Things Fall Apart: Ben Shapiro, Chuck Hagel and Friends of Hamas

Look, I'm not going to lie to you and say that I don't watch Fox News. The fact is that I do. A lot. What's important is why I watch it.

First, I'm love with my own anger, and few things make me as angry as what the ridiculous talking head culture has done to conservatism as an intellectual movement. Not only do liberals deride conservatives as mouth-breathing fuckheads, so does everybody else. And all you have to do is look at the "skewed polls" debacle leading up to last year's presidential election and any reasonable person will understand that that they're not wrong.

Then there's Benghazi, where four Americans were tragically killed. The same people who spent a year resisting any investigation into 9/11 - where three thousand Americans were murdered in the streets of their own country - want to derail Cabinet confirmations of national security officials until they find out who edited Sunday show talking points.

Second, I like to masturbate while watching Megyn Kelly get pointlessly, stupidly angry about her right to maternity leave. She seems to think that it's okay for the government to dictate that employers give paid leave to new mothers but not for, y'know, health care. You can argue for both or neither, but advocating one over the other is amazingly stupid. And stupidity in pretty packages makes me hard.  I'm pretty kinky, I know.

But I can't take Fox seriously as a "news" source simply because they get so many of their stories from Brietbart. com.

Whenever someone cites a Brietbart story to me to support an argument, I generally stay silent. I do this because I know as a matter of absolute certainty that it's always a matter of minutes, if not seconds, before the Brietbart material is exposed as a deliberate fraud. No one has ever gotten rich betting on the accuracy of a Brietbart story. The people who work there are stupid or lying, and very often both.

Brietbart is one of the primary reasons that I distrust bloggers who portray themselves as journalists. Bloggers, and especially conservative ones, have spent years bitching about journalism's lack of objectivity, so they built an entire model out of the very thing that they were bitching about in the first fucking place.

The difference between bloggers and the mainstream media is accountability. Mainstream media companies are, as a general rule, publicly traded entities. They are also answerable to advertisers. Those two things are not usually true of bloggers, who can always resort to begging their gullible readers for money when shit goes sideways. Bad journalists get fired, whereas shitty bloggers get jobs at Brietbart.com.

I took a special interest in Brietbart's Ben Shapiro when he was Adam Carolla's podcast a couple of weeks ago. Shapiro was plugging his silly book, Bullies: How the Left's Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America.

The central premise of Bullies, that liberals shut down debate by panting anyone who opposes them as racists or worse, is factually sound. But Shapiro's solution is equally destructive to the public discourse and borderline retarded, besides. Basically, he advocates retaliating in kind.

Again, this is another example of building a model from the very thing that you were bitching about in the first place, which is hypocrisy.

Second, it cedes the moral high ground. By retaliating in kind to demonic liberal tactics, you essentially allow that your underlying ideas are equal to those of your opponents, when they should be better. If you can't argue your way through those charges, the chances are that your ideas are worthless, anyway.

Third, It undermines any condemnation of actual racism. This is why I've always despised liberals for playing the race card so loosely. When everybody's a racist, how bad can racism actually be? With very few exceptions, I've always thought that liberal anti-racist crusaders are far more interested in money, power or self-glorification than they actually are with confronting racism.

As conservatives increasingly associate themselves with that tactic, I increasingly disassociate myself with conservatism.

In a roundabout way, this brings me to Chuck Hagel.

Hagel presents a perfect opportunity for debate amongst conservative foreign policy thinkers, of which there are basically two schools: Taft-Eisenhower-Reagan non-interventionists and the neocon Bush 43 thinkers.

That's a debate very much worth having. But the neocons want to avoid it all costs. While whining that America is going broke, they also want to argue that the United States needs to have a wildly interventionist and expensive foreign policy. They know that this makes no sense in any economic way, so they resort to charges of racism.

Because he has questioned the way that America is involved in the Middle East, Senator Hagel's enemies have decided to paint him as an anti-Semite. That's where stories like this come from;

On Thursday, Senate sources told Breitbart News exclusively that they have been informed that one of the reasons that President Barack Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, has not turned over requested documents on his sources of foreign funding is that one of the names listed is a group purportedly called “Friends of Hamas.

Small problem: "Friends of Hamas" doesn't actually exist. Here's how the clusterfuck came to be.

