Republican presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty delivered a major foreign policy address this morning at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. The former Minnesota governor, still the darling of Washington’s hawks, spoke out during the question and answer session about the U.S.’ vital national security interest in Libya:

In Libya, once the President of the United States says [Libyan president Muammar] Qaddafi must go, he has to go. You can’t let a third rate dictator thumb his nose at the President of the United States in the free world. Keeping him there indefinitely is not an option.

And now, some would argue whether we had a vital interests initially, we have one now, which is you can’t leave Qaddafi sitting there because if he were to survive and reestablish any capability at all, I would guess one of his main motivations is going to be retaliation and guess who it’s going to be against? And so Qaddafi must now go.

In other words, Pawlenty laid out two ways that a vital national security interest can be created out of thin air:

1. If the President says something must be done, and it does not get done, then getting it done becomes a vital national security interest because the President cannot be embarrassed in this way.
2. If the President attacks someone who is not a national security threat, then killing, capturing or removing that person from office becomes a vital national security interest because, like a bee hive you’ve swatted with a stick, that person might come after you for attacking them.

Pawlenty’s line is remarkably consistent — though perhaps a bit disconcerting from someone who can’t keep his Middle East countries straight.

Compared to the rest of the GOP field, Pawlenty seems much closer to the first term of the George W. Bush presidency by emulating Bush’s tough guy swagger. Pawlenty has criticized the Obama administration for not pulling an Osama bin Laden-style raid on Qaddafi and for going to the U.N. Security Council to create an international coalition for the war. But at least Bush (falsely) sold the Iraq war as a vital national security interest before going to war there.

Mega-defense contractor Boeing has been vastly overcharging the Army for basic spare parts, forcing taxpayers to pay more than twice the “fair and reasonable” price, according to an audit conducted by the Department of Defense’s Office of Inspector General and leaked to the Project on Government Oversight. The IG looked at spare parts sales to the Corpus Christi, Texas Army Depot for two helicopters systems and found some egregious price gouging, such as charging $71 for a metal pin that should cost just 4 cents:

$644.75 for a small gear smaller than a dime that sells for $12.51: more than a 5,100 percent increase in price. $1,678.61 for another tiny part, also smaller than a dime, that could have been bought within DoD for $7.71: a 21,000 percent increase. $71.01 for a straight, thin metal pin that DoD had on hand, unused by the tens of thousands, for 4 cents: an increase of over 177,000 percent.

While this case is cause for concern in its own right, it speaks to a bigger question of the Pentagon’s reliance on private contractors. Even without Boeing’s price gouging, the IG’s office expected Boehing to charge a “34 percent surcharge fee for overhead, general and administrative costs, and profit, according to the audit report.” And many of the parts studied in the report were available from the Pentagon’s internal procurement agencies at lower costs:

What is even more shocking is the difference in prices the Army would have paid if it procured many of these parts directly from the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) and from the Army’s own procurement offices, the audit shows. The largest percentage differences cited in the DoD OIG report—such as the 177,475 percent example (which is not among the 18 parts the report focuses on)—compare DLA unit prices to Boeing unit prices.

Boeing is currently the center of a national debate over labor laws after the company moved a production line from Washington to South Carolina to thwart labor unions, potentially violating rules established by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). In response to the NLRB’s attempt to enforce the law, a number of national Republican leaders, including much of the presidential field, have come to Boeing’s defense and attacked the labor board, even calling for it to be defunded or disbanded.

GOP presidential hopeful Tim Pawlenty has been one of President Obama’s most forceful foreign policy critics. Even though Pawlenty reportedly “doesn’t want to be identified as a neoconservative,” his attacks on the president, particularly on Libya, have had a neoconservative aura.

That pattern didn’t subside this morning in his foreign policy speech at the Council on Foreign Relations this morning. The former Minnesota governor “sought to claim the mantle as his party’s foreign policy hawk” by “accusing President Obama and his GOP rivals of being weak-kneed in their posture toward the Middle East.” Pawlenty wasted no time in attacking the Obama administration on Syria, saying the president has no “moral clarity” in dealing with Syrian President Bashir al-Assad:

PAWLENTY: By contrast, I called for Assad’s departure on March 29; I call for it again today. We should recall our ambassador from Damascus; and I call for that again today.

So Pawlenty wants to withdraw America’s top diplomat in Syria. Later in the speech, he returned to the issue. “We have a clear interest in seeing an end to Assad’s murderous regime,” he said. How should the U.S. accomplish this goal? Diplomacy:

PAWLENTY: To take advantage of this moment, we should press every diplomatic and economic channel to bring the Assad reign of terror to an end.

Perhaps Pawlenty would argue that recalling the U.S. ambassador to Syria is a diplomatic move. But at the same time, not having an ambassador in Syria means we aren’t using “every diplomatic” channel available. This is how White House spokesman Jay Carney recently explained it:

CARNEY: Having an ambassador in Syria has allowed us to be in Syria, basically in the presence of the government, to make our views known directly and not via long distance.  So, yes, it has been useful to have our ambassador there, precisely because we can communicate directly what our positions and views are. And so I think that has been a useful avenue for us to pursue in terms of communicating our points of view.

Later when taking questions after the speech, Pawlenty said the U.S. should “try to effectuate change within Syria.” So to recap: Pawlenty wants to press “every diplomatic channel,” including using assets “within Syria,” to bring about change. Yet, he also wants to recall America’s number one point of contact that is currently in Syria.

The campaign to discredit the Gaza Freedom Flotilla by the Israeli government and its staunch defenders appears to have hit a new low: Bloggers discredited a recent video made by an “activist” claiming an LGBT group he led was not allowed to participate in the flotilla to break the blockade of Gaza. What’s more, upon its creation, Israeli government officials and their allies promoted the video.

The hoax is only the latest of what is often called the “pinkwashing” of Israel — using the Jewish State’s general openness to its LGBT community as a public relations bludgeon to demonize Israel’s Arab and Muslim adversaries, where LGBT communities face oppression and discrimination.

“Marc,” the star of the high-production-value clip, said he became interested in broadening his activism beyond LGBT issues by working for the flotilla. He claims that, after he contacted organizers, he was told his participation was not in the “overall interests of the flotilla,” insinuating a homophobic strain among participants. The “activist” said he began to further explore the flotilla, and found photos of participants interacting with officials from the militant Hamas group that runs the blockaded Gaza Strip. Watch it:

The video’s authenticity started to unravel almost immediately. The New York Times’s Lede blog, declaring the video a “hoax,” reported there has been “no evidence of homophobia by the [flotilla organizers], and indeed some of the participants in the new flotilla are gay.”

Bloggers Max Blumenthal, Ali Abunimah, and Benjamin Doherty quickly showed a trail of promotion by employees of top Israeli government offices — including that of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — and the true identity of the “activist.” His name was not “Marc” at all, but rather Omer Gershon.

Gershon, who no reporter seems to be able to reach, appears to be an Israeli aspiring actor and entrepreneur who was running a night club in Tel Aviv in 2009. Netanyahu’s office gave an Israeli reporter a statement noting that they promote various online content when it “can serve Israel’s campaigns.”

To criticize parties around the world that take anti-LGBT stances is of course perfectly fine, but creating a hoax video to discredit the flotilla activists — for a conjured incident of homophobia — under the banner of an LGBT rights makes a mockery of that struggle.