With the U.S. expected to begin talks soon with the Afghan Taliban insurgency, all parties were quick to distance themselves from the act. The Marines said in a statement that the actions “are not consistent with our core values and are not indicative of the character of the Marines in our Corps.” In a separate statement, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said a criminal probe was being launched and added:

This disrespectful act is inexplicable and not in keeping with the high moral standards we expect of coalition forces.

ISAF strongly condemns the actions depicted in the video, which appear to have been conducted by a small group of U.S. individuals, who apparently are no longer serving in Afghanistan.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said of the incident, “I condemn it in the strongest possible terms.” Panetta has ordered an investigation to the matter.

Afghans offered across-the-board condemnation as well. “It was inhuman and despicable, an unforgivable act which we condemn in the strongest terms,” said a Taliban spokesman. Karzai called the act “completely inhumane” and asked that those found responsible by an investigation get the “most severe punishment” possible.

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who served in the U.S. military, said:

Here’s a handful of obviously undisciplined young people of the hundred and some thousand Marines that we have. And it makes me so sad. There should be an investigation and these young people should be punished, but it does great damage. It makes me so sad.

Not everyone, however, was saddened by the events. Anti-Muslim activist Pam Geller wrote in favor of the incident. “I love these Marines,” she said, adding, “Perhaps this is the infidel interpretation of the Islamic ritual of washing and preparing the body for burial.” A former Republican National Committee researcher tweeted wondering, “this is a story?” He added: “I could care less. Liberal media at work.” Michael Goldfarb, a neoconseravtive Republican operative (a former McCain campaign spokesman), lobbyist and, as of recently, chairman of a new conservative online media venture, retweeted the comments from the RNC researcher.

Neocon pundit Rachel Abrams

When the blog post, by Rachel Abrams (wife of top Bush adviser Elliott Abrams), got some media attention — highlighted by both liberal and conservative writers — the progressive Jewish-American group J Street demanded that the right-wing Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) cut ties with the neoconservative doyen.

ECI responded to J Street’s criticism with a statement from former John McCain campaign adviser Michael Goldfarb (who advises ECI) to the Washington Jewish Week’s Adam Kredo. Goldfarb said:

J Street chooses to deliberately and viciously slander Rachel Abrams, accusing her of directing her words at all Palestinians when she was clearly speaking about the terrorists who abducted [Israeli soldier] Gilad Shalit and those who celebrated that deed and other acts of terror. ECI supports Israeli efforts to kill or capture terrorists, including those responsible for abducting Gilad Shalit.

Despite the fact that her original post said Palestinians’ children should also befall the fate she prescribes for their parents — something the denial took no heed of — Abrams would unequivocally demonstrate shortly thereafter that she does not, indeed, limit her call for gruesome physical harm to be done only to Palestinian terrorists. Her list of those slated to become “food for sharks” also apparently includes liberal American writers with no ties to terror or a record of supporting or celebrating such acts.

After the Washington Jewish Week piece, this reporter asked Goldfarb on Twitter if he personally thought it would be alright to drop Palestinian prisoners in the sea as shark food instead of taking them to Israeli prisons. Goldfarb dodged, writing back that he’d “have to check with [Rachel Abrams] re official ECI position.” It was at this point that Abrams herself chimed in, writing in a Twitter post that she would feed this reporter “and all his friends to sharks.”

Before Abrams and ECI start issuing convoluted denials that relay implausible defenses or alternate intended meanings, it should be noted that the context of Abrams’ Tweet seems unambiguous as to the target of her comment. Take a look at a screenshot of her tweet, along with Goldfarb’s to which she was responding:

In his condemnation of the original blog post, J Street chief Jeremy Ben-Ami said Abrams’ screed was an “unhinged rant filled with incitement and hate.” The term seems to apply to her twitter feed too. If Abrams is, as her brother Commentary editor John Podhoretz posited, the “neocon id,” then perhaps that school of thought has its issues to work out as well. Looking at her tweet, one wonders what this reporter and Abrams’ mutual friends must think, for she said she’d consign them to becoming shark feed, too.

