If you like Dubya you'll love Rudy

Over at Antiwar.com Justin Raimondo talks about Rudy Giuliani and the "dingbat wing" of the neoconservative movement that makes up the core of his advisers in:
Rudy's Radicals

If ever there was an archetypal anti-libertarian, a politician whose views exemplify all the very worst aspects of the authoritarian personality, then that man is Rudy Giuliani, who infamously intoned:

"We look upon authority too often and focus over and over again, for 30 or 40 or 50 years, as if there is something wrong with authority. We see only the oppressive side of authority. Maybe it comes out of our history and our background. What we don't see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do."

This quote just about sums up his almost cartoonish ability to embody the values and rhetorical style of what Lew Rockwell has trenchantly described as "red-state fascism": state-worship, the cult of the leader, and, most of all – the bedrock upon which the entire rotten edifice rests – an aggressive foreign policy that virtually guarantees perpetual war.

As Newsweek's Michael Hirsh did earlier Raimondo points out that Rudy's foreign policy team is made up of many of the same bat shit crazy lunatics that got us bogged down in Iraq and are now pushing for war with Iran.

The “bull goose looney” of these escapees from the asylum is of course Norman Podhoretz:

....one of Giuliani's top consiglieres, Norman Podhoretz, has been "praying" will happen. (Since praying to God for war seems, uh, counterintuitive, to say the least, one has to wonder: Who, in this instance, does Poddy pray to? Himself? Ares? Maybe this guy.)

Poddy's latest book-length rant, aptly titled World War IV, is a compendium of every mythological bugaboo and grandiose exercise in "national greatness" in the neocon canon, from the "they hate us because we're free" canard to the vicious labeling of anyone who dissents from his Israel First agenda as anti-American, pro-fascist, and anti-Semitic, to the all-too-familiar neocon hubris that conjures up a 50-year project of "reordering" the Middle East in order to make the region safe for Israel (and, supposedly, the U.S., although one fails to see how).

Aside from openly declaring that he is lobbying the president to attack Iran, Poddy envisions a grand project of secularizing and "democratizing" the Middle East that would require us to invade and indefinitely occupy Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, and Egypt, with Pakistan and the states of Central Asia also in our sights. (Turkey presumably gets a pass, unless, of course, they stop cooperating with the U.S. and Israel). How many American lives will this social engineering crusade require? The invasion of Iraq is costing us $2 trillion – multiply that times at least 10, and you get the bill for Poddy's regime-change shopping spree.

Raimondo gives us a rundown on the rest of the crew.

• Daniel Pipes
• Martin Kramer
• Stephen Rosen
• Peter Berkowitz

Head over to Newsweek or Raimondo's piece for their complete rap sheets.

Raimondo concludes with this interesting commentary:

All this malarkey about how only Giuliani can beat Hillary is nonsense: one "daisy-picking" television ad à la 1964 would make short work of the blustering bully. The Democrats will go after the extremists who populate the highest reaches of the Giuliani campaign, hammer and tongs, and a war-weary American public, which is so easily spooked, will look at "America's mayor" quite differently. The hysterical hyperbole that tends to color the candidate's every pronouncement will tend to validate the charges of extremism.