Rudy sits down to tea with Mao and Uncle Joe

Fareed Zakaria looks at the how the President, the neo-cons, Rudy Giuliani, and much of the Right has lost contact with reality on the subject of Iran and wonders, "What planet are we on?"

clipped from www.newsweek.com In a speech last week, Rudy Giuliani said that while the Soviet Union and China could be deterred during the cold war, Iran can't be. The Soviet and Chinese regimes had a "residual rationality," he explained. Hmm. Stalin and Mao—who casually ordered the deaths of millions of their own people, fomented insurgencies and revolutions, and starved whole regions that opposed them—were rational folk. But not Ahmadinejad, who has done what that compares? One of the bizarre twists of the current Iran hysteria is that conservatives have become surprisingly charitable about two of history's greatest mass murderers.

Comments

[Ken Muldrew]

Even the dullest among Rudy's audience knows that this nonsense is frankly silly. Do they flatter themselves as being in on the noble lie? Do they imagine that there are hoards of lesser intellects who swallow this foolishness whole; but for the good of the nation they stand with their fellow Straussians allowing the deception to pass without comment? Is that the charm of these absurd charlatans who mock the office of the presidency by pretending to be suitable candidates? That they make the "common man" feel like a very clever fellow, clever enough to con much of the population?