Daniel S. Loeb

The ad, which was faithfully promoted by ECI’s go-to media outlets — Politico’s Ben Smith, the Weekly Standard, and Commentary — alleges that Democratic party leaders are “turning a blind eye to anti-Semitic, anti-Israel attacks,” and urges President Obama and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to “stand up to the mob.” Watch it:

While the anti-Semitic signs and clips shown in the commercial are deeply offensive, the Occupy Wall Street protesters have consistently rejected the attempts of a small number of extremists to hijack the movement. In fact, on Friday, “new media activist” Daniel Sieradski organized over 700 Occupy Wall Street protesters to participate in Kol Nidre, the prayers that begin Yom Kippur.

ThinkProgress reported in June that two-thirds of ECIPAC’s contributions in the past election cycle came from Daniel S. Loeb, CEO of Third Point Management, a New York based hedge fund.

Loeb’s $100,000 in support for ECI follows his track record of falling out of love with Obama after the White House pushed for financial regulatory reforms.

On April 26, the Wall Street Journal reported on Loeb’s change of heart and quoted from an email Loeb wrote and circulated in late 2010.

“I am sure, if we are really nice and stay quiet, everything will be alright and the president will become more centrist and that all his tough talk is just words,” Mr. Loeb wrote in an email about four months ago expressing frustration with the president’s posture toward Wall Street. “I mean, he really loves us and when he beats us, he doesn’t mean it.”

Indeed, in the 2010 and 2012 election cycles, Loeb has contributed nearly $170,000 to a stable of Republican candidates including radical Islamophobe Rep. Allen West (R-FL).

And last week, the New York Times reported that Loeb had signed on to support Mitt Romney.

While the ECI appears to be in the business of taking any and all opportunities to paint the Obama administration and the Democratic party as anti-Israel, their attempts to smear the Wall Street protests as anti-Semitic closely aligns the right wing pro-Israel group with the domestic political and business interests of its biggest financial backer.

But in an interview today on the Washington Times’ “America’s Morning News” radio show, Cheney denied that the ad questioned “anybody’s loyalty”:

HOLMES: Liz, good morning. So you released a fairly provocative ad, I have to say. And you ask the question “whose values” [does] Eric Holder share? In your view, whose values does he share?

CHENEY: Well, what the ad does — and actually it doesn’t question anybody’s loyalty. What the ad does is it says that there are nine lawyers in the Justice Department who used to represent al Qaeda terrorists and the Attorney General will only tell us who two of them are and we want the American people to have the right to know who the others are.

Guest host Amy Holmes continued to press Cheney on the point, repeating her question. “But your ad does raise the question ‘whose values’ does Eric Holder share. Who would you say?” Cheney dodged the question, stating that she thinks Holder “believes that you can defeat terror, you can win this war we’re engaged in by treating terrorism like law enforcement.” Listen here:

Cheney is simply lying. Not only does the ad suggest that the lawyers might “share” the “values” of al Qaeda, but it also flashes an image of a headline from the far right Investor’s Business Daily asking if the Justice Department was the “Department of Jihad?” “Just whose side are they on?” asked the editorial.

When Politico’s Smith first reported on the ad, Keep America Safe spokesman Michael Goldfarb gave him a quote that essentially accused the lawyers of treason, saying that they “did far more than represent criminals.” “They have propagandized on behalf of our enemies, engaging in a worldwide smear campaign against the CIA, the U.S. military and the United States itself while we are at war,” said Goldfarb. On Tuesday, Keep America Safe released a fundraising letter in Cheney’s name that used the exact same language:

Former Bush administration officials have pushed back against the ad. “While it’s legitimate for the public to inquire about the past work of DOJ political appointees, we need to recognize that our judicial system cannot function without pro bono counsel, and it doesn’t make a lawyer less patriotic just because he or she has represented a criminal or terrorist suspect,” former U.S. attorney and homeland security adviser Kenneth Wainstein told the Washington Post. “It’s beyond a cheap shot to suggest that a lawyer is an al-Qaeda sympathizer because he advocates a detainee’s position in the Supreme Court,” said former Bush White House lawyer Reginald Brown.

