sowing doubt

According to Andrew Sullivan, this ignorant opinion-mongering  serves as a “helpful roundup” of the curious incident of the IAF over Syria [e.a.]:

According to this Times article, the strike was directed at a cache of nuclear materials that had recently been delivered to Syria from North Korea.

This didn’t make a lot of sense to me. …

I suppose that the North Koreans could have shipped a completed nuke to Syria, but that seems quite outlandish …

I‘m still pretty skeptical …

I don’t think the Syrians could do anything useful with nuclear material short of a bomb …

I’d be stunned if the North Koreans were willing to actually sell them a completed weapon. …

Who is “I”? Someone named Robert Farley, an “assistant professor at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce, University of Kentucky.” Well, okay. I guess that makes him an expert opinion-monger!

Meanwhile Sullivan, who apparently considers himself a public intellectual—ha ha ha HA—has been delighting in unearthing one-sided details of a four-decade-old dispute between real public intellectuals  (one of whom, a grandfather of neo-condom—which is what this is really about: the hysterical fear of a theory) happens to have the ear of a current presidential contender.

Naturally, Sullivan is siding with onetime wife-stabber Norman Mailer over his former close friend onetime stab-in-the-back theorist Norman Podhoretz.

Unlike (I suspect) most bloggers, I happen to own a copy of Podhoretz’s book Breaking Ranks. I will be delighted to quote it at length. Stay tuned for a real history lesson.