Josh Marshall (Talking Points Memo) has been plugging away for a couple of weeks trying to get people to focus on Rudy's foreign policy advisors. Pro-choice and gay-friendly are red herrings. Rudy is NOT the moderate in the republican race. Rudy Guliani is perhaps the most dangerous foreign policy extremist to have sought the presidency in a century. Worse than Dick Cheney... let that sink in.
Maybe you love Rudy or maybe you hate him. But whatever you may think of him, check out his foreign policy team, because that's the key to knowing what to expect from a Rudy presidency. Especially for candidates with little or no foreign policy experience of their own, the folks advising the candidate are key.
And Rudy's team is made up, more or less, of all the guys who were too nuts or too extreme to make the cut with George W. Bush. If you really, really want to go to war with Iran as soon as possible, vote Rudy.
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I know I've said before that Romney's profound and almost incalculable phoniness is a terrifying prospect to behold in a possible president. But the danger of phoniness, aesthetic or otherwise, cannot hold a candle to the truly catastrophic foreign policy Giuliani would likely pursue if he got anywhere near the Oval Office. Watching him campaign it's pretty clear that the guy has no real sense that posturing and pandering to ethnic paranoia in New York City simply isn't the same as running a national foreign policy. The people he's coalescing around himself as his foreign policy advisors are the ones who are going to help him learn as he goes.
And they are simply the most dangerous, deranged and deluded folks you can find in American political and foreign policy circles today. It's really not an exaggeration. Scrape the bottom of the "Global War on Terror" Islamofascism nutbasket and you find they've pretty much all signed on as Rudy advisors.
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In Tehran by Summer
Rudy Giuliani has just announced a new raft of foreign policy advisors. ( http://www.observer.com/2007/rudys-new-foreign-policy-advisors-0 ) And I guess the premise of the campaign is now that the Bush administration wasn't sufficiently riddled by neoconservative whackjobs.
Topping the list: Michael Rubin as Senior Iran and Turkey Advisor and Middle East Advisory Board Member.
I really don't know how to describe Rubin for those who aren't familiar with him. He worked at Doug Feith's Office of Special Plans. But that hardly does the matter justice -- rather like saying Dick Cheney was a supporter of the Iraq War. On the TPM Scale of Pure Neoconism (TM) Rubin gets well over 99%. Like the most interesting and frightening neos, Michael is that perfect mix of extreme factual knowledge and extreme lack of judgment, prone to wild-eyed theories and fantasies of various sorts but all in the end leading inexorably toward catastrophic policy moves for the United States. You really might as well put Ahmed Chalabi as your top Mideast or Iran advisor.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/056028.php
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/056020.php
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2007_10_07.php
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