For more on Cheney’s smearing of the Justice Department lawyers, read today’s Progress Report.

Last night, Goldfarb dismissed the denials, claiming that the proposed investigation by the Republican senators vindicated his story:

Meanwhile, both Nelson and the White House strenuously deny the allegation. A statement from White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer asserts “This rumor is absolutely false, as the people spreading it well know. This is nothing but a cynical, crass political game that is designed to maintain the status quo. Let’s be clear: the people spreading these falsehoods think nothing is wrong with a system under which families and businesses continue to bear the brunt of skyrocketing costs, insurance companies are allowed to discriminate and drop at will, and thousands of Americans lose their coverage every single day.”

They protest a little too much. I do not know this story is “absolutely false.” To the contrary, I’m confident it’s true. Twenty senators are now calling for an investigation, and each is presumably pretty well sourced in the Senate. If the charges are “absolutely false,” maybe the White House will encourage Senate Democrats to call this Republican bluff. I won’t hold my breath.

As Media Matters has noted, Goldfarb is struggling to preserve his disintegrating story as well as his own credibility. On Glenn Beck’s Fox News show last night, he retracted some of the details of his story. In an interview on WorldNetDaily’s radio show today, Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO) undermined Goldfarb’s claim that the GOP senators had vindicated him, saying that they called for the investigation based on “rumors” that they “haven’t confirmed.”

In a KLIN radio interview today, Nelson denied it again. He said that he had discovered “at least one of the sources” of the rumor and that those pushing the story would be “embarrassed” because “those who have started the rumors and those who’ve been speculating on it, they might have something to fear” in an investigation.

Despite the increasing headwind against the credibility of his reporting, Goldfarb had the audacity to mock another journalist, Time’s Joe Klein, today for getting “caught making things up.” Goldfarb’s proof that Klein got his story wrong? Official denials in the same vein that Nelson and the White House have denied his story.

Goldfarb responded on Twitter to questions about the consistency of his respect for official denials by saying, “Like everybody else, I believe official denials except when I have a good reason not to.”

It has been reported that the Obama Administration threatened the closure of a U.S. military installation for political purposes, thereby bringing into question the integrity of the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process. The BRAC process was established to remove political influence so that the decision to close or not to close a military installation could be based upon military utility.

Specifically, various media reports have stated that the Obama Administration would put Offutt AFB in southeastern Nebraska on a future BRAC list because of a vote on healthcare reform. While we recognize the importance of Offutt AFB as the headquarters of U.S. Strategic Command and the approximately 10,000 individuals that work there, we feel that this installation should remain open or be closed on its own merits.

Both the White House and Nelson’s office have denied the rumor. Nelson himself rejected the rumors as “yellow journalism at its worst.” Now, Johanns is saying that though he believes Nelson when he says he wasn’t threatened, there should still be hearings on the rumor:

Even Johanns himself said he doesn’t believe the rumors.

“When Senator Nelson says it didn’t happen, I trust Senator Nelson. I have no reason not to trust him,” Johanns said. [...]

But Johanns said the White House needs to work directly with senators.

“The White House can work with us and say ‘Look, folks, this did not happen. We’re happy to appear before whatever committee,’” Johanns said. “I think that really does put this to rest.”

