’t have to watch what they say so carefully or measure out what they say.
Lovely comment.
And I guess it depends on what definition you are using of that word.
I read “principle” in this case as:
“Right conduct” for nations is to respect the sovereignty of other nations. This generally means that nations do not seek to oust leaders of other nations. (Yes, the US has repeatedly violated this principle.) But that is where the built-in bias not to call for Mubarak’s removal came from–principle.
So the problem that the Obama administration had was how to honor that principle and still stand up for the human rights and civil liberties of the folks who were seeking redress of their grievances. That is fundamentally a strategic problem. How to move events toward a conclusion that represents your objective. Given the US history of intervention, the first response needed to be restraint. The second response needed to be using all of the diplomacy at one’s disposal to ensure the civil liberties and human rights of the protesters. And then let the political processes in the country sort themselves out.
As far as US national interests were concerned, as long as the new regime operated the canal as effectively as the old regime so as to allow the free flow of ships and goods, the US was open to change. There has been a growing view that genuinely democratic regimes offer more stability than do dictatorships; that meant that the US was open to Mubarak’s departure so long as the transition was relatively stable.
So the case of Egypt does not prove the first statement.
But the statement, “The West can no longer claim to be an honest broker in the search for peace.” needs some context. I suspect the context is peace in the Middle East. If that is it, I agree but only because of the revelations of the Palestine Papers. The West has failed to be an honest broker because it allowed a phony “peace process” to persist for several decades instead of pushing Israel for a change of policy. Rabin and Arafat received Nobel Peace Prizes because of a charade. Rabin was assassinated because the settlers believed the charade. Well, the charade is over. Maybe it is possible for the West, and that is a pretty broad category, to change their strategy so as to indeed act as an honest broker.
More than likely, as I have noted in another comment, the days of brokering peace between Israel and Palestine are over for a while.
when the dude accused Napolitano and the Joint Chiefs of being part of the Muslim Brotherhood…I think that he he was fucking crazy should have been obvious.
rikyarah,
Ya think.