The revelation could have doomed President Obama’s nomination of Chuck Hagel to be secretary of defense: He gave a paid speech to a group called “Friends of Hamas.”

Fortunately for Hagel, this claim, which galloped across the Internet, was bogus. I know, because I was the unwitting source.

In the process, I became part of an inadvertent demonstration of how quickly partisan agendas and the Internet can transform an obvious joke into a Washington talking point used by senators and presidential wannabes.

Here’s what happened: When rumors swirled that Hagel received speaking fees from controversial organizations, I attempted to check them out.

On Feb. 6, I called a Republican aide on Capitol Hill with a question: Did Hagel’s Senate critics know of controversial groups that he had addressed?

Hagel was in hot water for alleged hostility to Israel. So, I asked my source, had Hagel given a speech to, say, the “Junior League of Hezbollah, in France”? And: What about “Friends of Hamas”?

The names were so over-the-top, so linked to terrorism in the Middle East, that it was clear I was talking hypothetically and hyperbolically. No one could take seriously the idea that organizations with those names existed — let alone that a former senator would speak to them.

Or so I thought.

Basically, what happened is that a Hill staffer repeated a reporter's question as fact to Shapiro and Shapiro published it as fact.

Not only did Ben Shapiro not bother to get multiple sources, he didn't even google "Friends of Hamas," which would have pretty conclusively proved that they don't exist.

I get that there are honest disagreements about Hagel's views on foreign policy, and I'm not against an honest about them. But selective reporting - if Shapiro's "Friends of Hamas" story can even be called that - is something else altogether.

Syria is Awfully Complicated

It's hard to take seriously those who don't understand even recent history. Even worse are those who consciously ignore it, or worse still, lie about it. All three groups of ahistorical shitheads are overly represented in today's Republican Party.

The neoconservative ideology was tested in Iraq and was found lacking by any sane and fair observer. If you want to decide whether to take a given Republican seriously about current foreign policy challenges, I'd advise you to take a look at what they say about Iraq.

First, the U.S invasion did not bring democracy to Mesopotamia, but it did bring more than it's fair share of chaos. Democracy was always a foolish goal in an unnatural country comprised of competing ethnic and religious groups. As soon as you lift out of tyranny those who very much want to kill one another, you shouldn't be at all surprised when they actually start killing one another.

Second, like everything else about the Iraq War, the 2007 "surge" did not accomplish it's stated aims. If you look back on the statements of the surge's supporters, you learn that the aim was to provide enough security in the country (and especially the famously murderous "Sunni Triangle") to allow for political reconciliation. That did not occur. Suicide bombings that kill hundreds of civilians are routine in Iraq.

What the surge did create was what the Nixon Administration called a "decent interval" in Vietnam that allowed the United States to withdraw without being humiliated.

Third, President Obama didn't withdraw from Iraq, President Bush did. In the summer of 2008, Bush signed a status of forces agreement that called for the last American troops to depart by 2011. There was to be no residual force left behind because the Iraqis would not exempt U.S forces and contractors from Iraqi law. Obama merely implemented that agreement, although you'd never know it from listening to Fox News or reading Republican blogs.

Then there's the Arab Spring. During the entirety of the Bush years, Republicans contended that the liberation of Iraq would speed the growth of democracy through the Middle East. In the earliest days of the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, they actually sought to take credit for it.

But democracy didn't work out exactly the way they had planned, and Islamist-leaning governments were elected, just as Hamas had been in 2005 elections in the Palestinian Authority that Bush insisted on, despite the protests of Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas.

Anyone who thought that a Thomas Jefferson was going to rise up in the region is a fool. The true Democrats had long ago been murdered or exiled by the (often American-supported) tyrannies that the revolutions displaced. Just as nature does, politics abhors a vacuum, and the most organized forces were destined to win the democratic elections, and that the most organized forces were affiliated with the Islamist movement was the most predictable thing in the world to anyone that was paying attention.

So the neocons did exactly what they did in the wake of their failure in Iraq; they blamed Obama.

Now moron Republicans like John McCain want to make Syria an issue.

Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta acknowledged that he and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, had supported a plan last year to arm carefully vetted Syrian rebels. But it was ultimately vetoed by the White House, Mr. Panetta said, although it was developed by David H. Petraeus, the C.I.A. director at the time, and backed by Hillary Rodham Clinton, then the secretary of state.

“How many more have to die before you recommend military action?” Mr. McCain asked Mr. Panetta on Thursday, noting that an estimated 60,000 Syrians had been killed in the fighting.

And did the Pentagon, Mr. McCain continued, support the recommendation by Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Petraeus “that we provide weapons to the resistance in Syria? Did you support that?”

“We did,” Mr. Panetta said.

“You did support that,” Mr. McCain said.

“We did,” General Dempsey added.

Of course, the implication is that Obama isn't listening to his national security team, which in this case, he thankfully isn't. And Obama isn't alone among presidents in this regard. Had President Truman listened to his national security advisers, the United States would not have recognized the State of Israel.

There are a couple of points that most Republicans won't make about Syria that you should hear;

• There is no shortage of weapons in Syria.
• The civil war there is already a regional proxy war that American allies in Turkey and Saudi Arabia are already hip deep in.

Too many people who don't know what they're talking about say that when the House of Assad falls, it will precipitate the same kind of chaos that overwhelmed Iraq a decade ago. That's actually not true. The fall of Assad will more exactly precipitate the kind of chaos that overwhelmed Afghanistan twenty years ago.

When the Soviet-sponsored regime of Mohammad Najibullah disintegrated in 1992, the various rebel groups that toppled it immediately went to war with one another. Most of the factions were sponsored by foreign intelligence services, most notably Pakistan's ISI and the CIA.

Those in the cult of St. Ronald of Reagan prefer to ignore this inconvenient truth today, but the Reagan Administration's poster boy of the Afghan "freedom fighters" was one Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The fact that Hekmatyar rallied his troops into battle with Soviet forces chanting "Death to America" was somehow overlooked at the time. Hekmatyar is now wanted by the United States as a war criminal and a close associate of both the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

In wanting to arm Syrian factions, people like McCain risk doing the same thing all over again. And please don't tell me that the United States will rally around a figure like Ahmad Massoud because there likely isn't one, and the U.S  pointedly ignored Massoud until the closing days of the Clinton Administration, nearly a decade later.

Just as happened in Afghanistan, American aims in Syria are at odds with the other regional players. . In the 1980s, the Carter and Reagan Administration, along with the Chinese, sought to humiliate the Soviets, whereas the Pakistanis wanted Afghanistan to use as "strategic depth" in a possible future war with India.

The U.S wants stability and a possible Syrian accommodation with Israel. What the Turks, Saudis and Iranians want is for their preferred ethnic allies to prevail. The Turks and Saudis want a Sunni power base in Damascus, whether or not its jihadi is a secondary concern. The Iranians want to maintain their Alawite ally, and their Syrian bridge to both Lebanon and the Israeli-Occupied Territories.

In any event, none of the Syrian rebels share American national security aims and, to one degree or another, all of them will probably seek thwart them at some point in the not too distant future. While it's a fable of the left that the United States created the Taliban or al-Qaeda in the 80's, it did directly arm and train more than a few of their allied groups.

Toppling Assad is not going to stop the killing. Indeed, his overthrow is almost certain accelerate it as the competing rebel groups go to war with one another in a battle to control the country. Just as they did in Afghanistan, the neocons and liberal supporters of intervention steadfastly refuse to recognize that horrible reality.

Having said that, Syria threatens to destroy the very delicate situations in both Lebanon and Iraq. That's something that the United States should do everything in its power to avoid, either with air forces or, in a worst case scenario, ground troops. Neither country can seal their borders on their own.

If McCain wants to be somehow useful, he can introduce a resolution in the Senate holding Turkey and Saudi Arabia responsible for the actions of their proxies if they take the fight outside of Syria. Their American aid can be held hostage, along with Turkey's NATO membership.

The U.S has tried playing Great Game politics in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and failed miserably both times, to the great benefit of the Pakistanis and Iranians.

Republicans universally mocked the 2006 Biden-Gelb Plan, which would have divided Iraq into a loose federation of three countries. What they've chosen to ignore is that the Iraqis themselves have essentially implemented it on their own.