Rep. Lee Terry (R-NE), however, doesn’t trust Nelson’s dismissal of the rumor. “A threat like this would usually sound absurd, except that there has been a culture of strong-arm, Chicago-style politics,” said Terry. That’s the same logic Glenn Beck has used to accuse the White House of being close to “treason.” (HT: Eric Boehlert)

In a conference call with Nebraska reporters yesterday, Nelson said that’s indeed what he would do if…it were true. But he isn’t saying it’s true because it’s not true. “If I had been threatened, I would have gone public with it,” said Nelson, who called suggestions of a trade-off “yellow journalism at its worst.”

Offutt Air Force Base employs some 10,000 military and federal employees in Southeastern Nebraska. As our source put it, this is a “naked effort by Rahm Emanuel and the White House to extort Nelson’s vote.” They are “threatening to close a base vital to national security for what?” asked the Senate staffer.

Indeed, Offutt is the headquarters for US Strategic Command, the successor to Strategic Air Command, and not by accident. STRATCOM was located in the middle of the country for strategic reasons. Its closure would be a massive blow to the economy of the state of Nebraska, but it would also be another example of this administration playing politics with our national security.

Last night, White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer wrote on the White House blog that the “absurd rumor” of the threat was “completely baseless and false.” Nelson spokesman Jake Thompson also put out a statement, saying “The rumor is not true” and that “this misinformation is coming from inside-the-Beltway partisans who only want to derail health care reform.” Nelson himself told reporters today that no threat was made.

But these denials from all of the parties alleged to be involved have not stopped the right-wing noise machine from latching onto them. On his Fox News show today, Glenn Beck said three times that “if it is true,” it is close to “treason”:

– “There’s a story at the bottom of the hour that if it is true, and we have three sources on it now, if it is true. I mean how much closer do you get to treason?”

– “I’ve said it all along. Principles over party. Principles. Well, one senator apparently agrees with me, I think, kind of, maybe. But his party reportedly very angry and allegedly making threats. This one borders treason, I believe.”

– “But this! Using the military and our strategic command as a pawn. Threatening to weaken our national security defenses to fulfill your Utopian social justice agenda. To me that borders on treason.“

Beck acknowledged during the show that “Senator Nelson has denied this story this afternoon, the White House denies this story,” but added that “Goldfarb and the Weekly Standard are standing by their source and now two others.” He later said that Nelson “would obviously deny it to protect his party and the president.” Watch it:

Before hosting Goldfarb on his radio show today, Beck said he “called Senator Nelson’s office” and Nelson said “No, no, no. That’s not true.” In the interview, Goldfarb said that Emanuel “delivered” the “message to the Senate leadership” about Nelson and Offutt. When Beck interviewed Goldfarb later on his Fox show, Goldfarb “changed” his “story from this morning,” saying that rather than Emanuel it was “just someone in the White House.”

Bill Shine, Fox News’ Senior Vice President for Programming, has said that the network serves as the “voice of opposition” to Obama. So does Fox News condone Glenn Beck’s accusations of “treason” against Obama? Contact Bill Shine here.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s eldest daughter Liz will launch a new group aimed at rallying opposition to the “radical” foreign policy of the Obama administration which it says has succeeded only in undermining the nation’s security.

The new group, Keep America Safe, will make the case against President Barack Obama’s moves to wrench America away from Bush era foreign policy on issues from detaining alleged terrorists at Guantanamo Bay to building a missile shield in Eastern Europe.

“The policies being proposed by the Obama administration are so radical across the board,” Cheney said. “Whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, you want the nation to be strong and so many steps this president is taking are making the nation weaker.”

Along with Cheney, Keep America Safe’s board features Weekly Standard editor William Kristol and Debra Burlingame, whose husband was killed in 9/11. The project is being helped by a number of former McCain campaign aides, including blogger Michael Goldfarb, war room chief Aaron Harison and video producer Justin Germany.

