Via a gushing K-Lo (“he’s a clear thinker on this war. And isn’t his honesty about the stakes and his principles — even if you’re someone who disagrees with him on this or that — reason enough to want him reelected”), Rick Santorum’s bafflingly stupid speech on “the gathering storm” facing the United States:

Mr. Casey said that “the U.S. should not escalate the drive to place weapons in space and should seek an international ban on such weaponry.” I hate to break the news to you, but Iran and North Korea are already escalating things. . . .

Let me tell you, Mr. Casey, people are concerned when Venezuela is harboring terrorists, many of whom will penetrate our border because of the amnesty bill you support, that puts amnesty before security.

And just think — what if the Venezuelan terrorists get on the Iranian space station? What then Mr. Casey, huh? huh? Seriously, these people are morons. Dangerously dishonest or (I fear) dangerously confused about what’s going on in the world. “Say what you will,” remarks Lopez, “but this is leadership.” Custer-quality leadership at that.

Kudos, incidentally, to Bob Casey for taking on the administration’s bafflingly wrongheaded National Space Strategy. This is exactly the sort of ground where Democrats normally fear to tread.

Lorelei Kelly writes: “The world public opinion poll that found seven in ten Americans favor Congressional candidates who will pursue major changes in US foreign policy, want less emphasis on use of military force to solve problems and want to work more cooperatively with the United Nations. Most favor direct talks with North Korea and Iran to boot!” See more here.

I do think the political prospects for candidates espousing “dovish” views is considerably worse than a simplistic read of the polling data would indicate. On the other had, I also think the political prospects of such views are considerably better than is commonly accepted inside Democratic campaigning circles, where the thinking seems to be that you always want to position yourself as hawkishly as you can manage. Here’s John Hostettler (R-IN) touting his 2002 vote against the war — “In October 2002, when America was clamoring to go to war in Iraq, I voted against sending America’s sons and daughters into harm’s way because the intelligence did not support the claim that there were weapons of mass destruction there.” No doubt he took a lot of shit, politically, for his stand at the time. But there are probably a lot of perfectly cynical pols out there who think they’d be in better shape today if they could make Hostettler’s claim honestly.

America’s worst Thucydides scholar takes on twentieth century history:

I thought these who advocated such nonsense might at any second suggest that because Mussolini’s fascists, Hitler’s Nazis, and Tojo’s militarists all had quite different agendas, separate racial ideologies, and particular aims in WWII, then, they could hardly be lumped together as the Axis that threatened Western republics and needed a generic anti-fascist response. All during the Vietnam War, we were lectured daily about the intricacies of Vietnamese, Russian, and Chinese Communists — their rivalries, hatreds, and quite separate aims-as they combined to defeat the United States, and trumped their own tensions with an all-encompassing hatred of Western democratic capitalism.

Now then. Germany and Italy formed a formal military alliance and Germany and Japan had a looser, but similar arrangement. Nobody was “lumping” them together, they were actual allies. Meanwhile, this view of Vietnam is bizarre. The distinction-drawers were completely correct. Where Communist parties were seen as alien impositions of Moscow (Warsaw, Prague, Kabul, Budapest) you had one dynamic, but where they had authentic roots in local nationalism (as in, say, Vietnam) the situation was very different. Nixon seized advantage of the Sino-Soviet split to greatly enhance America’s strategic situation. Does Hanson really deny this? How stupid is he?

As I said below, we certainly have had some good journalists in this country, especially for the past couple of years (2001, 2002, and 2003 were not nearly as good) and these days at least, Tom Ricks of Fiasco fame is certainly one of them. Today’s article from Ricks rocks: “The text of President Bush’s news conference yesterday ran to nearly 10,000 words, but what may have been more significant were the things he did not say.”

That response left unclear how the benchmarks would be different from previous times when the United States has set out intentions, only to back down. For example, the original war plan envisioned the U.S. troop presence in Iraq being cut to 30,000 by the fall of 2003. Last year, some top U.S. commanders thought they would be able to significantly cut the U.S. troop level in Iraq this year — a hope now officially abandoned. More recently, the U.S. military all but withdrew from Baghdad, only to have to have to reenter the capital as security evaporated from its streets and Iraqi forces proved unable to restore calm by themselves.

Right, exactly, the “plan” has always been to reduce troop levels as the Iraqi government hit awesome benchmarks. The problem in Iraq has never been a lack of a “plan” to (a) have the Iraqi government hit benchmarks, and then (b) reduce US troops levels dramatically, leaving behind a few tens of thousands of soldiers on permanent bases to lay the groundwork for the next round of the Mideast Transformation Project. The problem has always been that the “plan” has no relationship to reality. Churning out new “plans” doesn’t change that.

The Vice President loves torture. “It’s a no brainer for me.” Of course, he denies that it’s actually “torture” which I’m certain American soldiers would love to hear were they to be subjected to such techniques in the Brave New Post-Geneva World the Bush administration is busy creating.