Because it should be by now apparent that you cannot have democracy or stability in artificial nations comprised of tribal ethnic groups that want autonomy from one another, Biden-Gelb should be at least looked at as a model for most of the Middle East.

With the exception of Israel, Iran, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, these countries were political creations of the various Versailles Conferences of 1919-1922 and maintained as expedient client states during the Cold War. They will eventually disintegrate on their own, the only question is how.

If the United States wants to extract itself from the morass of the Middle East, which it very much should, it should use its diplomatic influence to hasten the creation of a new, more homogeneous Arab states that better represent the national aspirations of their people.

Anyone who knows anything about the isolationist nature of American history should know that Americans are the very last people who should be involved in the poisonous pit of Arab politics. The region is likely to be eventually dominated by Egyptian and Iranian "superpowers" anyway, so why not expedite that?

All the status quo is likely to produce is more frequent revolutions that will be impossible to manage from outside the region. Such revolutions will make it impossible for Israel to have anything other than a war economy and remain forever dependent on an American ally that is rapidly approaching bankruptcy and irrelevance.

The map is eventually going to shake itself out. It is much better for everyone if it does so unopposed from the outside.

When Moshiach Comes, Will He Give Me an iPad Mini?

As you all know, I'm not a religious man. Since I was six, my position has been that if I absolutely must subscribe to intellectually unsupportable superstitious nonsense, it should at least be intellectually unsupportable superstitious nonsense that gets me laid. If some borderline cult gets my faith, energy, time and money then I should at least get stinky fingers out of it. That only seems fair.

Having said that, I acknowledge that I could be wrong. It's rare that I am, but I'd be less than wholly honest if I said it never happened. And, as a general rule, I rather enjoy folks with viewpoints different that mine. It keeps life interesting, and people who believe everything I do bore me terribly.

That's why I'm lucky to have a friend like the good and great Dr. Reverend, my closest friend and spiritual advisor of some two decades. I'd encourage you all to get to know him, but he likes people even less than I do.

From time to time, my phone will ring and I'll instinctively know that Herr Doktor is on the other end of the line, seeking to improve the condition of my immortal soul.

"You scumbag," he'll holler into the receiver. "You're too preoccupied with cocaine, Chivas Regal and orgies! Those things are all fine, if messy when taken in combination, but you need to read your fucking bible! Exactly what are you going to do when Moshiach comes? You think He's going to be impressed with you thick wang and ability to snort a three-mile line of blow? Well, he might, but that's not the point. You need to get right with the Lord, son!"

Not only are the Doctor's tirades impressive performance art, they have a ring of Truth to them.

As I said earlier, I could very well be wrong about the existence of a Higher Power. I don't think I am, but stranger things have happened. So I've decided to cover my bases. In financial circles, they call it hedging.

While I was raised Catholic, I just can't get behind Jesus. He's simply not trending the way he should. When the only person who relates to you is Chris Brown, you've got what can only be considered a serious branding problem. Besides, look what happens every time He makes a personal appearance.



That's right. If a group of crazed Italians don't get you, then some homeless Dudebro with a hatchet will. And I just can't rely on that when the End Times come. You're free to, but I have a feeling it won't end the way you want it to.

Besides, Christians haven't faced any serious adversity since roughly the second century. How do you know that He'll have your back when shit gets real?

The Jews are different. They've been fucked over by everyone wherever they've gone since the dawn of recorded history. They can't even be in a room with each other without a violent disagreement breaking out. Yet they've persevered, which tells me that they have a Friend in High Place.

So I've concluded that if there's anything at all to this superstitious nonsense about an afterlife, Dr. Reverend is likely right and Moshiach is the way to go. And that's why I'm helping him spread his righteous message.

The Good Doctor is spreading that message in the most modern of evangelical ways; on a t-shirt. If you want Moshiach to immediately recognize you as a believer upon His vengeful arrival, you don't just want this shirt, you need it. It just might be the best fifteen bucks you've ever spent. After all, this is your soul we're talking about, people!

In the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that there's something in it for me. I've been advised that if the Doctor sells 200 of these shirts, he'll use the proceeds to buy me an iPad mini. And I desperately need one of those. There are about 1,500 of you here every day, and I suspect that a healthy majority of you have souls in dire need of saving.

And you know what, iPad Minis just don't buy themselves. So help a couple of brothers out.