Mohammad Khatami won elections without any help from George W. Bush (Wikimedia)

As I understand the basic neoconservative approach to the eventual vindication of the Iraq War, their plan is to take advantage of the fact that over the course of the long-term, things tend to get better. So someday, the politics of the Persian Gulf region will almost certainly be less autocratic than they are now. This will all be credited to George W. Bush and his splendid little war. Of course by this same logic, Mao’s Five Year Plan was a smashing success, since today China is much richer than it was before the Revolution. Thus, Michael Goldfarb:

Is it possible that the Iraqi election experience had something to do with Iranian expectations of an election? If critics of the war can for just a moment move beyond their own deeply held opinions about the invasion of Iraq — that this was a war of choice fought on false premises to lower gas prices or whatever — and examine the effect of that war on the region as a whole, they might see a connection to the current turmoil in Iran. After all, one of the intellectual arguments in favor of overthrowing Saddam Hussein was, in the words of Dick Cheney, to place “a democracy in the heart of the Middle East, a nation that will be a positive force in influencing the world around it in the future.”

I think a case can be made that Barack Obama’s election as president has also raised expectations of the democratic process in countries around the world. It is certainly possible that we are seeing an Obama effect in Iran as young people there look to replicate the excitement and enthusiasm of young people here during last year’s election. But any honest assessment of events in Iran would also have to consider the effect of having a functioning democracy right next door — a democracy that millions of Iranians have seen for themselves as they make religious pilgrimages and conduct business in Iraq. Iran has had a tremendous influence on Iraq these last few years, usually to the detriment of peace and security there. Perhaps the current protests in Iran are evidence that influence doesn’t just cross the border in one direction.

Spencer Ackerman offers the sensible observation that if Iraq were a major source of inspiration for Iranian opposition leaders you might expect to hear something about that from the Iranian opposition leaders. But then again, the right-wing has gotten very invested in partisan criticism of Barack Obama for following the lead of actual Iranian dissidents and not injecting himself in a ham-fisted and counterproductive way into the crisis, and the general neocon view seems to be that Iranians are irrelevant to events in Iran.

So I think that the key point to make here is that the reformist candidate won the Iranian presidential election in 1997, and won re-election by a big margin in 2001. Then back in 2003 when a reformist president was actually in office and the Iranian government was looking to improve relations with the United States, the Bush administration chose to strengthen the hand of Iranian hardliners by (a) labeling Iran part of an “axis of evil” (b) refusing to engage in bilateral dialogue with Iran (c) cutting off cooperation on Afghanistan and (d) invading Iraq. We then got Ahmadenijad in the 2005 election, and now we’re watching the 2009 election unfold right before our eyes. The moral of the story is that there’s nothing unusual about a reformist candidate getting strong support from the Iranian voters.

To be clear, when I say that the conservative movement has a lot to offer people who are convinced that poor Puerto Rican women growing up in Bronx housing projects get a lot of unfair advantages in life, I’m not kidding.

Michael Goldfarb of The Weekly Standard and Stuart Taylor of National Journal are genuinely engaged in an Ahab-like quest to smoke out examples of the “preferential treatment” of which Sotomayor has been such a beneficiary.

Beyond the simple observation that conservatives really and truly are fanatical in their defense of the prerogatives of white people, the obvious observation to make is that everyone in life has been treated preferentially by someone at some point. Sometimes if you face a lot of disadvantages in life, people recognize that and extend you an extra helping hand. Or maybe, like John Roberts, you were educated at a private boarding school before attending Harvard. Or maybe you’re Irving Kristol’s son. Or maybe because your ideology pleases Rupert Murdoch, he agrees to cover the losses of the magazine you work at. The only reasonable question to ask about someone like Sotomayor is whether or not you think it’s reasonable to conclude that, on balance, poor minority women benefit from more special advantages in life than do middle class white men. I think that would be a difficult case to make. It’s hard to look at the composition of the United States Senate, or the Washington Post and New York Times op-ed pages, or the roster of Fortune 500 CEOs and reach the conclusion that the system has been working overtime to promote underqualified Latinos into positions of prominence. Unless, that is, you want to argue that we’re so intrinsically deficient in our ability that we’re structurally underrepresented despite the massive advantages we receive in life. Maybe that’s what Goldfarb really thinks.

