4 Year-Olds

Maybe the right is fabricating Abe Lincoln quotes to make their own moral depravity look better:

IRAN IN IRAQ: This has been obvious for a long time anyway, and I don't understand why the Bush Administration has been so slow to respond. Nor do I think that high-profile diplomacy, or an invasion, is an appropriate response. We should be responding quietly, killing radical mullahs and iranian atomic scientists....Basically, stepping on the Iranians' toes hard enough to make them reconsider their not-so-covert war against us in Iraq.

....[T]o be clear, I think it's perfectly fine to kill people who are working on atomic bombs for countries -- like Iran -- that have already said that they want to use those bombs against America and its allies, and I think that those who feel otherwise are idiots, and in absolutely no position to strike moral poses.

It's kind of hilarious that these fantasists have swallowed the "24" style of politics completely whole. They actually think, like Matthew Yglesias says that a super-secret team of mercenary ninjas exist within the CIA (but off the books, so, you know, it's quiet) to pick off Iranian nuclear scientists and then, presumably, use a neuralizer to wipe everyone's memory of these scientists and mullahs clean. These are the same people who think government should be abolished or minimized because it's so inefficient.

In addition, as Kevin Drum notes, it doesn't seem to reach the minds of these people that this is an act of terrorism that they're advocating. They mean to assassinate leaders in foreign countries without a declaration of war, and believe they can do so with impunity.

These are the biggest children this nation has ever produced, people whose minds are so addled by early-80s action movies and a belief in their own righteousness that they can make themselves believe anything is possible and also necessary and just. One would hope that such stupidity was limited to the mewling cabbages in the blogosphere, but not so (h/t)

In a pattern that would become familiar, however, a chill quickly followed the warming in relations. Barely a week after the Tokyo meeting, Iran was included with Iraq and North Korea in the "Axis of Evil." Michael Gerson, now a NEWSWEEK contributor, headed the White House speechwriting shop at the time. He says Iran and North Korea were inserted into Bush's controversial State of the Union address in order to avoid focusing solely on Iraq. At the time, Bush was already making plans to topple Saddam Hussein, but he wasn't ready to say so. Gerson says it was Condoleezza Rice, then national-security adviser, who told him which two countries to include along with Iraq. But the phrase also appealed to a president who felt himself thrust into a grand struggle. Senior aides say it reminded him of Ronald Reagan's ringing denunciations of the "evil empire."

Once again, Iran's reformists were knocked back on their heels. "Those who were in favor of a rapprochement with the United States were marginalized," says Adeli. "The speech somehow exonerated those who had always doubted America's intentions."

Yes friends, we're moving toward war with Iran because Michael Gerson needed to fill out the sentence.

This is an example of how lies beget other lies. We were clearly angling to go into Iraq by Feb. 2002, but didn't want to tell anybody, so we grouped Iran in there, leading to the practical end of the reform movement in that country, leading to a more hardline and strident approach, leading to hyped-up rhetoric and a need to lie again to justify the rhetoric (so now we decide that the "highest levels of the Iranian government" have sold bombs to insurgents, except when they haven't).

So these are children too, just as willing to believe magical thinking; just as willing to buy into myths that the government is both bloated and slow, yet lightning-quick and lethal, at the same time; just as willing to deny everything but what they want to believe, and then deny that they believe THAT when it all goes wrong.

The problem with these children is that they're running the country.