CRAZY OLD MAN, CRAZY OLD PARTY

Via Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings I learned that "WW IV" Podhoretz is one of Rudy Giuliani's senior foreign policy advisers! Giuliani currently is the leading GOP presidential candidate, not some fringe player like Ron Paul. Hilzoy also clued me into Peter Beinart's joint review of WW IV's book and madman Ledeen's book on Iran. Here's an excerpt from Beinart on WW IV:

What really interests Podhoretz, who now advises Rudolph Giuliani, isn’t the Islamic world; it’s the home front. The news media, he explains, are in favor of “an American defeat in Iraq.” So are the former national security advisers Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft. Why do these ostensibly patriotic Americans want to see their nation humiliated and its troops killed? Because it will help their careers. Many “Realists ... along with most liberal internationalists,” he writes, “were rooting for an American defeat as the only way to save their worldview from winding up on the ash heap of history.” And thus, Podhoretz lays the foundation for claiming — if America loses in Iraq — that we were stabbed in the back.

Note that Sean Hannity for months has repeatedly (here, here and here) accused the Democrats of stabbing our troops in the back. Just like Hannity, WW IV describes the domestic political scene in apocalyptic terms:

The most astonishing part of “World War IV” is Podhoretz’s incessant use of violent imagery to describe American politics. Critics of the Iraq war represent a “domestic insurgency” with a “life-and-death stake” in America’s defeat. And their dispute with the president’s supporters represents “a war of ideas on the home front.” “In its own way,” Podhoretz declares, “this war of ideas is no less bloody than the one being fought by our troops in the Middle East.”

Violence and war seem to be crucial to the neo-con's worldview. Anne Norton wrote that some Straussians believe that war is "the activity which would restore seriousness to life" and recently Slots Bennett described his son's and his son's teammates fascination with the movie 300 in these terms:

They're young men. This kind of thing touches them and moves them. They want something to live for and even, if they have to, to die for.

(There's no word yet on whether his son, a senior in high school, has decided to enlist in the military. )

Ian Buruma detects in WW IV's book "a weird longing for the state of war, for the clarity it brings, and for the chance to divide one's fellow citizens, or indeed the whole world, neatly into friends and foes, comrades and traitors, warriors and appeasers, those who are with us and those who are against."

The same could be said for the neo-cons, the radio gasbags and the base of the GOP.