Broadsides

A quick check in on the Special Air Service of the Keyboard Kommandos, Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens. Sully came back from Sussex and while continuing the justified War on Rumsfeld, he still can't help himself when it comes to the GWOT rhetoric. Atrios picked up one bizarre segment from a suggestion by us in his comment section, and then there's his inevitable tribute to the Euston Manifesto (see Mike Power here and here):

Equally, we have to make sure that our criticism of Bush and his dreadful, criminal defense secretary does not mean a capitulation to the anti-Americanism, moral relativism and defeatism of the cut-and-run left. We must fight that tendency as relentlessly as we must fight Christianism and Islamism. But a new coalition is forming - against all these isms. For freedom. For the West.

Note the equation of the "fight" against advocates of withdrawal from Iraq with the fight against Islamic extremism. Note also the Theoden-like cadences at the end.

Now to Hitchens, who really is a bigger snake ("George Tenet and other Clinton holdovers who left us under open skies on Sept. 11, 2001"). Roger Ailes has already taken a look at the latest shite but we'd also point out this:

the most reactionary law against disclosure this century: the Intelligence Identities Protection Act

The IIPA is legislation from 1982, so we're not sure what his definition of "century" is. But the real problem for Hitch is that he has tied himself in knots from his past positions -- he opposes the UK Official Secrets Act (link in previous post), and therefore presumably must oppose the Espionage Act, its emerging US equivalent. And the Espionage Act is a much more broad-reaching and reactionary piece of legislation than the narrow IIPA, which as its name suggests specifically targets disclosure of agent identities.

And as we've pointed out repeatedly, Patrick Fitzgerald has indicated that he thinks it's much more likely that the Espionage Act was broken by Scooter Libby and others (Rove?), not the IIPA. But with the former Act now being used against people out to embarrass his hero, George W. Bush, Hitch must deflect his faux-libertarian rage via a phony tirade against an irrelevant law.

UPDATE: A Washington Post article notes the multiple laws regarding leaks, and the apparent revival of the Espionage Act as the primary instrument of government clampdown. As Byron York notes, one strange thing about the article is that it never mentions the most interesting conjunction of the different laws: the Plame case.