Yesterday, Glenn Beck warned his Fox News viewers that the “left is lining up” against tea party activists as “radicals in today’s administration” align themselves with “crazy groups” that help assemble the opposition. During his rant, Beck named National Council of La Raza (NCLR), the nation’s largest Latino civil rights and advocacy organization, and then immediately went on to identify MS-13, one of the world’s most violent criminal gangs which originated in Los Angeles and has spread to Central America, as belonging to the same general classification of groups:

The left is lining up against you. Remember, the radicals in today’s administration — the radicals — have connections to everybody. And who is assembling? [...]

La Raza — which if you want to talk about a racist statement — if I called an organization “the race” — wow, that’s…Anyway, La Raza supports drivers licenses for illegal aliens — not for that. They oppose any cooperation between local law enforcement and federal authorities, such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement and enforcing U.S. immigration laws. Why wouldn’t you want them working together?

Then you have MS-13 — this is a blood-thirsty, this a notoriously violent gang who has often left behind dismembered corpses, decapitated heads. It’s bad. [...]

Watch it:

Beck goes on to explain why NCLR and MS-13 should be lumped into the same category of “crazy groups.” Beck brings up the fact that Justice Sonia Sotomayor is a member of NCLR and that President Obama spoke at one of their events in 2008. He then infers that Attorney General Eric Holder must be connected to MS-13 because he directed prosecutors not to seek the death penalty against three El Salvadoran men with ties to the “decapitation gang” who were being tried on charges that, although shameful, did not involve anything close to decapitation.

While MS-13 is in fact a gruesome, violent gang, NCLR is a private, nonprofit, nonpartisan organization with a mission to “strengthen this great nation by promoting the advancement of Latino families.” NCLR believes that “all immigration to the U.S. should be safe and legal” and explains that “la raza” also means “the people” or “community.” Their position against the depudization of immigration law has been justified by research showing that it leads to racial profiling, discrimination, and other civil rights abuses. NCLR has featured a variety of speakers from both sides of the aisle at their events including Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-CA), then Gov. George Bush (R-TX), Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), and Representatives Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-FL).

Given that Beck has gone as far as to say he likes immigrants more than Americans because they love and appreciate this country, it seems odd that he would slam a group that aims to “create opportunities and open the door to the American Dream for Latino and other families.” In an interview with Sarah Palin, Beck argued that the U.S. should “make the door wider and make it easier to bring people in.” Back in March, Beck stated, “if we don’t have immigrants who love this country, we’re gonna run out of people who love this country.” If anything, Beck’s immigration platform is more radical than NCLR’s, which advocates for “reasonable enforcement with reduction in family immigration backlogs, a legal path for future immigrant workers, and a path to citizenship for those living and working in the U.S.”

Beck also names the Center for American Progress as one of the organizations that Obama administration “radicals” associate with.

BBC reports that an Iranian cleric, Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi, recently suggested that promiscuity causes earthquakes. “Many women who do not dress modestly lead young men astray and spread adultery in society,” said Sedighi, “which increases earthquakes.”

The Weekly Standard’s Gabriel Schoenfeld suggests that such clerical wackiness “can teach us a serious lesson” about Iran:

The question it poses is: How well do we understand the thinking of the Iranian leadership on questions small and large? [...]

The assumption that the Iranians are “rational” in the way we normally understand that term is open to doubt. If promiscuous women can cause earthquakes, what kinds of human behavior, one wonders, might cause a nuclear bomb to detonate or be detonated?

Quite right! What will those nutty, nutty clerics think of next? Maybe gays cause hurricanes? Perhaps feminists cause terrorism? What about abortion causing illegal immigration? Soon they’ll be telling us that God supports political assassinations! Or even that God intervenes in Republican primaries! It’s just so ridiculous.

In reality, off course, those are all views proudly expressed by conservative American clerics, and shared by the millions of Americans who follow them. Which just shows, as I’m sure Schoenfeld would agree, that the assumption that the Americans are “rational” in the way we normally understand that term is open to doubt.

Yesterday, a conservative Florida blogger interviewed Republican GOP Senate candidate Marco Rubio about “the struggle against Radical Islam and Global Terrorism.” When asked if he would support an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, Rubio suggested that he would, saying that an Israeli attack would be justified:

Q: Iran just came out and said that they’ve developed, that they’ve proliferated nuclear weapons or they have the capability of. What if Israel preempted a strike on Iran? Would you support it as a U.S. Senator?

RUBIO: Israel has to do whatever Israel needs to do for their own national security. You would hope the United States, by taking a stronger role, would prevent that from needing to happen. But ultimately, I don’t think any of us are going to blame Israel if they take it upon themselves to ensure that the security and well being of their people is safeguarded.

Watch it:

It’s unclear what Rubio is suggesting when he says the U.S. could address the problem by “taking a stronger role.” Is he advocating that the U.S. should bomb Iran first?

