Write What You Know

Now that the American public seems to be pretty much done with the New American Century, a gang of the usual suspects has officially rolled back out the Present Danger to scare voters. They ran full page ads in today's WaPo and NYT.

You know, it's one thing to play your hit single over and over again, but when it amounts to the geostrategic equivalent of "We Built This City," one would hope you'd hang it up after a good run. I mean, it doesn't matter if you call it Airplane, Starship, whatever -- it's still gonna suck.

It is astonishing how many times we've seen this same group of crackpots come together to exaggerate various threats. From Team B to PNAC to AEI to this newest (re)incarnation, it never stops.

Led by Jim "Nobody at Booz Allen Lets Me Blow Anything Up!" Woolsey, CPD is now a schizophrenic mishmash of nutball hawks, squishy "let's rid the world of dictatorships" internationalists, wind-up Republicans, Israeli partisans, and irrelevant cold warriors.

However, this could be trouble. If the relaunch and media push from this scares people into thinking there's a devil under every bed, and we just need good people like these to take care of us, we could get led down the path of four more years of Bush and end up with a validation of the Bush doctrine. Pushing the sense of an omnipresent, underestimated, but existential threat alongside the "moral clarity" these types exude is strong stuff. Let's hope the American people are smart enough to know they're really Starship touring as Airplane.

Regardless, it is funny to watch these guys run around from front group to front group like so many mafiosi.