Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Rubin, Biden And Iran

By Cernig



Another neocon failure gets his say in the WaPo's op-ed pages and boy what a waste of ink it is. If this is the best they can muster, Biden's got them worried as hell.  Ilan Goldenberg - who doesn't have a track record that includes the the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, the Office of the Secretary of Defense as an advisor to Rummie, political adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority and unpaid hack for propaganda articles produced by the Penaton's PR firm, the Lincoln Group - offers an analysis of what passes for logic in neocon circles.

Rubin makes a convoluted and non-sensical argument that A.  Joe Biden supported engagement with the reformist Khatami government of Iran during the late 1990s and first half of this decade.  That B.  During that time trade between Iran and the EU increased.  That C.  A National Intelligence Estimate found that Iran had stopped working on its nuclear weapons program in 2003.  From this he deduces that it's Biden's fault that Iran has moved ahead on its nuclear weapons program because it used increased trade with Europe to fund a nuclear weapons program.  What???



... Rubin basically takes a bunch of unrelated facts and uses them to conclude that Iran must have spent 2000 to 2003 working furiously on its nuclear weapons program and that it did it with money from Europe that somehow Joe Biden was responsible for.  Yup, putting those rigorous analytical skills that he learned that the Office of Special Plans to work.



Rubin also forgets to mention little details.  Like the fact that under this Administration trade with Iran has actually increased ten-fold and is at its highest levels since before the Iranian revolution.  Or the fact that the 2007 NIE concluded that Iran did in fact stop working on its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and was still years away from building a bomb.



Rubin then claims that Biden's vote against Kyl-Lieberman was partisan politics because Biden said that he didn't trust this Administration.  Ummm.... Trying to prevent war with Iran is not exactly a partisan activity.  It's not partisan to fear that an administration that has a track record of escalating conflict and misleading the American public might do it again.  That is in fact the exact opposite of partisan if you believe that war with Iran is against America's interests.

Of course, neocons like Ed Morrisey are lapping it up. Ed argues that Biden's �engagement� strategy  has failed to oust Iranian hardliners - and seems to want to ignore the Iranian Ayatollah's own remarks confirming that its the bellicose rhetoric of the neocons that has saved Ahmadinejhad's political neck. Go figure.



Update: Matt Duss with a zinger:

Given that Biden has, for five of the last seven years, been a member of the minority in the Senate, how dumb is it to blame him for the fact that President Bush has no coherent Iran policy? Monumentally dumb? Or just profoundly dumb?



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  1. tpAugust 26, 2008 at 9:56 AM

    Shortened version of Rubin's article in one sentence:
    Biden is bad because he won't bomb Iran like Israel demands.

    ReplyDelete

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