A CRAZY OLD MAN

Just about 3 years, Norman Podhoretz published an article in Commentary that described our current problem with Islamic terrorism as World War IV. The article is chock-full of lies and misrepresentations but that doesn't bother the Noise Machine because it's now been turned into a book:

World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism
by Norman Podhoretz
Doubleday, 230 pp., $24.95

Ian Buruma has a review of this lunacy in the New York Review of Books and I think comes to the perfect conclusions about in two places.
First:

Podhoretz's rhetoric of war can be quite zany. He describes the dispute between opponents of Bush's war and its defenders as "no less bloody than the one being fought by our troops in the Middle East," indeed as "nothing less than a kind of civil war." I myself was opposed to the war, and do not always hold tender feelings for my intellectual opponents, but I hardly think of our differences as comparable to the burning of Atlanta or the battle of Fallujah. By the same token, Bush critics in academe are called "guerrillas-with-tenure,"which seems a grandiose description of what are on the whole rather harmless professors.[2]

This is almost EXACTLY the type of demagoguery that one gets from Mark Levin or Ann Coulter.

Second:

Spooked by his obsession with elitist and anti-Israel traitors undermining American power, he seriously proposes that US television was "drowning us with material presenting Islam in glowing terms. Worse, "the media," including such august organs as The New York Times, had cloaked themselves in a dangerous "stance of neutrality" between "America and its Islamofascist enemies," which "logically implied that the two were morally equivalent." The only exception, Podhoretz concedes, was the Fox network. I remember watching a great deal of American television in 2003, as well as reading the papers. My impression was not that the media produced "an antiwar and in many cases anti-American stance as an alternative to the pro-American Fox." In fact, such an impression strikes me as unhinged.

Thus, Podhoretz repeats the old wingnut lie about the liberal media and the liberal elites but his writing clearly shows that he is just as crazy as Melanie Morgan.