My guess, though, is that they haven’t thought this through at all. And that one reason they haven’t thought this through at all is that to the best of my knowledge there are no Hispanics working in high levels at The Weekly Standard and thus nobody around to point out what an ass he’s being.

Jason Zengerle comments:

Honestly. Is there anything in Sotomayor’s background–other than the fact that she’s a Latina–that would lead Goldfarb to such a sweeping conclusion? I’m always reluctant to say someone’s a racist, but I’m really struggling to come up with another explanation here.

Personally, I’m of the view that American pundits are too hesitant to call other people’s statements racist, but in the case of Goldfarb I’m willing to lean toward charity. If you look at the man’s body of work in full, there’s tons of evidence that he’s extremely dim-witted and not that much in the way of racially charged rhetoric.

Via John Chait, it seems that conservative talk radio host Eric “Mancow” Muller decided it would be a fun stunt to have himself waterboarded in order to prove that it’s not really torture. Didn’t work so well:

“It is way worse than I thought it would be, and that’s no joke,”Mancow said, likening it to a time when he nearly drowned as a child. “It is such an odd feeling to have water poured down your nose with your head back…It was instantaneous…and I don’t want to say this: absolutely torture.”

“I wanted to prove it wasn’t torture,” Mancow said. “They cut off our heads, we put water on their face…I got voted to do this but I really thought ‘I’m going to laugh this off.’”

I’m not sure I understand why Mancow wasn’t willing to take Christopher Hitchens’ word for it when he undertook an identical experiment for the same reason and concluded “if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.” But as Chait says “I think the torture debate would be mighty different if more of the conservatives who scoff at waterboarding would try the same thing.”

The one guy who I want to see at the front of the line for this is Michael Goldfarb from the Weekly Standard who, I think, has really gone above and beyond the call of duty in terms of minimizing torture by referring to it as “dunking”.

Here’s a clip of Rep. Pete Hoekstra at the presser this morning explaining to a particularly thick reporter why the threat posed by al Qaeda detainees is different, and far more serious, that that posed by German prisoners of war. As Hoekstra explains, the Germans didn’t kill three thousand American civilians as they went to work.

The difference between al-Qaeda and the Nazis is that Nazis didn’t kill civilians? Really?

This is via Conor Friedersdorf.

Meanwhile, the underlying assumption that the United States of America is incapable of building a secure prison physically located on the North American continent is really strange. If there’s anything we know how to do in the USA it’s lock people up. Everybody knows that.

Goldfarb was at it again yesterday, attacking the pro-Israel, pro-peace group J Street, laughably misrepresenting their positions and accusing them of responding to criticism by blaming a “Jewish conspiracy…a cabal apparently run out of the Israeli embassy in Washington,” based on this story in the Jewish Week. But, while the JW item does cite sources who “said they believed the campaign [against J Street] was being mounted by major pro-Israel groups and by the Israeli Embassy in Washington,” none of those sources are J Street sources, as Goldfarb claims.

Interestingly, Goldfarb, who was complaining just last week about being called a thug because of his belief in the utility of the murder of Palestinian children, had no problem comparing liberal pro-Israel activists to terrorists, writing that “J Street, like Hamas, has provoked a disproportionate response from the Jews.”

I wonder if we should expect a similar apology to the one that Goldfarb’s fellow lil’ neocon fantasist Jamie Kirchick had to issue after he wrongly attributed positions to J Street and others? Wait and see!

To be clear, he’s not saying that it’s sometimes okay to kill a bad guy’s innocent children as part of a military operation directed against the guy. He’s saying it’s better to kill his children than it would be to avoid killing them.

It’s really too bad John McCain lost the election so we don’t get to see this character in federal office.