According to National Review he’s “a dedicated public servant caught in a crazy political fight that should have never happened, convicted of lying about a crime that the prosecutor can’t even prove was committed.” But, of course, it’s very hard for prosecutors to prove that crimes have been committed when the perpetrators and their employees are allowed to lie to help cover it up. This stuff is illegal for a reason.

Tom Schaller alerts us to the fact that today is the tenth anniversary of the Project for a New American Century’s statement of principles. All that has, naturally, worked out beautifully.

The actual statement is fairly useless propaganda. If you want a pretty decent “in their own words” statement of the neoconservative foreign policy agenda, I’d go back to the slightly older Bill Kristol / Bob Kagan collaboration “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy” which lays out the argument that, among other things, a foreign policy that creates a lot of dangerous crises will be politically helpful to Republicans. Charles Krauthammer’s 1991 essay “The Unipolar Moment” and his 2002 followup “The Unipolar Moment Revisited” are also key texts.

In the course of a post with which I otherwise agree, Ed Kilgore remarks “Edwards’ efforts to separate himself from Clinton and Obama by deriding the ‘war on terror’ (accurate as it is with respect to the terminology involved) is politically perilous, to say the least.” This is actually what I think is the most significant aspect of Edwards’ decision to take this bit of sloganeering on.

He had the balls to say what everyone knows is true (but only parenthetically) and is too afraid to say and . . . he wasn’t struck down by lightning. Hillary Clinton’s shameful efforts to play right-wing demagogue in response to Edwards have no sting whatsoever in my view. For years and years this kind of dogma has built-up among Bush administration critics that None May Say The Obvious about the “war on terror” lest they face dire, dire political consequences, but a party that doesn’t have sufficient confidence in its national security chops to offer a really banal criticism of the Bush administration is bound to end up projecting that insecurity to voters in a way that’s much more damaging than taking a 48 hour hit as the White House borrows the Clinton campaign’s talking points.

David Remnick seems insightful here on the 40th anniversary of the 6 Days War.