Like most neocon war hawks advocating military action in Iran, one thing Rubio perhaps hasn’t thought through is what happens next. The Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol wrote yesterday that Adm. Michael Mullen “is being silly” for noting that an attack would further destabilize the region. But the Wonk Room’s Matt Duss points out the real foolishness of Kristol’s (and Rubio’s) position:

Numerous analysts have discussed the disastrous consequences that would likely result from a military attack on Iran by either Israel or the U.S. Among those likely consequences are: Attacks on U.S. troops and interests throughout the Middle East; The death of Iran’s democratic opposition movement; The strengthening of hardliners within Iran’s government; The withdrawal of Iran from the NPT and a redoubling of its efforts to obtain a nuclear capability, an effort that would now have the benefit of cover from international outrage at the U.S. and/or Israel for its attack.

As far as what happens after an attack on Iran, retired Gen. Anthony Zinni said “if you follow this all the way down, eventually I’m putting boots on the ground somewhere. … If you like Iraq and Afghanistan, you’ll love Iran.” And a senior defense official told ThinkProgress last year that an attack probably would “incentivize the Iranians to go all the way to weaponize” their nuclear material.

Back in February 2003, just before the beginning of the U.S.-led preventive war on Iraq, Army Gen. Eric Shinseki told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the U.S. would need “several hundred thousand soldiers” to secure the country. Shinseki’s estimate drew upon a substantial body of analysis that suggested that the weeks immediately following the fall of Iraq’s government would be decisive for securing the country, and therefore a substantial troop presence was necessary to prevent chaos and deter potential insurgents.

Several days later, in what journalist James Fallows called “probably the most direct public dressing-down of a military officer, a four-star general, by a civilian superior since Harry Truman and Douglas MacArthur, 50 years ago,” Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz called Shinseki’s estimate “wildly off the mark,” and said that “it’s hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself.”

While it’s unclear whether a larger initial troop presence could have actually prevented Iraq’s insurgency, it is abundantly clear that it was Wolfowitz and other neocon supporters of the invasion, not Shinseki, who were “wildly off the mark,” and that they intentionally downplayed the costs and potential consequences of the Iraq war in order to make sure that it went off.

Even though the neocons are thankfully not in power anymore (though, as I wrote in a recent Nation article, they’re carefully laying the groundwork for their return), they’re still running the same plays, dismissing the views of top military officers when those views conflict with the various splendid new wars that they have planned.

This time it’s chief neocon cleric Bill Kristol — who’s probably been more wrong more times about more things than any other figure in American political life — dismissing as “silly” Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen’s recent suggestion that a military attack on Iran could be just as destabilizing to the region as a nuclear-capable Iran:

KRISTOL: Even assuming the degree and kind of “destabilization” would be the same in both the cases of attack and appeasement (which I don’t think would be so), one scenario — attack — leaves Iran without nuclear weapons, at least for now; the other — appeasement — means Iran would have nuclear weapons going forward. Which unstable outcome is less damaging to U.S. interests? I think the answer is pretty clear: An attacked Iran that does not have nukes.

And when Mullen goes on to say, “we just don’t need more of that [destabilizing of the region],” he’s being silly. It’s not a question of whether we “need” or would like more instability in the Middle East. Everyone would like to be able to wish the Iranian nuclear program (and the current Iranian regime) away, and to wish a happier “stability” into existence. The real question is what form of instability would be more dangerous — that caused by this Iranian regime with nuclear weapons, or that caused by attacking this regime’s nuclear weapons program. It’s time to have a serious debate about the choice between these two kinds of destabilization, instead of just refusing to confront the choice.

Numerous analysts have discussed the disastrous consequences that would likely result from a military attack on Iran by either Israel or the U.S. Among those likely consequences are: Attacks on U.S. troops and interests throughout the Middle East; The death of Iran’s democratic opposition movement; The strengthening of hardliners within Iran’s government; The withdrawal of Iran from the NPT and a redoubling of its efforts to obtain a nuclear capability, an effort that would now have the benefit of cover from international outrage at the U.S. and/or Israel for its attack.

So what you’d end up with in a few years would be… a nuclear-capable Iran.

I would also suggest that a “serious debate” over the pros and cons of containing Iran versus attacking Iran has been going on for a good while. It’s just that Bill Kristol — for whom “seriousness” almost always involves sending somebody else’s kid off to war — simply has nothing productive to contribute. Spencer Ackerman nails it: “If you see no meaningful option within the yawning chasm between ‘attack’ and ‘appeasement’ then you are too stupid or too dishonest to engage in this discussion.”

Finally, it shouldn’t even need to be said that President Obama’s approach hardly qualifies as “appeasement” of Iran — unless you’re someone for whom any strategy that doesn’t involve huge numbers of people being blown up by U.S. bombs equals “appeasement.” Seriously: President Obama just hosted a very successful nuclear security summit that, in addition to front-and-centering vital nuclear non-proliferation issues that the Bush administration could barely be bothered with, has resulted in significantly more international unity around efforts to pressure Iran over its nuclear program — the very sort of unity made impossible by the Bush administration’s neocon-inspired belligerence. It’s says something very troubling about the lack of accountability in American politics that these same characters should come again now, calling for another preventive war, using the same clever argumentative method of simply insisting that such a war will go splendidly and will achieve all of our aims with no unintended consequences, and be taken remotely seriously.