PrintJuly 19, 2007
Bush=Hitler. But Does Cheney=Ahmadinejad?
Smearing a politician is just too easy these days. It used to be that journalists had certain standards, that comparing a politician to Josef Stalin or Hitler or to any mass murdering thug just wasn't done. It was seen even by partisans as unfair.
My how times have changed:
Could Dick Cheney and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad be twins separated at birth? The U.S. vice president and Iranian president, each the No. 2 in his country, certainly seem to be working together to create conflict between the two nations. Theirs may be the oddest and perhaps most dangerous partnership in the world today. Both men are hawks who defy the international community, scorn the U.N. and are unpopular at home because of incompetence and recklessness — and each finds justification in the extremism of the other.President Ahmadinejad, a man with genocide on his mind and a hatred of Jews and Christians in his heart, is compared by Nicolas Kristoff (behind the Times-Select Firewall) to the Vice President of the United States. Nor should it be surprising that Gary Sick, best known for his book that supported the thesis of the "October Surprise" during the election of 1980, eagerly participated in this outrageous comparison. Sick was on Jimmy Carter's national security staff and was the principle aide on Persian Gulf Affairs during the Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis.
“Iranians refer to their new political radicals as ‘neoconservatives,’ with multiple layers of deliberate irony,” notes Gary Sick, an Iran specialist at Columbia University, adding: “The hotheads around President Ahmadinejad’s office and the U.S. foreign policy radicals who cluster around Vice President Cheney’s office, listen to each other, cite each others’ statements and goad each other to new excesses on either side.”
Great advice you gave Jimmy there, Gary.
And to compare “The hotheads around President Ahmadinejad’s office and the U.S. foreign policy radicals who cluster around Vice President Cheney’s office," as Sick does is beneath contempt. Comparing those who wish to destroy the Jewish state and establish a Muslim paradise by destroying the US and the west with the accomplished, reasonable (unless you're a liberal) men who "cluster" around Cheney is beyond belief.
Some kind of apology would be in order if Kristoff and Sick were even cognizant of their smears. But as we've learned over the last 6 years, any criticism of Bush-Cheney, no matter how outrageous or demagogic, is acceptable in the liberal universe.
(Hat Tip: Ed Lasky)
